The Raspberry Pi, the $35 single-board computer intended to get kids coding again has seen unprecedented demand since the 6am announcement that it had gone on sale through big-name partners Farnell and RS Components.

Indeed the foundation’s Twitter account has been inundated with complaints from irate would-be buyers finding first that the Farnell site has collapsed under the traffic (and had, 50 minutes after launch sold-out anyway) and reports that RS Components aren’t actually putting the thing on sale until the end of the week, seemingly counter to the foundation’s expectations.

It’s regrettable that Farnell couldn’t keep their site up, though both are primarily regarded as resellers for industry (indeed, we used both at my previous job extensively for electronics components, thermocouples and so on). Even when I was using them professionally either’s site being up and down like a whore’s knickers wasn’t exactly out of the ordinary but what’s annoying this time around, and more so than the TouchPad fire sale, is that both sites are now making the foundation look bad.

It’s extremely early days, though it seems that expectations between the foundation and their new partners weren’t quite aligned. All parties seem to be getting a lot of flak on social media networks, though in the foundation’s defence there probably wasn’t much they could do to get this right either way. Their alternative was to build their own ordering system, replete with payment processing, and a worldwide distribution network (or do it themselves at considerable cost) and then hope that the tsunami of F5-wielding punters wouldn’t floor the site. At least the approach they took had a higher probability of success.

It’s a shame that such big-name players as RS and Farnell are adding a bitter note to the start of what’s an incredible project. Still, it’s unlikely to dent anyone’s enthusiam for the project longer term – people just aren’t well equipped for dealing with disappointment it seems. Especially when one looks at the UK’s current Twitter trends – in the top four: RaspberryPi, Farnell, RS Components and DDoS.