Pandora; open source handheld console II

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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.

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I've chased and chased those cases but the courier said the factory were unable to give weights or number of boxes last week.

Chasing that up with the factory just resulted in the usual apologies and more promises to sort it out.

Anyway, eventually Fatih spoke to someone higher up and they promised to get them all packaged and weighed correctly so the courier can collect them.

This just seems to be the 'way' with these Chinese companies, I've never had a good experience with one, it seems you have to go through this baptism of fire with them all. I just wish we could have found a company in the UK which we could afford to use. But alas it had to be China with our budget.

You have to understand they just lie and lie and lie to us. It may well be that the person telling the lies really believes them to be true because it is what he is told. Who knows. It's all smoke and mirrors constantly. This is just how they seem to do business.

Anyway the good news is that all the final case samples have been absolutely superb.

I'm also very glad these cases were the only thing done in China. The rumour that the PCBs were made in China isn't entirely true, the (American) PCB company had them made for us, and used a facility in Asia (which they may well own) for some of the work. We know no more about it than that. They were certainly populated and tested in Texas.

The decline of manufacturing in the west is all due to this smoke and mirrors Chinese crap. I bet most companies go though it, save very little money, but stick with it because they invested so much. It's one big long con by China.

If I can I'll move that case production to the west at the earliest possible opportunity because I'm not falling for it.

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Op zondag 2 mei 2010 23:40 schreef Maanvis het volgende:
lol ja gek he als je voor een chinees dubbeltje op de 1e rang wilt zitten.

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Op maandag 3 mei 2010 08:21 schreef Fe2O3 het volgende:

[..]

Die 'mallen' zijn tools van enkele duizende dollars in waarde, maar ook een paar duizend kilo zwaar ook. Ze mogen in ieder geval niet zomaar China uit (wetgeving) dus dat gaat niet zo 1 2 3. Hooguit een nieuwe leverancier in China.

Het is voor ons meestal zelfs goedkoper om tools te scrappen voor oud ijzer en nieuwe te maken op een andere locatie dan het gezeul en gesleep tussen een leverancier A en B. Om over het papierwerk en partijen die eigenlijk helemaal niet met elkaar willen praten toch dit soort dingen te laten regelen maar te zwijgen

Power Consumption

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Here’s a video showing my ammeter in series with the Pandora battery. I wanted to double check the fuel gauge calibration because with lite settings, 15 hours is being presented. I thought that was crazy, but it’s true. With an average current of 278mA and a battery testing at 4200mAh, that really is 15 hours (under specific settings talked about below of course).


Testing was done at 500MHz and the screen brightness set just about as low as it will go before shutting off. Increasing the screen brightness to 100% upped the average current to 398mA which is only 10.5 hours of continuous use.

In the second half, I upped the clock to 750MHz using the little menu option but I’m not certain if it actually did anything. Some stuff seems to work better for other people than me but this little program is one that seems to bug out on me.

This video also shows the power consumption with wifi running. You can see the power go way up when web pages are loaded or when new cover art is loaded in Mplayer. If you load pages and then spend a long time reading them before loading the next one, perhaps 10 hours is still possible. At the max I saw of approx. 600mA, that would be 7 hours and you’d have to be hammering wireless hard to maintain that as you can see. Notaz did a fantastic job of getting the power management for wifi working and it will really help battery life for normal use. I guess it’s like any other device you would buy now, but for the developers it’s such a thrill to see it working

mweston

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So dos some Boards arrive in the Gardencenter until the Cases arive??

And dos UPS knows where to took the next boards??


Yes, the driver allegedly lost his job for what he did (although I highly suspect he was temp staff).

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The 4000 batteries have been released by customs. I'm expecting them to get here on monday.

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Evildragon wrote:

Look! There! It's a plane!

*ducks and hides*

Naah. 12 Cartons with 207kgs alltogether are ready. The flight they will take (they need to be transported to the airport first) will be on Monday.
Yay! Hopefully no lie (though they never told us any number of packages with weight before, so I doubt it), but we'll know for sure as soon as we really get the tracking number from UPS (which, as said, did take a few days in China last time).

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The OS and some software

The OS is also coming along. We installed an image to the NAND a week ago - it runs well and rock solid so far.
I tried quite a few things to break it - hard reset while it was running quite a few times, etc.
The OS survived. The only thing I managed to do was making the bootup hang when I did four Hard Resets while booting in a row - guess a hardware driver hang. Was solved by powering off and reboot again - and still the filesystem was fine and intact.

Looking good here. Bootup is still a bit slow (55 Seconds at the moment), but that's something we surely try to improve in the near future. As a test, I simply removed some services that won't be needed AFAIK and got a booting time of 33 seconds. It won't make it in the first release (as we don't have time to test if my removed scripts REALLY don't break anything!), but it's a nice view of what can be done. Switching to Upstart (a tool which enhances bootup by running scripts parallel instead of serial) will also make a difference. Stay tuned for OS updates!

Power Management has become better. The WiFi driver now supports power management - so with the standard OS settings, 7 hours with WiFi are possible. Without WiFi, it goes up to 13 hours at the moment.

For a basic OS, this is all pretty advanced already. There will surely be some settings that can be enhanced (i.e. Browser layout, MIME types, etc.), but we'll wait for suggestions from you guys and will include the best settings in future firmware versions.

Also, in case you want to meddle around and break the OS (you should only do so on the SD Card, but some probably still mess around with the NAND I guess )
I will create a recovery bootsystem which allows you to restore the config files on your system or backup your home-directory.
Aditionally, notaz created a flasher (it's the same one we use to install the OS for the first time). With that, you can copy some files on your SD Card and restore the image completely (don't do this too often though, it will wear out the NAND over time )

Various devs (me too, though I don't think you can call me dev) are packaging up games, apps and emulators that are ported so far.
We have Stella, Hatari, UAE4ALL, DOSBox, Vice, Colem, Exaile, Free Heroes 2, Commander Genius, Angry Drunken Dwarfs, BattleJewels, Battle for Wesnoth, Super Mario War, C-Dogs, Pandora Panic!, Quake 2, etc. and more coming up...

Some stuff needs more work (notaz wants to improve PicoDrive more before Pandora release, UAE4ALL is just a direct port of the GP2X Version, runs fullspeed Amiga 500 games, but is not as compatible, PSX and N64 also need more work), but I guess that stuff will keep you busy for a while.

MAJOR thanks again to ALL the devs who have helped us with the OS - despite them having few time... THANKS!

I also suspect there are some devs among the preorderers who also like to port some games (or code their own ones).

I can't await to see what's coming from you guys - I'm sure it will be worth all the trouble we went through.

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Op zondag 9 mei 2010 21:38 schreef Maanvis het volgende:
eindelijk een bericht zonder dat er iets fout gaat.. het begon al op een vlemmixje te lijken

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Op zondag 9 mei 2010 21:52 schreef Nick-GizMo het volgende:
Bosbeetle heeft er nog flink vertrouwen in

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EvilDragon tells us that the shipment from China has taken to the skies, and is due to arrive at its UK destination on Wednesday. This shipment should include 1,000 deliciously painted cases, including all buttons, styli and other moulded parts, along with at least 1,000 keymats. Enough other parts (boards, LCDs etc) are reportedly waiting in the UK to build 1,500 complete Pandoras, so when the cases arrive they should have the first 1,000 built before breakfast. Or not. Now we just need to convince MWeston to fly cargo class, so we can get a tracking number. Come on Mike, be a sport.

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Craigix: Finally, the cases should arrive in Newcastle tomorrow!

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I'm hoping they will be though customs and delivered by friday so I can do some photos and video of everything here.

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Yep, this is it, building will start next week, probably on Wednesday.