Raspberry Pi hit CE Mark compliance delay

RS Components and element14/Premier Farnell the two companies distributing the Raspberry Pi have put orders of the boards on hold until the Raspberry Pi receives a CE mark.  Raspberry Pi’s view is that it doesn’t need testing as its not a finished product but the distributers don’t agree and it could delay the sale of the boards. Anybody that managed to order one that is shipping directly from Raspberry Pi should still get the board soon as the testing is being done by the team at Raspberry but for orders from element14 and RS Components could be delayed while the testing is completed.

Also if you got an email with an August delivery date yesterday from element14 don’t panic it was automatically generated due to the CE mark issue and they should have a clearer delivery date soon.

It must be frustrating for the Pi team as boards like the Beagleboard are on sale without the CE mark.

Following on from last week’s discussions, both RS Components and element14/Premier Farnell have now informed us that they are not willing to distribute the Raspberry Pi until it has received the CE mark. While this differs from our view (as we’ve said before, we believe that the uncased Raspberry Pi is not a “finished end product”, and may be distributed on the same terms as Beagleboard and other non-CE-marked platforms), we respect their right to make that decision.

The good news is that our first 2,000 boards arrived in the UK on Monday and that we are working to get them CE marked as soon as is humanly possible, in parallel with bringing the remainder of our initial batch into the country. Pete and Eben have been burning the midnight oil – literally; I only exchanged about three words with Eben yesterday, and those were when he got back in from a long day’s hacking at two in the morning. On the basis of preliminary measurements, we expect emissions from the uncased product to meet category A requirements comfortably without modification, and possibly to meet the more stringent category B requirements which we had originally expected would require a metalised case.

We’re also talking to the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS), to better understand the terms under which devices like Beagleboard are permitted to ship to domestic end users in the UK, and to obtain a definitive statement as to whether we can distribute on the same terms. We should say the UK Government in general, and BIS in particular, have been incredibly supportive of the project so far; they are looking into this as a matter of urgency, so hopefully we should have another update for you soon. With graphs in. We know you guys love graphs.

All this means that we’re waiting on one of two things – the results of further EMC tests, and whatever BIS comes back to us with – before RS and Farnell can give you any firm delivery dates. We’ll let you know as soon as we do.

via Raspberrypi.org