Pi Hardware UK and China, SD Card Slots

[markosjal]

I Posted on http://forum.xbian.org/thread-1286.html

about the behaviour of Chinese hardware vs UK hardware and I wanted to elaborate on hardware differences without hijacking that thread. This is the closest match as to the areas of the forums I could find so, posting it here.

I might suggest that an area be created discussing Pi Hardware as we will now be seeing a wider range of hardware available made in all different parts of the world.

I wanted to firstr clarify that not all Chinese Pi boards are red in color. I am attaching both UK Pi and Chinese Pi side by side and as you can see there is no colour difference.
   

In the next image I want to point out a difference between the UK and Chinese Pis. I origanlly began to look at this because I found that My Adata Class 10 Cards would not work on UK Pis, but were fine on Chinese Pis. I suspected the SD slot and upon further inspection, I discovered that The UK Pis seem to have issues with one of the contacts for card inserted detections slips out of place. This refers to the wire that is moved on insertion of the SD card. This means that the one small bump on the wire does not make reliable contact. The Chinese slot however seems to be more likely to make contact even if one of these wires becomes displaced, because there is a greater surface area and smaller bump on the fixed wire, thereby increasing the probabbility to make contact should either wire get displaced.

On the left we see the UK Pi while on the right we see the Chinese Pi
   

In any case this was NOT the cause of incompatibility between UK Pis and Adata cards that I have been seeing

I am posting the back side of the boards because I thought someone might update the Wiki here or at elinux with the images I have attached, so feel free to do so. The UK Pi has blue audio out while the chinese has black. That is easy enough to see in the images.
   

I hope someone else may find this info useful!