Last week I received my Raspberry Pi. It was not that easy, me and some coworkers tried to import them directly from the UK, but they were not available and we would need to wait for weeks. We were able to cancel the order and buy from Farnell small stock here in Brazil. So it’s true, Raspberry Pies do reach Brazil !
For curiosity, and also to show the Brazilian broken imports regulation, each Raspberry cost us US$ 83,00 (€ 64,00) !!! That’s almost two and a half times the price of a Raspberry, mainly because of the import taxes at 60%. This tax is supposed to protect the Brazilian semiconductor industry, but that industry is non existent. On top of that there is another tax that further expands the value of the import tax, the two combined reaching almost 100%. If we had managed to import it directly from UK, it would have been even more expensive, at around US$ 100,00.
Now for the pictures !
-
- Raspberry Pi
-
- Raspberry Pi logo
-
- Raspberry Pi and keys
-
- Power on !
-
- First boot
-
- Initial setup
-
- A more standard setup, Rasp Pi as a cool desktop
-
- All the cables: mini USB, 2 USB, HDMI and ether
-
- Yet another setup: Rasp Pi as a NAT router
First impressions: I had some goals for the Raspberry Pi. First was to use it as a general server and router at home. The second was to use it as a portable cool “pseudo-notebook”. The third was to have an ARM machine, for study and for fun. My initial view is that the Raspberry Pi is somewhat disappointing for some of these goals, specially number two. In particular I noticed that the board is unable to do web browsing at reasonable performance, taking many seconds to respond to interactive use.
Taking a look at the forums, this is confirmed by a general agreement that rasppi had the specific goal as being a learning device for students and never meant to do web browsing in general. Also I’ve noticed that the rasppi is very dependant on the SD card performance, the minimum officially recommended (a class 4 SD card) not being enough for my goals. At least, there’s some effort being done to overcome part of the performance issues. 🙂
