Pandora; open source handheld console II

het zou ook eens een keer goed gaan

quote:

An official blog post should be incoming, but in the meantime a few status updates have made their way to the forums.

Okay, got some news. Cases are fine so far, they managed to make it look much better than what we saw last Thursday (they got a new machine and asked if we could give them two more days to test if that does a better quality… Fatih agreed and they did a new test today and according to them, it does a MUCH better quality). Can’t wait for the pictures.

Shipping and production will happen this week, so yeah, we lost a few days for assembly, but got much better cases.

(EvilDragon)


File that one under yay. Next on the menu is the unfolding saga of the wifi. The guys are not at all happy with where it’s at, and are considering shipping with a free USB wifi adapter similar to this until the issue is fixed.

About the WiFi… well, we’re currently discussing things and will do the blog post (finally!) when we decided everything (hopefully tonight).

We’ll probably let you decide if you want your Pandora NOW (and we might even throw in a free mini-WiFi-Stick so you can use WiFi with your Pandora!) or wait until everything is sorted out. And when I mean YOU, I’m not talking about a public discussion – every single customer can decide if he wants it now with stick or wait until internal WiFi is sorted out.

Yep, we don’t want to keep you waiting anymore.

(EvilDragon)

One thing I can promise: If it REALLY turns out to be a hardware fault, you can be sure we’ll either fix it for you or exchange your board for free as soon as we can afford it (maybe after the second batch, when we got some money back).
So either way, you won’t be screwed. (I remember I had to fix over 200 gp2x First Editions as they had a flickering LCD…)

We just wanted to make an offer that you can use WiFi right from the start, that’s why we want to offer you a small WiFi dongle and your Pandora NOW.

(EvilDragon)

Remember that an official blog post is still on the way, so this may not be the final word. Odds are though that you’ve already decided which team you’re on, “wait for wifi” or “ship now”.

Het doel van de pandora devs was eigenlijk om een draagbare amiga te maken en dat is het zo ongeveer

Alleen heeft hij ook alle functies van een mini netbook.

Hij is btw krachtiger dan een PSP (hij kan zelfs al een klein beetje een PSP emuleren)

1 van de 1000

Er zijn nog steeds problemen met de wifi en Openpandora denkt er nu aan om een mini-wifi stick bij de eerste 1000 pandora's te leveren. Zodat je iig werkende wifi hebt (de chip werkt wel maar aan de trage kant 56KB/s). Dit is een hot issue op het moment op de pandora fora (hihi dat rijmt) maar het geeft ook gelijk de kracht van de pandora community weer

quote:

View Posttorpor, on 30 March 2010 - 02:23 PM, said:
Send me the two Pandora's I've ordered, and I will dedicate 40 hours working on this WLAN issue for free. EDIT: Just FYI, I am employed at THALES corporation as an embedded systems/firmware engineer, and I write drivers just like this for a living. If there is a driver issue, I will fix it. If its hardware, I will use all my resources (faraday cage, logic analyzer, WLAN radio receivers, etc.) to determine just what the hardware is doing and why its causing problems.

Deze man Torpor is nu druk bezig om de pandora devs te helpen en de dingen die hij uitkraamt klinken veelbelovend, hij heeft er iig veel verstand van.

Hierdoor heb ik ook nog steeds vertrouwen in het project er lopen daar zoveel getallenteerde mensen rond die enthausiast zijn over de pandora dat ik denk dat alle software matige problemen snel opgelost/verbeterd zullen worden.

quote:

Op woensdag 31 maart 2010 11:16 schreef Maanvis het volgende:
Wat gaat dat geval eigenlijk kosten?

$330

quote:

Enne, waarom geen draagbare C64 incl. SID chip?

omdat dat al kan met de GP32x en de GP2x en de wiz

Nog meer user reviews

quote:

First impression: it’s bigger than I expected, thicker especially. At first I was worried about it, but after handling it for a few minutes, it actually felt a lot more comfortable. My DS now feels too small in comparison. The extra size makes it seem to fill your hands, like a large sammich. I don’t really know how to explain it. I put my fingers around it and they fit. With my PSP and DS, I have to curl my hand slightly to get the same kind of grip.

The keys are shiny, bubbly, when you squish them they go straight down, no wiggle. I was constantly looking at the keys to remember where certain keys were (such as the /, ~, and -), but I imagine this will change with usage. Regular typing was pretty easy and only took a little bit to get used to. The location of the space bar is about the only thing I imagine anyone will have any problem with. On a fullsized keyboard I’ll hit it with whichever thumb is convenient, but here it has to be the right thumb. More than once I found myself trying to press the B key with my left thumb. Practice!

The nubs! Oh my! Tactile and responsive. You can see in a video later Quake 3 being played with the nubs and I didn’t completely suck, just mostly. The nubs moved smoothly, and snapped back when released. I think “frictionless” is the right word, or as close as possible. They just moved when pushed, didn’t resist at all. I liked it!

I didn’t get as much play with the D-pad as I could have. It felt good. Played Giana’s return a bit, it worked smoothly, didn’t scrape or poke my fingers. I can believe this would be good for extended play.

The sound was also a lot quieter than I had expected. I knew it wouldn’t be able to fill a room or anything, but I expected to be able to hear a little better than I did. That pub wasn’t exactly loud, and it was hard to hear sometimes. What I could hear was nice and clear though, including video and MP3 playback. Not a real problem, that’s what headphones and the line out on the EXT port is for, just don’t expect you and a couple friends to be able to sit around and watch something without some kind of external speaker. [Note: ED suggests that this may be because the audio level was set low in software - Gruso]

This was the first time I’d run jzintv and Dink Smallwood on an actual Pandora and it made me very, very happy. They just worked. It was beautiful! That should demonstrate how easy it is to code for the Pandora if you’re coming from a PC background. They’re both simple SDL apps and they just worked. A little bit of keyboard mapping and they’ll be perfect.

Yes, there is an outline on the lid of the case, that square that has been pointed out, but under a flat light it disappeared. I could only see it when looking at an angle. It might also be visible under brighter light, but it is faint enough that I can see the finish making it disappear. That’s my hope anyway. If it doesn’t, it’s not that bad. Not perfect, but still very good.

I also went looking for other anomalies. The plastic, in general, was not perfect. There were spots where it was slightly more dull than others, but again, only under the right light. These should disappear with the finish (knock on wood). The “dent” on the right side of the keyboard we’ve seen in other pictures wasn’t there, and I didn’t see any sign of shrinkage around the side. I ran my finger along the seam all the way around the edge and it was smooth. Under the battery, however, was some very noticeable distortion. It almost looked like it was stressed and ready to crack. You may be able to see it in the video, we’ll see if I got it. This is a prototype, I’ve got faith that the stress has already been taken care of. I hope.

I didn’t see any ghosting, even when I was told I should be seeing ghosting. I do see ghosting on my PSP1000, so any ghosting on the Pandora is not as bad as on the PSP1000. I’m sure there is some there, but how many people it will actually affect has yet to be determined.

Both XFCE and Jeff’s minimal menu felt very familiar and intuitive. The touch screen needs a bit of fuzzy logic for the double tap. I was only able to actually double tap an icon a few times, all the other times I gave up and just hit enter. The problem seems to be that it only counts a double tap if you’re tapping the exact same pixel twice in a row. Really, it should have a reasonable dropoff, say 10 pixels on any side. The fact that I got it a couple of times proves it works, it just needs to be less sensitive.

I started Abiword, it came up fast. Happy happy, type away, “Hellollo” in big, bold, underlined, italic letters. This will serve all your rapid note taking needs, once you get used to the keyboard.

Obviously we didn’t test the wifi, but Tempel did accidentally start Midori. It loaded pretty quickly, 3 tabs open, one of which was the list of recently used tabs in windows thing. He scrolled it up and down, it was smooth. Here’s hoping the wifi gets solved.

We stress tested the hinge, giving it a hard twist. It squeaked, as old plastic tends to do, but it didn’t seem like it was going to give. My DS, in contrast, I just gave a twist and I’m fairly confident I could rip the screen off if I wanted to.

I don’t know what else I can say. Is it worth the wait? I think it is. It does everything I wanted it for (excepting wifi) back in May 2008, and there is no one device that matches it.

Is it worth the hype? That’s a tricky one, but only because the last year has seen more and more hype built on it. When everyone finally does get theirs, there will be a huge fanfare, followed by a collective “now what?”. I just hope the response will be big enough to generate enough momentum to carry them through a few more batches.

quote:

Thanks skeezix for inviting us out! And thanks WizardStan for paying attention to all these details; I didn’t have nearly enough forethought to check out so much of the hardware. And congratulations to both of you on not getting fired!

I’m not really sure what to add, except that it met all my expectations. In my mind, I keep comparing it to that Touch Book that skeezix apparently covets; it’s also an OMAP3530-based device, made by a small startup company, but the difference is that the TB was rushed out after just a year of development, and it shows (the TB does what I need it to quite well, but I have a litany of complaints that you’re all about to read). The casing on the TB seems loose and cheap, but the casing on skeezix’s Pandora is solid. Do you all remember when some prototype cases came in and MWeston described them as “an insult”? Yeah, skeezix’s prototype has one of those cases, and it was still great (oh, except the hinge was kinda loose, but I think this was one of the Craig-abused versions).

The touchscreen on the Pandora was accurate enough to use with a finger, which is no small feat given that my TB’s touchscreen, so much larger than the Pandora’s, can be inaccurate enough to make fingers useless. The software all seems well thought-out, even down to details like the menu button ignoring rapid mashing so impatient users don’t find themselves with half a dozen windows suddenly spawning (I can definitely not say the same about the software on the TB). Even the stylus felt nicer than the one that came with my TB! So everyone upset with delays: the TB is what the Pandora would have looked like if it had been rushed out. Be happy that you’re getting something far better.

So yeah, I have nothing but nice things to say about it so far (oh wait, one exception: the pixel-perfect double-tap was indeed tough, but skeezix and the rest of the devs are aware, so don’t be surprised if the issue disappears soon. Alternatively, just switch to single-tap activation). Again, I wasn’t the most attentive person there, so I imagine I could find something to gripe about eventually, but I haven’t seen it yet.

For posterity, I can second much of what WizardStan said. Nubs were great for playing Q3; I managed to suck only as much as I do with any dual-stick FPS. Keyboard worked far better than any of the handheld qwertys I’ve tried before (though, like WizardStan said, hunting for special characters was a challenge that I’m sure will be corrected with practice). That outline on the case lid is not at all as prominent as some of the photos would make you believe (in photos, it almost looks like a section of the case is raised, but it’s actually perfectly flush; I expect the line will disappear entirely after proper finishing). However, I disagree with him on two points: I was very impressed with the sound – I think you could gather people around a video playing on the Pandora (though I think my expectations were low as I’m going to be using headphones regardless); and I was actually surprised at how small it was (ED’s high-res videos have spoiled me).

Exciting times, everyone! Now calm your beating hearts and continue to wait patiently; you’ll be happy with the result.

Achja goedkoper dan een iPhone en die heeft de zelfde hardware minus hoog resolutie scherm, gaming controls, keyboard, linux, open source, etc.

quote:

Op donderdag 1 april 2010 13:47 schreef Maanvis het volgende:

[..]

De iPhone is toch een telefoon niet waar? Daar kun je mee bellen, met dit ding toch niet !?
Vergelijk het dan met de PSP ($90) of de DS ($100) en je ziet waarom dit ding nooit een succes kan worden.

okay ik zou het eerder vergelijken met een netbook

zoals bijvoobeeld de touchbook https://www.alwaysinnovating.com/store/home.php of de eeePC

maar ik denk eerder dat het een niche gaat vervullen zo groot als de DS of PSP zal het niet worden en dat is ook het doel niet. Het doel is om enthausiaste mensen een open platform te bieden om mee te doen wat ze zelf willen.

quote:

Op donderdag 1 april 2010 18:31 schreef Maanvis het volgende:

Moet ik dan zoveel extra betalen voor een kleiner profiel en wat extra gameknopjes?

Ja en een batterij die 10 uur meegaat als je 100% CPU draait

quote:

Op donderdag 1 april 2010 21:10 schreef Maanvis het volgende:

[..]

$125 verschil voor een batterij en wat knopjes dus .

ja en een kleinere vormfactor

De iControlpad een zijproject van craig die ook de pandora maakt wordt nu door apple aangevallen

http://www.pocketgamer.co(...)pad/news.asp?c=19637

De icontrol pad een soort additie om smartphones pandora controls te geven

Het wifi probleem is gevonden

quote:

The Pandora team has found the problem with the internal Wi-fi module. Turns out a resistor had an incorrect value.

It was a resistor.

CraigIX

Good news: The modification is minimal and can be done within a few minutes. We told the company to send the boards already produced and tested to UK ASAP and Michael will go there and start modding.
Then we need the cases – and assembly will finally start.

(Evildragon)

van de officiele blog

Finally - a new blog post. Did take a real long time, since there was so much we needed to figure out first.

Okay, here is what happened:

1. The WiFi issue - finally resolved

A lot of guys have probably already followed this on the boards: notaz was working on the WiFi driver and still couldn't get it to work reliable. As he didn't know what else to try, he thought it could also be a hardware issue - of course, that got us alarmed. Michael immediately stopped the board production (700 had been produced so far back then) to first do more tests with WiFi. We were totally in the dark. If you ever wanted to know how sudden death feels... well, we do know for sure yet.

Michael did begin investigating the hardware while notaz did more tests and tweaks with the software. A kernel which disabled everything except WiFi did get a bit more speed out of the WiFi, but it still was very slow. Was it the driver causing problems when other stuff was running? Or was it the hardware? We still didn't know for sure.

As we didn't know, we decided we will get some WiFi sticks for the beginning and ask every customer whether he wanted to get the Pandora with a stick and internal WiFi that might be fixable by software or maybe needs a hardware fix later.

Then, at one time, we found out that WiFi was faster on Rev2/3 boards then on the recent Rev4/5 boards - pretty weird, as nothing had been changed in these revisions that could affect WiFi. Except the board manufacturer. Using that clue, we figured out that the impedance of one trace had been changed. The impedance is important here, as a wrong impedance will distort the signal and then the module doesn't get a clean clock. Measuring the clock signal did prove that: Yep, the impedance had been changed.
Who's fault was it? Hard to tell. The company had changed that trace without asking, but we also didn't explicitely say it needs to have a correct back. So it's a hard thing, the trace is working, it was just not good enough for the signal.
Knowing that, Michael did work on it for a couple of days, doing some trial and error (not much you can't do unless you do know the exact new impedance).
He got it working better - but still not good enough to really be usable - was this due to software? Or still hardware?
So he started to work on a new testing board (Rev6) which could also be used as new board for the rest of the 3300 Pandoras if it fixes WiFi.
While doing that, he had another idea - modded another Rev5 board and got a HUGE speed increase! On minimal kernel, he can get 350KB/s, on normal image he gets 66KB/s stable speed (tested downloading from the internet. That fix is easy: Simply piggyback a resistor on top of an existing one. Takes about 1 - 2 minutes. And the rest of the 3300 boards can be populated with the new resistor immediately, so that fix won'tl be needed on them.
Speed can probably still be improved - Michael just found out about that yesterday, he will try to tweak more (or even combine the two mods) during the next days, until he leaves for UK to start assembling (he will do the modification of each board while assembling).
Finally! That news did make us more alive again, we were really suffering during the last days...


2. The cases

Since board production had been stopped for a while, we allowed the Chinese guys to tweak the case moulds a bit more. As you might have seen on the latest image, the bottom part (with the keyboard) looks spot-on right now - however, the top part still has some weird discoloration. No problem with stability here, just looks a bit weird if you look closely.


3. The OS - ready for first release

The latest image had been tested a lot by all of us already. It is pretty stable, has some minor issues (like you need to restart after calibrating the touchscreen at the moment... no biggie, I only needed to calibrate once in the last four months).
It has a working browser, eMail client, IRC, ICQ, MSN, etc. everything you need for normal life.
There is room for speed improvement in the future, SDL is not using hardware surfaces yet, but that will follow.
Also, boot process will be further optimized and will use Upstart to be a lot faster.
If you don't like a fancy desktop system, you can also use some minimal GUIs. We also designed that system to be configurable, so as soon as anyone codes a new GUI, it can easily be included by simply changing a config file.

The libpnd system is also working nicely: download a PND onto your SD Card and it will automatically appear in the menu (or on the desktop). Games will be sorted into categories, every dev can include a documentation in his PND so you can easily check the manual or installation settings, etc. Really convenient.
Of course, the categories, icons, etc. can be overriden, in case you want to have your own ones.
One thing you should not expect from the beginning is (as said before) accellerated movie playing (and therefore, also youtube movie playing).
This does need a new kernel and is on our TO-Do list for the next firmware release, which will be worked on as soon as the first one is ready to go on the NAND.
You can also help us testing then, as you can install the new beta image on an SD Card and try it out.

As the image is working well already, devs already concentrate to port more things. At the moment, we got fullspeed Amiga 500 emulation (without frameskip) at 500MHz, fullspeed Genesis and MegaCD, fullspeed C64 (Vice!) on 500 MHz without any frameskip, VCS2600, Colecovision, Atari ST, ... tons of stuff to play. Skeezix is also porting PocketSNES, so fullspeed SNES will also work when you get your unit.
PandoraPanic (minigames created by members of the GP32x.com community) is working nice, FreeDink, some PyGame-Games, etc. have also been ported already.

Overall, you will get a good working first release OS which still leaves a lot of room for improvements.


4. The current situation

We lost two weeks due to that WiFi issue, but now that this has been resolved being a fixable hardware issue, Michael told the company yesterday to ship out all the produced boards we have as soon as possible to UK. Additionally, Fatih told the Chinese to do the same: Produce the cases as they are now and ship them!
DJWillis is working on making the image NAND-installable, so yes, you might see us assembling them on webcam soon!

Het wifi probleem lijkt opgelost door het toevoegen van deze enorme resistor

en van de twitter

quote:

Craigix: Looks like the Pandora parts will be arriving next week for sure.

Dus ik hou mijn fingers crossed en hoop nogsteeds op assembly in april.

I have to admit it's getting better

ohja en een testje van de fabriek

Op het forum hebben ze laten wezen dat ze deze one-off roze waarschijnlijk op ebay gaan zetten

officiele blog

quote:

Here we go with the latest updates for the hungry masses!
First, my apologies for not updating the site a lot. That WiFi issue really did wear me out, I wasn't able to do much during that time. We all were a bit demotivated, but now that WiFi's working, we've recovered and are working fullspeed ahead!
Sorry for that, but after all, we're only human beings, too... and after years of constant work on the Pandora and our normal jobs... well, things can get a bit hard.



1. The hardware

Michael has finished working on WiFi and did manage to get it working quite well. Stable websurfing at about 500 KB/s. He tried webbrowsing, streaming music, etc.
This put our minds on ease, we really were quite scared when we found out about WiFi.
We now got FULLY WORKING HARDWARE, as we got drivers for EVERY component!

As can be seen on this picture, there's a lot of boxes shipping to UK. Some might go to Turkey, as Fatih got hold of a company who usually does laptop repairs, and they might help to fix the WiFi on the already produced 700 boards to speed things up a bit.

Boxes full of Boards and LCDs
Boxes full of B...
Boxes full of Boards and LCDs Boxes full of Boards and LCDs

This whole WiFi issue did throw as back a few weeks - but I hope you all do agree it's better we took the two weeks finding out what the problem was. Otherwise, you would've been gotten Pandoras with broken WiFi... not a good idea, if you ask me.
This seemed to happen for a big, well-known company whose latest product has serious WiFi issues (and WiFi working much worse than ours...)
We rather ship you something working - even if it did delay things by two or three more weeks!


2. The cases

While Michael was working on WiFi, the Chinese were working on increasing the case quality.
And we really do think it was worth the extra time - especially the final one that has some paint added looks spot-on!
Way better than anything we've seen before!

color1
color1
color1 color1

Just compare that to an older version of the case...

DSC07222
DSC07222
DSC07222 DSC07222

Was it worth it? That's up to decide for yourself. We sure do think so.

Unfortunately, adding paint did lead to one thing that has to be done: As it makes the case a bit thicker, Michael needs to approve that case and therefore is waiting for a sample.
To speed production up, Fatih will visit the company in China if necessary to make sure they won't mess around more but start shipping!
They still have a few days to ship, as applying the WiFi fix to the boards will take a while.

One thing that might interest you: You might have seen that they also painted a pink version of the Pandora... Michael will most probably put a Rev 4 board in and sell it on eBay soon!
Yep, that Prototype will probably be out shortly before we assemble and ship!

color21
color21
color21 color21

So if you want to own this case, keep your eyes on our blog!

Oh, some might think Painting is cheating... well, not really.
A lot of companies actually do it that way - and it doesn't wear off. Remember the old Nintendo DS? Not the DS Lite, but the old silvergrey one? I got one. Never had a carry case, it's really scratched (even the LCD is scratched).
But only on one corner it can be seen it's painted - and only because the base plastic color was white.
So black with black won't wear off - don't worry. It will simply LOOK better.


3. The software

I'm currently doing a lot of neat scripts while DJWillis prepare the image for the NAND.
Today I did create an LCD Gamma Manager - a small tool where you can create, load and save various LCD Gamma settings. I also created one that looks like an old CRT TV. Really cool - emulation on a handheld has never looked better!
To check out what's happening on the OS, simply go to http://git.openpandora.org

As Midori was a bit unstable and FireFox eating up RAM, we changed browsers once again. Arora is now included in the OS. Fast, without any rendering issues and it didn't crash yet for me.
The OS is getting more and more complete.


That's it for now - as soon as I know any more information (shipping dates for the cases, dates when we all meet in England, etc.), I'll inform you!
And sorry to my German readers: I'll translate the post tomorrow, it's 5:50 am now, I want to go to bed...

Ik denk dat hij er gewoon nooit komt

van mweston

quote:

Geez, I'm sick of these blog posts with suggestions as fact. Nothing is going to Turkey. Fatih suggested it. ED promoted it. Craig shot it down. End of story. Thousands of dollars have been spent setting up the hall in England and more shipping means more delays, more cost and possibly more taxes. It was a nice idea to spare my sanity having to solder 800 boards (don't forget all those rev4s still ready for devs and the Press) but that is just how it has to be. I'll do what I have to do to get it done faster and that is the reality of my life for the past two years. After reading ED's blog post it doesn't look like he actually said anything other than suggesting things but it's not a fault of the forum to read something and not at least consider it to be the plan. It's not.

The parts from Texas are in the air already and they are going to England. The cases will be shipped on Saturday April 17th (unpainted) or on Tuesday April 20th (painted). Silk screening would mean shipping them on Friday April 23rd and we saw more samples that were a bit better but still not great. Why is that so hard to do? Why haven't they made thousands yet? It baffles me too but from what I hear, they know we are unhappy and keep trying to impress us to no end...and it isn't happening although I have to say seeing the painted cases was the first time I started to feel like this could actually work. I'm pretty picky and perhaps more so than many forumers but I just want a professional product. We'll see what we get in the end. We actually never asked them to keep trying things like they have done. They've just sort of forced that on us by never having anything ready to ship. I'm not sure ED really understood that from Fatih and saying we told them to keep taking their time making it perfect is so not true. It was more like "well, um, if you think that is best...I guess we have a wifi issue we could work on while these delays happen".

The current problem with the painting idea is that they need to take a PCB I sent them and put a painted unit together to be sure that tolerances still exist. Unlike those pictures you have seen of the black and pink one, doing thousands will be done in a professional and dust free environment should we chose to do that. A few extra days while we prepare other stuff like opening up boxes and soldering resistors? Hmmn, it might actually be worth it.

I asked Fatih to ask them about the durability of the paint. Yes, I go through Fatih again because going direct seems to go no where these days. They answer to the one making the purchase orders. He said they tried applying stickers and scratching the paint with a knife and were happy with the test results. I mentioned that we were more interested in more general rubbing and finger grease/salts. I also asked him to find out exactly what kind of paint they will use so we can research its durability. If this all gets done before Friday, no time will be lost since I guess they are still building final cases themselves this week. Can I get a collective: WTF? I hear ya.

So the deal is still that I fly to England as soon as I know those cases have taken off. I will make sure the hall is prepared as I want it and maybe double check the wiring to be sure stations are properly grounded. Craig and I will go through the boxes from Texas and be sure it is all there and okay. I'm also going to ship lots of stuff from my own office here so that I am certain I have the tools I've used all along. I'll do the resistor mod while the cases are in the air and when they get there, we'll throw hundreds together immediately following that. As long as the case company can finally get it together this time, we can still start shipping these out to customers at the end of the month. That's the real plan.

Oh, I should also add that production of the remaining boards from the 4000 has been resumed. Once the wifi fix had been verified to make wireless transactions work and reliably so (maybe not at break neck speeds but I still think there is some software work to do as download rates are totally variable based on CPU speed), I emailed them to continue on with the part change as part of the remaining build process.


Michael

Reactie van ED

quote:

Wow! A lot of new informations I didn't know yet!
I did ask for recent stuff happening via mail, but it looks the replies didn't make it in time when I did the post, so all I knew was what we were evaluating.

Thanks for clearing up Michael and sorry to anyone who was scared or pissed off by my blog post.
I should stop posting and do more scripting for the time being...

[ Bericht 6% gewijzigd door Bosbeetle op 13-04-2010 14:32:44 ]

Hier blijkt de batterij tijd ook maar weer eens uit

#
in reply to: alerinofilho wow, 12 hours ans 22 minutes battery life left? ARM rox!

EvilDragon1717 (uploader) @alerinofilho
Yep And that value is accurate. With full display brightness it's about 9 hours, with just a bit less it goes up to 12 hours (and that's bright enough for me to use it in normal daylit rooms)

uit de youtube comments

de cases worden de 17de verscheept of als ze voor de geverfde gaan de 20ste.

Mag van mij wel een keer gebeuren. De andere onderdelen waren gisteren in de lucht dus ze zullen vandaag of morgen aankomen, meer dan een ton aan hardware

quote:

Behold, a painted and assembled Pandora. Click to zoom and enhance, and be warned, they’re large. As outlined in Tuesday’s festival of edits, the only verification needed on these painted cases was that they would fit together nicely. The factory has had a set of Pandora internals on hand for some time, so were able to throw this together and confirm that none of the finely tuned case tolerances are upset by the lick of paint. (They’ve also sent MWeston a painted review case, but only because it was easier for him to to say yes than no. He doesn’t need to wait for it.)

Now all that needs to be decided is whether 1,000 cases ship out of China on April 17 unpainted, or April 20 painted (dates provided by case factory, grain of salt and all that). In the meantime, a literal ton of boards, LCDs, nubs and other ephemera will be dumped on Craig’s doorstep any day now. They’ll need several days to unpack it all and prepare the assembly hall for action, days which may be well spent getting those cases painted. With the 17th only two sleeps away, we should expect a decision to be announced very soon.

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[Update] EvilDragon tweets:

50% of the case parts of the Pandora are produced already. So of some parts already exists 1000 pcs and the rest is in production. Woot!

Clarification on that second sentence: There are already 1,000 pieces of some case parts produced.

Laatste nieuws van de onofficiele blog

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Painted samples are shown, one unexpected.
April 16, 2010
Posted by: BackAssward


MWeston has favored us with some new pics of the Sample Cases, assembled. The pics show the regular unpainted case, one painted black, and surprisingly one painted a dark shade of grey. Sure it’s no pink, but you can’t make everyone happy.
(Click for larger version, but they are big so be careful if you have a slow connection.)



MWeston likes the Grey but the chosen color is still black:

Grey is actually like a black/silver looking thing but not at all as nasty as real silver would be. I like it. The final color is still black.

In the pic they are arranged: Unpainted Case, Painted Black, and Painted Grey.
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MWeston goes on to provide pictures of the assembled samples in their open position.



(arranged from Painted Black, Painted Grey, and Unpainted)
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Plus a pic of just the lids themselves.



(arranged from Unpainted, Painted Grey, to Painted Black)

In MWestons own words:

New case samples
Unpainted/Grey/Black Interesting choices. Grey is actually like a black/silver looking thing but not at all as nasty as real silver would be. I like it. The final color is still black though. This picture was taken outside in the sunlight.

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[ Bericht 0% gewijzigd door Bosbeetle op 20-04-2010 12:35:51 ]

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Op maandag 19 april 2010 00:02 schreef SinofEnvy het volgende:


En nee, ik verwacht niet dat het ding een volledig OS draait,

Dat doet hij dus wel tenzij je linux (in welke smaak dan ook) een onvolledige OS wilt noemen.

quote:

Okay, now for some real news:

As you probably already found out, there was a volcanic eruption in Iceland which caused chaos to the european air traffic. No flights are currently going to and from UK. As the boards in Dallas were already picked up last week, we hoped that they were already in UK, maybe sitting at the customs, when that all happened.
Well, unfortunately, that was not the case. They didn't go on a direct flight from Dallas to UK, but were routed via some other airport in USA. And that's where they are still waiting for the moment. I guess 1t shipments do not go the same routes a small packages

UPS is currently rerouting their shipments, we don't have an update yet when the boards will arrive, but I'm sure UPS is working as fast as possible to get it all sorted out. The production of the remaining boards is still going on, of course.

Next, onto the cases:

Since the volcanic eruption gave us some more time, we decided to tweak the cases some mor.... naaaah! Just kidding!

The first 1000 cases have been fully produced and will be painted black!

I'll let you know as soon a we get more information from UPS on when the shipping will continue. As long as the cases aren't finished painting, we won't have lost any time due to the volcano. Let's just hope it REALLY decides to stop spitting ash into the air and the delivery services will catch up with the lost days soon!

Vulkaan

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Op dinsdag 20 april 2010 02:30 schreef Clownbaby het volgende:
Wat een lelijk chinees namaak uiterlijk heeft dit apparaatje, de specificaties zijn ook niet bepaald bijzonder te noemen, wat een tijdverspilling. Erg gênant dit voor de TS.

Verre van genant hoor ik wacht graag op dit apparaatje. Als je het niks vindt is het ook goed.

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cragix twitter:

I'm in a state of absolute rage. UPS left all the Pandora boards outside at a neighboring business - anyone could have walked off with them.

Met andere woorden de 'ingewanden' van de pandora zijn in engeland

wtf het mag ook nooit meezitten

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Here is what happened this morning:

I get up early, watch Educating Rita, have a bath, do some work, go to leave and see a UPS note in the porch. I assume they called while I was in the bath.

The note just has the name of a local garden centre on it (a place which sells plants).

I assume that they have thought I was the garden centre and messed up. I decided to drive up to the garden centre and give them the UPS note.

But then on the outside of the door is another UPS note with my name on it.

At this point I was confused. I'm not expecting anything today... well apart from the Pandora stuff... but that's not until next week.

So what does this all mean? One with my name, one with the name of a local business?

Anyway by time time it's 2pm and I know the garden place has lazy friday afternoons.

Suddenly a horrible thought comes to me... I'm not in... garden centre up the road... they would not have done that would they? But if they have it will be safe, right?

So I take my two notes and drive up there.

WOW.

Place is deserted - friday afternoon after all.

Just as I'm about to turn the car around... what do I see in the parking spaces? A pile of boxes.

Yes - outside.

No one around.

At this point I'm shaking with rage. I park. I walk over. Yes. They are our boards. Outside. Where the public can just walk up.

There is no one else around.

I wander about looking for some staff, finally I go over and open a door and there is an old guy there.

He says he guesses they are mine. I tell him how much those boards are worth. He looks amazed. He tells me I'd better phone UPS.

I agree.

I take the boards and drive home.

Now I'm chasing up the REST of that delivery....

PS I just realised the old guy had no way of knowing who I was - I could have been anyone.

PPS no - it didn't rain today, although it looks like it might now.

aangekomen in engeland