Slice Media Player Starts Shipping!

Back in August 2014 we got very excited about one of the first Kickstarter projects to use the Raspberry Pi Compute Module. We’re pleased to announce that after much hard work, many late nights and far too much sugar and caffeine, the FiveNinjas team have started shipping actual real Slices to backers. Here’s a picture of Gordon and Jon working their ninja magic in a cold warehouse somewhere in deepest darkest Sheffield; the racking that can be seen in the picture contains parts for 1500 Kickstarter Slices. Slices are assembled at a secret location in Sheffield, UK We believe Slice is the first Kickstarter project using the Compute Module to start shipping to backers, narrowly beating our other favourite project the OTTO Camera (which also seems to be very close to shipping!). Slice comes in black, red and silver One of the things we wanted to see with the Compute Module was people using it to do just this type of thing – leverage the Raspberry Pi technology to create innovative and high-quality products with minimum resources, something that has historically been a difficult challenge. The FiveNinjas team includes our very own James Adams and Gordon Hollingworth, who have been spending large amounts of their spare time working on the Slice hardware and software and, in doing so, discovering exactly what it’s like to build a product using the Compute Module and mass produce it. In the process a few wrinkles have been found, but mostly it has been a big success, and there’ll be another blog post soon from Gordon on the process used to test and program Slice in mass production (which is a very important and often overlooked part of creating a real product). Slices being automatically programmed before packing and shipping We’ve been told that to get the cost of the Slice motherboard down to an affordable level the Ninjas had to make a minimum order of 3000 Slice PCBs, so there are 1500 more Slices that can be built relatively quickly once the Kickstarter units have all been shipped. If you missed the Kickstarter and want to grab one of these extra units, head over to the brand new FiveNinjas store!

URL: http://www.raspberrypi.org/slice-media-player-starts-shipping/