Raspberry Pi Available To Purchase By The End Of February

The fine folks over at Raspberry Pi have announced that they expect fans of their tiny little media streaming system will be able to purchase the device by the end of February. The company had apparently hoped the device would be ready to purchase before the end of the month, but ran into an issue in manufacturing. The manufacturing issue was with the quartz crystal package that the company had chosen.

According to the company, the quartz crystal that the Raspberry Pi board was designed to use was readily available in UK, but over in China where the device is manufactured it was hard to find. The manufacturer is finally putting the boards together after getting a supply of the crystals. The first batch of boards is expected to be finished on February 20.

After the boards are complete, they will be shipped over to the UK where they will be available for purchase shortly thereafter. Another interesting piece of news has been offered up as well. Broadcom has published a datasheet on the BCM2835 SoC that is used inside the Raspberry Pi. Those of you out there dying to learn more details about the SoC can grab the datasheet, which describes the ARM peripherals inside the chip in PDF form here. We mentioned that the Raspberry Pi would be running a custom version of the XBMC software not long ago.