Pandora; open source handheld console II

Daar zijn de fototjes





Ik zeg opsturen die hap

de devs raken een beetje overwerkt ze doen dit allemaal naast hun gewone baan

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Pheewww... so much things have happened. So many stuff to tell you... and that's what I wanted to do tonight.

However, I just came home from a 13-hour workday after having 3 hours of sleep and having another 17-hour workday before...
I'm too tired to do anything except for closing my eyes and rest a while... I hope you do understand.

I will use the weekend to recover and try to get you all informed latest at the beginning of next week.

Really sorry about that... had so much work to do. Didn't even find a few minutes to use twitter, update the buglist or status page here on the website...

het zou ook eens een keer goed gaan

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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

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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.

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

$330

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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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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

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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

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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.