Today we received an email from one of our fantastic FIRST EDITION backers, Nial Pearce, who has set up his beta Pi Supply in record time…we only sent the boards out on Wednesday, and he had it up and running by 4pm on Thursday. Fantastic effort by both Royal Mail and Nial – give yourself a pat on the back!

Anyway, Nial has very kindly taken pictures of the first Pi supply that has been received and assembled out in the wild and has posted them for everyone to see on Flickr here – http://www.flickr.com/photos/nialpearce/sets/72157633161140477/

He has also done a bit of a review for us, which read as follows:

The kit took about 10 mins to solder together with easy to read silk screen to easily identify what goes where and which way round! (I had to check the resistors against a photo of the original but I’m sure there will be a short build guide published to show where the 2 different values go before the boards ship out). All went together nicely and only small issue was the capacitor legs that were a real pain to solder, in the end a good coating from my flux pen and the solder finally made 2 clean and solid joins. Its the capacitor legs and not the PCB I think, sometimes a batch of parts can be like that and not take soldering well.

For a newbie to electronics it would still be a quick build at about 30 mins I reckon. A really nice little kit!

The system works well. You issue the shutdown command (even set to a countdown value by using a number after the sudo shutdown command) and the Pi shuts down as it should, you then have a couple of mins then the circuit kicks in and unlatches the power completely from the Pi. To turn back on just hit the On button on the board and power comes back and the RasPi fires up and boots as usual.

The hard power off switch is definitely useful as there are times when you need to power off immediately without access to the console and hitting a nicely wired up switch is better then yanking the USB cable out of the Pi.

The safe shutdown button that is being added to the final board will really make this a fantastic little RasPi must have accessory and also the addition of a micro USB on the input socket will be a real bonus to do away with USB to USB leads (The USB to USB lead supplied was almost twice the weight of the rest of the package all together including the lightweight and better looking Noodle cable, so the Pi Supply guys will be glad not to ship to many of those I’m sure!

All in all a handy little RasPi gadget and with the planned revisions for the full production version it really will be a must have for your Pi/Pis

As you can imagine, we were very chuffed to receive such a glowing review and glad that the product is already now being used in the wild!

Stay tuned for more updates over the next few days as we continue to work on fulfilling the pre-orders.

You can read the short update we did on Kickstarter here – http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/pisupply/pi-supply-intelligent-power-switch-for-raspberry-p/posts/445841