A few weeks ago I was at the Zimbo Py Workshop. As I was talking to some of the mentors at the event it became clear that obtaining Raspberry Pi units locally is an exercise in futility. The mentors at the event said they end up resorting to getting relatives/friends from outside the country to bring in units for them.
As you can probably see, this is not really a viable solution to the problem because at the end of the day if you do not have a relative abroad you cannot get your hands on these simple computing devices. It’s almost ridiculous, but I’ll vent about that on another day.
Right now let’s talk about the good news. You may have heard of Netro Electronics. If not, Netro is a company that’s selling the Raspberry Pi units at an affordable price in order to help make the devices easily accessible, be it to students or anyone who has an interest in these type of things.
Price comparisons
Obviously compared to buying from outside the price listed for the Raspberry Pi is a bit higher but this was always going to be the case when you factor in duty and markup. However the reason why this is an appealing deal is because you get to buy the units in bond notes, so there’s that. For example, the Raspberry Pi 3B unit is priced at $83 bucks and I don’t think that’s prohibitively expensive or expensive at all.
They also sell other components including:
- 5v Motor DC
- 9v Transformer
- Arduino Mini Kit
- Arduino Nano
…and many other things.
Where are they?
Ok, so now you may be thinking of dropping by and checking out what they have. If that’s the case Netro Electronics is situated at Jona City on the 12th floor. They have another shop in Bulawayo and that’s at .
If you aren’t in the two metropolis’ don’t worry as Netro have agents at universities around the country. They have agents at :
- CUT (Chinhoyi)
- NUST (Bulawayo)
- BUSE (Bindura)
- MSU (Gweru)
The reason they have a presence in universities is because they realised how difficult it was for university students to do their final year projects due to the lack of components.
In Netro’s own words:
Some students lack the knowledge of the existing technology which
they can use to build practical projects. Therefore, access to necessary learning equipment
has been a menacing challenge. As such we are trying to cover the whole country through
online services and delivery to customers’ doorstep. We have also decided not only to
supply components but also to give assistance, thus we introduced tutorials and project
support.
If you have been struggling to get a Raspberry Pi it might be worth checking visiting a Netro store, or checking out their Facebook page…
3 comments
are they accepting swipe/ecocash though? even Bond notes are hard to come by.
Hello kilotango thank you for the comment and thanks to Techzim team for writing such a good post about us, im Donald, a Netro Agent and yes we accept ecocash
Hi Donald, awesome. i’ll definitely be visiting soon.