Micro Bit bought by Swiss company

The maker of the Raspberry Pi mini computer is being bought by Swiss electronics company Daetwyler Holdings for 1bn Swiss francs (£700m).

The deal values Premier Farnell shares at 165p each. The shares rose 45% to 162p following news of the takeover.

Daetwyler distributes more than 500,000 electronics products under brands such as Nedis.

Premier Farnell has been trying to put its business on a firmer footing in recent months.

It has cut dividend payouts to shareholders, and sold its industrial products business, Akron Brass, for $224.2m.

In April 2016, the Pi became the most popular British computer ever made.

More than eight million have been sold since it was launched in early 2012.

**LINK**

Tsk tsk tsk, it's the Micro Bit computer they make, the Raspberry Pi is produced under licence

Sorry about that, can a mod change the title please, ta

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The BBC Micro Bit, the tiny computing device designed to get children coding, is going on sale to the general public.

The device is already being delivered, free, to one million Year 7 children in schools across the UK.

Now it will also be available to buy from the various partners in the project for £12.99.

Commercial availability of the Micro Bit follows the signing of a licensing deal with the device's manufacturer, the Leeds-based company, element 14.

Element 14 is part of Premier Farnell, one of the distributors of the very successful Raspberry Pi barebones computer. Richard Curtin, strategic alliance director at element 14, is expecting a similar reception for the Micro Bit.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-36416862

Edited By Ady1 on 14/06/2016 11:22:09

That's rather a confusing report. As I understand it the Raspberry Pi is a product of the Raspberry Pi Foundation. They subcontract manufacturing to a number of companies. I think Farnell is just one of a number of official distributors.

Russell.

Edit:  Ady beat me to it.  I was referring to the original post.

Edited By Russell Eberhardt on 14/06/2016 11:29:16

Back in the 80s and 90s, the Farnell group used to comprise a manufacturing division and a distribution group. Then the board decided that manufacturing was for girls and sold it to a VC buyer who flogged various bits off to the likes of APC (now part of Schneider), who then transferred all the order books and designs abroad, closed the factories down and made the workforce redundant. I left about 18 months before then, as I could see the way the wind was blowing and the incumbent management were too busy indignantly rearranging the deckchairs. The distribution group (remember Farnell Electronic Components and CPC?) did a bizarre reverse buyout of Premier Compts (a US distributor), hence the name change.

AFAIK, Farnell have never manufactured anything since back then, so all this talk of Farnell being the "manufacturer of the RPi" and even of the BBC Microbit is all rather bizarre. If you look at the RPi website, it says in a document from last year that "The Raspberry Pi Foundation is a British enterprise. We design our computers and develop software in the UK, and the vast majority of Raspberry Pi computers are also manufactured in the UK. Since the Model B Rev 2, we have worked with Sony’s manufacturing plant in Pencoed, South Wales to manufacture our boards". I don't suppose corporate financiers or the BBC need to bother getting their basic facts right but it all sounds terribly dramatic.

I've owned shares since the mid 80s and the share price has been pretty much static since then, give or take a few ripples. The one thing they used to stick to religiously was paying out a steady dividend but they can't even manage to pay that it seems. The board is packed with the great and the good who are very well compensated but don't seem to have really done much for the company. I expect this buyout will result in significant wins for them, based on the share options they will be sitting on. I've never been convinced that people in these positions can make objective decisions on the future of the company when they have so much at stake personally from a sale. The annual report is full of fine talk and missed targets.

Murray

Edited By Muzzer on 14/06/2016 12:18:17

I was tempted to respond:

"Raspberry Pi bought by Stevenage Teenager - Fourteen year old Gilbert Throb says he is 'not sure' what he will do with it, but it 'seemed like a good idea at the time'."

That's more or less what happened to TVR a few years back.

He could run some really good telescope software on it Neil. Handles downloading images from dslr's etc. Guides, plate solves and just about everything anybody could want. Just slightly slower than a certain TV dongle fitted with a similar processor. Graphics provided via an android tablet. Uses wifi for comms.

There is also another UK Ras Pi sold by another name that is usually faster but not as stable platform wise which guess what - Linux.

If some one looks at packages on certain Linux distro sites it's not that unusual to see ports to Arm. All sorts can be run on them. My USB oscilloscope uses one and uses Tcl/Tk for the application. The processor is way way more interesting than an Arduino.

John

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I got a free Micro Bit at the launch at the skool place wot I work at, some of the ungrateful little darlings didn't want their free rubbish handout, found 33 of them in the bins during clearup.

I can now get it to flash different leds and say "hello world" one letter every second, the computing world is my oyster

It's basically the guts of a state of the art smart phone. Eben Upton works at Broadcom who make the processors or whatever they are called for smart phones, so he took one of them and made the first Pi.

The latest RPi 3B has a quad core ARM v8 processor, fancy graphics processor and multimedia peripherals. Trouble is, although it is now a very powerful device with HD graphics etc, it's not so ideally suited to robotics, CNC etc. Great if you want to graft on a (smart phone) camera or create a mini media centre. It can be done but TBH the Arduino is easier and powerful enough for a lot of motion control, with many different versions for different applications.

Have to say, I also find Arduino language easier to come to terms with (it's basically C), whereas Python (used on the RPi) is hard going for my old and stupid brain.

It's pretty impressive to be able to run a complete Linux PC on a RPi, including office suite etc. And you can run Windows 10 if you are a real masochist....

I think there is an arm with an FPU as well Muzzer. I'm pretty sure that the GNU compiler supports it so languages other than Python can be used. In principle it could run Linux CNC. It can also be used with the LInux telescope control package but I'm not sure how far that has gone now.

Last time I googled ARM CNC there seemed to be a fair amount of activity out there.

John

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. . . or even a web server **LINK**

Russell

I wasn't intending to diss the PI, it just seemed a humorous reading of the original thread title...

I still think it's too complex to be what it intends to be. In essence it's a Linux PC and kids downloading images so they can use it for media players or games console emulators are learning very little.

Something that forced them to learn some low-level programming would be much better

Neil

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This is getting closer **LINK**

MichaelG.

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It even has 'Button A' and 'Button B' ... like proper Telephone Boxes did.

Edited By Michael Gilligan on 16/06/2016 18:34:30

As you say, in principle it possibly could. But IIRC, the ARM core is integrated into a system on chip type arrangement and the drivers have to be written by Broadcom or someone authorised by them - with proprietary knowledge of the internals. I seem to recall some such problem came up a year or so ago although I forget the specifics.

Setting up Raspian Linux is the default first step with the RPi for most users and it pretty much self-installs if you choose the "NOOB" build - but is typically for use as a PC, media centre or similar. The Python IDE runs within Raspian of course and there is an "even more GUI" "building block" programming environment for younger beginners. As I said, you can even get W10 IOT (if that is your thing) or Ubuntu, RISC OS and others.

I got myself a RPi stepper driver "shield" last year and got it working but it's a bit of a faff on and despite the awesome power and might of the ARM processor, it's not really an ideal platform for motion control, being rather light on IO and expansion for starters. No great need for ADC inputs or GPIO on a smart phone for instance and no obvious use for the powerful graphics processor in LinuxCNC either. A bit of a mismatch.

In contrast, the Arduino family is a straightforward implementation of a range of industry standard microcontrollers (8, 16 or 32 bit) with some general purpose IO connected up, the buses brought out and power supply etc on board. And if you want, you can even get 32 bit ARM versions of it, buckets of IO etc etc. It's a different collection of beasts altogether.

Murray

Edited By Muzzer on 16/06/2016 21:00:02

While I agree with you and to really understand something you need to start with the basics. You can't force kids to learn something. You need to inspire them to want to learn.

I started in the 1950s with basic valve circuits and went on to learn about transistors when they were introduced (red spot and white spot). By the early 1970s I was designing a floating point co-processor for a Honeywell computer. My inspiration, a BBC childrens TV program on building a one valve radio receiver. It didn't work so I started studying to find out why.

The PI does come with the Python language installed and perhaps that might inspire a few kids to dig deeper.

Russell