RaspberryPi Starter kit

I'd say you might want a monitor/tv as well...

... or pinch the small 'tele' from the spare bedroom (or kitchen) and use that instead... just as long as it has an HDMI input.

Well it doesn't have to I suppose, but it does make life just that little bit easier!

Whoops, yes I do have a 19" monitor with HDMI ready and waiting too

And an HDMI cable....

for anyone who doesn't already have an HDMI cable, and is planning to buy

one while waiting for their RPi, be aware that the RF compliance testing

currently underway may determine that a special kind of HDMI cable is

needed.  PeteL has reported that the HDMI cable they tried first didn't

control emissions, and neither did other more expensive ones.

It may turn out that recalibrating the HDMI signal strength can solve the

problem, or it may turn out that special HDMI cables are required.

Too soon to know yet.

The FCC rules (I don't know if the EC rules are similar) state in TItle 47,

section 15.27 "special accessories", paragraph (a),

"Where special accessories, such as shielded cables and/or special

connectors, are required to enable an unintentional radiator to comply

with the emission limits in this part, the equipment must be marketed

with, i.e., shipped and sold with, those special accessories."

I also have more HDMI cables than a person could reasonably need, i'm sure one of them will work :-)

If not, i'll buy whatever may be required with the Pi. Although a question springs to mind, isn't HDMI a defined standard, and if so if there is a 'special' cable required, is that still an HDMI cable as such ?

Does a tree falling in the woods make a sound if there is no one there to hear it?

And wouldn't a special cable increase the Rpi cost ?

I'm thinking all will be well and none of this will be required :-) I'm sure as this was developed to use HDMI, something like this would have been factored in.

I don't know how "special" a cable Pete will need to meet compliance, but I do know from experience that there are cheap HDMI cables out there that do not meet the HDMI spec.  Specifically, I bought some cheap 1m cables that did not implement the individual ground/shield pins.  Instead, the cable had a foil shield that wrapped around the differential pairs and was connected at both ends to the HDMI connector's shell.  In other words, it was relying on the shell to provide all the ground connections, and assumed the devices at both ends of the cable connected their shells to circuit ground.

   Cables like this are not HDMI compliant, because they don't connect the individual shield pins, but will most likely work anyway in most equipment, which is good enough for many Chinese products.  I suspect that any truly HDMI compliant cable will pass compliance testing, and even cheap non-compliant cables will be good enough for end users.

John, My last HDMI cable cost 37p, are you saying this may not work ?

My guess is that it will probably work, provided that RasPi grounds the HDMI shell.  Since I don't have a schematic or a board, I don't know if RasPi does this.  I only found out about this problem with cheap HDMI cables because I have a BeagleBoard rev B4 from 2008 which didn't ground the HDMI shell (newer revs do ground the shell).  I fixed the problem by soldering a short wire between the BeagleBoard's HDMI shell and a nearby ground connection.

   I expect cheap HDMI cables to work fine as long as they're short, e.g., 1m or less.  The differential signals can't get into too much trouble over 1m.