Gertboard Arrived

I received my Gertboard yesterday, having order it way back on August 9th.  The Gertboard is an add-on electronics control board approved by the Raspberry Pi Foundation.  I ordered it from Newark for US delivery.  Rather strange really, it has a label with my name and Farnell/Element17 from the UK but it was supposedly posted UPS via a second label from Newark, Gaffney, South Carolina, US.

That aside, I received the board and two plastic bags of parts.  All the parts seem to be in individual bags, like they were picked from a warehouse that way, even the chips each have individual plastic chip carriers (not electrostatic foam), each in a bag.  I'll have to download any instructions required from the web (and that's known just because I read a Raspberry Pi blog post).

Why do I sound disappointed as I knew this was a kit?  Well Tandy in the UK also bought some boards but made their own kits.  Those kits appear to package the parts in order of assembly with instructions (see this blog post for more on the Tandy package).

At least the kit comes with colored jumpers to help interconnect parts.  It takes the sting out of having to learn to solder about 13 surface-mount resistors and capacitors (Note to Newark et al. - even your new partner Adafruit does the surface mounting for their customers).

Apparently Newark is stating they have sold out and are not accepting further orders.  Given I paid $20 for shipping (rather steep from South Carolina to my East Coast home), I would suggest waiting for Tandy to get them back in stock.