When the Raspberry Pi ships later this year, it will be delivered to your door as a finished unit. The more adventurous tinkerers among you, as well as adept system builders, have asked the Raspberry Pi Foundation why they can’t get them in kit form instead. The reason why that wasn’t considered is demonstrated by the image above.
Sitting on the fingertip in that photo is the Broadcom BRCM2835 system-on-a-chip (SoC) alongside the memory chip. As you can see, they are tiny. And unlike a typical system build using an x86 chip that just slots into place, installing these chips requires a very steady hand and just the right amount of solder.
The memory chip has to sit on top of the BRCM2835 with a blob of solder required for every dot you see. Even those adept at such things could easily mess up, and if the chips aren’t perfectly lined up it’s game over. So Raspberry Pi did the sane thing and
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