How is Raspberry Pi supported?

Mark,

There is no central support. If it has a hardware problem in that it is faulty, then you can ask the supplier (Farnel or RS) for a replacement or refund, governed by any particular retail laws in your area.

I would suggest that further research would have been in order *before* you bought this device, as at no point have I expected it to come shipped with an SD card and / or a working OS. No one forced you to spend more on an SD card than the Pi itself cost, why would you do this when it would not seem you have a clear idea of what it can do or even what it is. I have a 4 gig card for mine that cost £4.99.

Remember, you have paid around £24.99 for this and above it being a device unique at this price point, the Foundation are also charity. Expecting any sort of formal support against an SLA is pretty wide of the mark.

I would suggest you re-sell for a nice profit on e-bay and buy something that does what you want, with the support that you want.

I don't know about the US, but in the UK (and probably in all of Europe) consumer laws do not have an exclusion for products that are cheap, nor for products that are cool, hyped, and objects of fanboi worship.

All retail products are required to be of merchantable quality and to fulfil the function expected of them, and when they do not meet that standard then the purchaser is entitled to recourse in the form of replacement or reimbursement, at their discretion.  They are also entitled to some reasonable level of customer service or support, the minimum acceptable level being to provide the statutory replacement or reimbursement in a responsive manner.  The relevant expectation with the Pi is that it should boot and all its features should work, and the relevant "SLA" here is stated in the consumer laws, which are mandatory, not a magnanimous offer.

My advice to RS and to Premier Farnell alike is to reduce the opportunity for problems at the customer end by supplying as many Pi boards as possible with a small pre-programmed SD card that you have validated yourselves.  If you get the price of the card low enough, almost everyone with a modicum of commonsense will buy the Pi+SDcard bundle.  This saves them trouble and reduces your support costs simultaneously.

Support is very expensive because manpower is very expensive, and you can't afford to offer a lot of support on a $35 product.  Even replacement or reimbursement costs you money in support, so try to avoid the possibility of customers not being able to boot the device at all costs.

The wholesale cost to you of a 4GB (or even 2GB), old-tech SD card is so low that you might want to investigate the possibility of always supplying one as standard, for no other reason than to reduce the calls to support.

Morgaine.

Interesting that here:

http://elinux.org/RaspberryPiBoardVerifiedPeripherals#Problem_SD_Cards

...it suggests that problems with class 10 SDHC cards seems to be fixed and 'Further feedback will be useful.'  Prompts two questions from me:

1) Perhaps a stupid question, but how do I tell what "class" of card I have?

2) Further feedback to whom?  Looking at the history on the wiki page, none of the authors have their own pages, so wouldn't know how to contact them to provide any further feedback....

Regards,

Mark.

The Wikipedia article on SD cards shows symbols for card class.  I have some older cards that don't have any class (symbols), but I was able to see the C4 logo on the one I purchased for my RasPi-to-be.

The Wikipedia article on SD cards shows symbols for card class.  I have some older cards that don't have any class (symbols), but I was able to see the C4 logo on the one I purchased for my RasPi-to-be.