This news comes to us from the official Raspberry Pi Foundation website:
“RS Components and Premier Farnell/element14 have Model A Raspberry Pis in stock as of this morning.”
The Model A is a stripped-down version of the Model B Raspberry Pi, with no Ethernet, one USB port and 256MB RAM.”
As of right now, Farnell are not listing it on their website whereas the typically unreliable RS Components does let you buy it.
Here’s the official release from the Foundation: Model A now for sale in Europe – buy one today! | Raspberry Pi.
Try as I might I can’t get very excited about the Model A, especially when the Model B is available for all of £6 more. But, horses for courses, I’m sure the lower power usage will appeal to someone for some reason!
I may end up getting one of these. Not for the low power or the lesser feature set but as a reference platform for my bare-metal software. Presumably it returns a different board rev code from the rev 1 and rev 2 model B boards, but without knowing what that code is it’s likely to break the rev1/rev2 detection code (needed because of the crazy GPIO pin and SPI changes) in quite a lot of software.
I guess the foundation _might_ have released such details ahead of time, but if so I’ve not managed to find anything yet.
I’ve got one on the way. I’ll post photos when it arrives 🙂 (Possibly as soon as tomorrow – we’ll see). It’ll be great for battery powered apps and GPIO stuff. I use all my Pis headless anyway and never got near the RAM limit. And it’s different and new and gives me something else to write about, and something to replace the one I knackered the SPI bus on last week 😉 Computer for less than £20 come now Mike. That IS something to get excited about 🙂
Oh, absolutely – a computer for less than £20 is huge news and something to get excited about. I look forward to the RasPi.tv coverage!
Just saw an article on the Model A and can’t believe I hadn’t looked at it from this perspective before. At the moment, it’s impossible to power the Pi from solar power unless you have a) a very sunny climate or b) lots and lots of solar panels. The Model A, with its ‘about a third of the power of the Model B’ opens up solar power possibilities. Man, my grammar doesn’t get better!
Is it really one third?
Wow….
“Roughly”. Well, that’s what the Foundation said. I guess they’re hedging their bets a bit because it depends on what peripherals you’ve got plugged in as to what power it uses at any given time.
I would imagine they mean a model A with nothing plugged in it consumes roughly a third as much power as a model B with nothing plugged in it. If that is true thats really impressive and will make a huge difference to people running on batteries (albeit if they have motors anything the Pi consumes is likely to be insignificant by comparison anyway)
Wow check this out!!!
http://www.raspberrypi.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?p=164893
They got it below 100mA with a few clock tweaks!
Wow! That’s a tiny trickle of power. At that amount of power usage, I wish the board had a smaller footprint.
I’m definitely getting one too. I’m going to replace the model B in my central heating controller http://www.peteronion.org.uk/smf/index.php?topic=27.0
No point in running the extra USB port and network card if they are never going to get used, especially as it runs 24/7 so the power savings will add up. Also generating less heat would be good as means the Pi won’t affect the temperature readings as much. Although saying that I’ve been using it without issue for a few months now, it will be interesting to see what difference making the swap does though….
Here’s hoping they haven’t decided to arbitrarily change the GPIO pin designations again!
Yeah definitely!
As it stands the Pi I have in my central heating controller is a 1st gen with the polyfuses, so presuming the model A is the same as the current model B I’m going to have to change some stuff anyway. I think I can do it all in software though.