And now it's gone!

After yesterdays depressing post, it's good to be able to report a 'whoop-de-doo' moment for a change. The kit that hadn't turned up yesterday arrived this morning and is wonderful. The company concerned had already offered to send another set of kit but were as pleased as me to discover that, once again, the postal services had delayed delivery. The items received were a couple of integrated infra-red sensors and a 'Piranha' LED board for illumination purposes. I am hoping to use it for photography but it may well fit into several other niches as well. As it is a twelve volt device, it may make a very good reading light in a car, for example.

A worrying trend.

For many years now, I have bought items from Hong Kong with no problems whatsoever. Unfortunately, since the end of 2011, a number of items have gone missing in the post. I buy, mainly, small electronic components and boards and I have so far lost two packages completely and another two that should have arrived by now but haven't. I have not given up hope of these as yet but the earlier two have never turned up. I must stress that this is not the fault of the respective suppliers in any way. In both the previous instances, they immediately sent replacements free of charge. The suppliers I deal with tend to be the most reliable on Ebay and I certainly have no complaint about them. The original losses occurred during the holiday period of the Chinese New Year and I assumed that this was the reason for the losses. This time, however, the New Year is well over and things should be back to normal. Another worry is that the missing items this time around are from one of the suppliers who had a package go astray last time and the paranoid part of me is wondering if someone is targeting their customers for some reason. Time, I assume, will tell.

Just call me Snowden or Bailey!

A Ginsing mounted on the Duemilanove

I have now begun my photographic library of component parts for Arduinos. Most of the weekend was spent setting up the studio in a box, taking the pictures and then putting them into the Wiki on the Google Code site. Quality was as good as I had hoped for and easily acheived with my new(ish) camera and accessories. I have substantially increased the page count of parts and will be adding some written descriptions and explanations over time. If anyone else feels that they could contribute to this work then, please, get stuck in! It's hard work for one and the more people contributing, the better.

A damp squib?

To be fair, not in some ways. The vast amount of publicity generated yesterday would, no doubt, have pleased P T Barnum. He was of the opinion that all publicity is good publicity. However, I suspect bad publicity can erode the publics trust in a product as well. Yesterday was not the unqualified success that I would have wished for the Raspberry Pi. There is  a fuller explanation in my diary blog and it will probably explain why I am somewhat concerned about what happened yesterday and, to a certain extent, is still happening today. The main foundation site is still only a simple html page for safety reasons and the two distributors, Farnell and RS, have no boards to sell as yet but have accepted orders for all 10,000 on the way from China. This will be the last time I mention the Pi until I have one in my hands.