Press Releases


RS Components and Allied Electronics Open Order Books for Revolutionary New Red Pitaya Open-source Test and Measurement Platform

Customers worldwide invited to place orders now to secure earliest availability of ground-breaking low-cost instrumentation platform

New Zealand, 21 May 2014 :

RS Components (RS) and Allied Electronics (Allied), the trading brands of Electrocomponents plc (LSE:ECM), the world’s leading high service distributor of electronics and maintenance products, have announced that they are inviting general orders for Red Pitaya, the pioneering single-board, open instrumentation and control platform that replaces many expensive laboratory and field instruments at a fraction of the price.

Customers across the globe who previously registered their interest on the Red Pitaya website, and who have been eagerly awaiting availability of the product, were given the opportunity to place a priority order with RS and Allied, which guarantees them delivery of a Red Pitaya board from the first limited production run in May 2014. All other orders are to be fulfilled in strict rotation by RS and Allied on a first-come first-served basis from the initial batch while stocks last, with lead times of up to twelve weeks for the next commercial production.

Red Pitaya board now available at RS Components

Red Pitaya is a groundbreaking test and measurement solution offering a unique, compact and low-cost ecosystem approach. It combines a Xilinx Zynq-based hardware platform with an open-source online repository of applications including a waveform generator, oscilloscope and spectrum analyser

Based on the GNU/Linux operating system, Red Pitaya can be programmed at different levels using a variety of software interfaces, including: HDL, C/C++, and scripting languages. HTML-based web interfaces enable access to Red Pitaya’s functionality in most Web browsers from a smartphone, tablet or personal computer.

A standard set of open-source test and measurement applications is provided in a community open access library known as the Bazaar cloud marketplace. In addition, the Backyard repository hosts open-source development code and tools to enable further development, and to inspire collaboration within the engineering community.

“Red Pitaya has sparked a considerable amount of excitement among engineers in the test and measurement sector,” said Philip Dock, Global Head of Product & Supplier Management at RS. “No other instrumentation product on the market can offer such functionality and flexibility at a price that is affordable within even the smallest of budgets. We expect to see high demand for the product, so we are encouraging customers to place orders early to secure the fastest delivery.”

“When we launched the Red Pitaya project our vision was to enable everyone to start using technologies that yesterday were available only to advanced research laboratories and industry. Today we are excited about the response from our users and about the creativity of ideas they are proposing. This is the real power of Red Pitaya,” said Borut Baričevič, Red Pitaya Co-founder and Product Manager.

Red Pitaya is available to order exclusively through RS Components websites globally at www.rs-online.com/redpitaya.

About RS Components

RS Components and Allied Electronics are the trading brands of Electrocomponents plc, the world's leading high service distributor of electronics and maintenance products. With operations in 32 countries, we offer around 500,000 products through the internet, catalogues and at trade counters to over one million customers, shipping around 44,000 parcels a day. Our products, sourced from 2,500 leading suppliers, include electronics, automation and control, test and measurement, electrical and mechanical components.

Electrocomponents is listed on the London Stock Exchange and in the last financial year ended 31 March 2013 had revenues of GBP1.24bn.

For more information, please visit the website at //www.rs-online.com

Further information is available via these links:

Twitter: @RSElectronics; @alliedelec; @designsparkRS

RS Components on Linkedin
http://www.linkedin.com/company/rs-components

Relevant Links:

Electrocomponents plc
www.electrocomponents.com

RS Components
www.rs-online.com

DesignSpark
http://www.designspark.com