wraggster
February 1st, 2012, 16:33
A post at the Raspberry Pi blog shows an image containing the device's SoC and memory chip to help explain why the tiny PC won't ship in kit form (http://www.raspberrypi.org/archives/592). Clearly, the chips are so small, and the solder blobs required so tiny, that most people would mess up doing it by hand. Add to that the fact one chip has to sit on top of the other, and if you're a millimeter out, your chips are fried (http://www.geek.com/articles/chips/why-the-raspberry-pi-wont-ship-in-kit-form-20120131/)."The post also addresses the use of closed source libraries for graphics acceleration.
http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/12/01/31/203229/why-the-raspberry-pi-wont-ship-in-kit-form
http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/12/01/31/203229/why-the-raspberry-pi-wont-ship-in-kit-form