Back in November 2014 I wrote about the various production revisions of Raspberry Pi. I also published a “family photo” of the 10 different kinds of Pi I then owned.
Since then, I’ve been given a 256 Mb Rev 2 model B by George Dowds of ThePiZone (thank you George) and I bought myself a red B+ from AliExpress. So now there are 12 Pi in the family photo, I thought it was worth a reshoot. If you fancy a closer look, you can click the below image for a higher resolution version. I set myself the impossible task of trying to light them so the writing could be read on the chips of all 12 in one shot. I got most of them though (and all in one shot, no cheating).
Raspberry Pi Family Photo 2 – January 2015
Last time, Andrew Scheller asked me if I could add the revision information to the photo. So this time I’ve done it. That’s what the numbers “0002” etc. are. They’re found by typing…
cat /proc/cpuinfo
…at the command line. And yes I had to do it for all 12.
You can see that my red, Chinese B+ has the same revision number 0010 as the SONY B+ models. I think it’s supposed to be different. But one of the things I’ve learnt, since getting into hardware, is that, quite often, things aren’t as they are supposed to be.
Other than that, there were no surprises in the revision numbers.
Someone also commented last time that it would be nice to see the compute module on its own without the baseboard – and it made it easier for me to fit them all in – so I did that too, this time.
Creative Commons
I’m releasing this photo at 1500px resolution under this Creative Commons license…
Raspberry Pi Family Photo 2 by Alex Eames – RasPi.TV is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Based on a work at https://raspi.tv/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/Pi_Family_256-Red_annotated_cropped_1500_01.jpg.
…which enables both commercial and non-commercial use with attribution. So please feel free to use it.
The model b rev 2 (China) one – is that correct because on the PCB it says made in the UK?
Awesome list though :-)
Yes. It had a “made in China” sticker on, which I peeled off to reveal “made in the UK” on the PCB. I noted that in the previous blog post, but forgot to mention it this time :)
Aha! Reason I asked is because I was doing a project with about 300 Pi last year and they were all made in UK. But some had that PCB, and some had the rev 2.1 PCB.
It seems it has something to do with the FCC class b certification – they had to make a PCB change for it.
Also some of those boards had LAN9514 before the 4 USB ports came in with b+ :-)
Interesting! I guess at the volumes the RPi is produced in, there’s probably not much cost difference between the LAN9512 and LAN9514?
What was the project involving 300 Pis? ;) Must have taken ages to flash all the SD cards!!
Yes, I am assuming the cost difference was pretty negligible and a straight swap on the footprint. Also maybe due to stock of 9512 running out or whatever.
300 Pi Project was this one, fortunately I did not flash the SD cards personally :-) although I did do all of the assembly! – https://twitter.com/PiSupply/status/473852622081110016
And here is a picture of the PCB change – https://twitter.com/shawaj2/status/474290505413844992
Aaron – I had a closer look at my Rev 2.1 in the photo above. It looks exactly the same as the one in your tweet. And – it has the 9514 chip on it :)
Strange! Maybe they were just having manufacturing done in China with some left over UK PCBs on your one – hence using a sticker instead of a PCB with that on.
The packaging of the different boards was slightly different as well – not the box, but the datasheet that came inside the box. The newer one referred to FCC class B certification, the older one with 9512 chip referred to only class A certification…which is why I thought it had something to do with FCC :-)
Well I never! I’ve just checked my Rev2.1 Pi and it also has a LAN9514 fitted! Learn something new every day etc.
Looks like it must have kept you busy for an afternoon or two Aaron ;-)
http://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=63&t=81736&start=300 says:
“Rev 2.1 was brought in to partially bridge the BOM gap between Rev 2 and B+. In this design, certain high-value parts that would be differentiated between B and B+ were made interchangeable between the B rev 2.1 and the B+.
The ethernet jack is just such a part: the footprint on the rev 2.1 was modified such that it could accept a B+ ethernet jack with embedded LEDs.”
http://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=81736&p=582770 says:
“yes the 9514 is pin compatible replacement for 9513 and 9512
so all fit and work on a plain B
if there is a stortage they can be directly replaced
you could wire up 4 ports on that B if you have the eyesight and steadyness”
And http://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=63&t=73379 also discusses the Rev 2.1
Yes – certainly kept me busy for a few days doing all that assembly and testing. Got to do it all again in a month or so as well by the sounds of it. Can’t complain though :-)
You see in the picture by Alex above, the B Rev 2(China) has a black 3.5mm jack, whereas in my one it has a blue 3.5mm jack – and from having seen a large number of pis come through I think that the Chinese ones all had black 3.5mm jacks, and any UK made ones had blue.
I might be wrong on that though…might just be a coincidence.
Yeah could be coincidence… as Alex is fond of saying, WJDK!
Looking at my spreadsheet-of-Pis I made a while ago (while bored one weekend), I only have one Chinese-made Pi (B Rev 1.0), which has a black audio jack, and all the rest are made in UK and have blue audio jacks. Except for the A+s/B+s of course which are UK-made but with black AV jacks ;-)
If you find this sort of thing interesting, you might also like http://elinux.org/RaspberryPi_Boards and http://elinux.org/RPi_HardwareHistory
IIRC the *very* early beta boards also had a black composite video connector.
Good luck Aaron with your next assembly-batch!
Thanks Andrew!
Hmm, your list isn’t quite complete. I have an early model B with a board much like models 0002 and 0003, but with the letters CE (not the proper CE symbol) left of S2. Otherwise it seems the same as those boards.
That’s the Farnell variant of the original Pi. I have one of those as well. Its a 0002. You can see high resolution photos of it in my first ever RasPi.TV blog post https://raspi.tv/2012/high-resolution-raspberry-pi-photos
Brilliant photo with great info, thanks Alex!
Impressed to hear you did it all as ‘one take’ rather than doing a composite.
That would be cheating, but obviously an ultra-high resolution version could be done with a full frame shot of each one individually. But I’m not sure it’s necessary ☺
No, it’s not :-)