32c3 Talk. Need a bit of support

[mclien]

So I was brave and put up something at the CfP of 32c3, which to my own surprise was accepted. The talk started as an vague idea to tell something about open hardware (namely about the Pandora/Pyra) and how to make it happen. After a bit of conversation with the guys of 32c3, I ended up to make it a bit wider view and here is my rough idea so far:


I will talk about 3 projects I am/was involved:


- Mooltipass (which I basicly supported by crowdfunding and involved an artist from outside)


- Senoko [Battery board of the Novena] (where I did a production run to supply some community guys with hardware)


- Pandora/Pyra:


Here I intent to make it more a perspective of the community than mine own (which are quite limited).


And now to the tricky part: As I started with one topic and now somehow ended up with 3 and there is no way to get more time for the talk, I have 30min (Talk and Q&A).


My rough "timetable" is this:


5 min Mooltipass


10 min Pyra/Pandora


10 min Senoko


some sec concluding/ dos and don'ts comparison ("What you get back": something like really cool, spyfree, open devices/ nice feedback)


3-4min Q&A


That is truly quite short amount of time, so I'd like to have some feedback what should be in the talk of 10 min with the main thought in mind:


"How to make open hardware happen and what you can do about it without being a hardware/software designer"


Aspects I was thinking about myself are:


-Never give up (revive of the Pandora)


-Learn and repeat (lessons learned made the Pyra development much better)


-don't hide anything (people will accept communicated fails and accidents, but will be pissed, if someone trys to cover them up)


-involve the community (make what the customer want and endure the very long discussions/ get a keymat designer)


So for that part I need some inspirations and facts I might have not that correctly present.


It's the basic concept so far and I might put some aspects from the projects in the conclusion part, but this is where I basicly start right now.

 

[Wally]

You might want some examples of how the community involvement has helped evolve the Pandora and will span to the Pyra as you'll have the audience captured with some live demos, if possible!



Things like:
1) GLShim - Originated on pandora and is now used across ARM devices


2) DraStic - Tested and built on Pandora at no cost but sold on Google Play


3) Static Recompiled games like Diablo / Diablo 2 and Starcraft


4) Crazy amounts of ports by some people like Ptitseb, including a first of Jedi Knight II on the Pandora before most others got it on portable devices!


Perhaps some discussion about how the OS couldn't evolve any further due to lack of capacity on the NAND would go a long way too.

 

[ZXDunny]

Only mention Craig in a negative sense. And impress upon the audience that the Pyra is going to succeed (As would any other project) due to his absence.


D.

 

[Mr_Loon]

Stressing the value of community / volunteer input to the Pandora/Pyra project is very important IMHO. When you look at the size of the user base for Pandora and look what the community has achieved the results are mind boggling.

Things like the Repo, firmware work, PND Manager, etc. etc. Are as good or better than the equivalents for many devices with millions of users.

 

[Neelix]

Only mention Craig in a negative sense. And impress upon the audience that the Pyra is going to succeed (As would any other project) due to his absence.

I would disagree with that.   Better not to mention Craig at all.   If he comes up in Q&A mention only that he's left the community and is not involved with the Pyra.  


If anyone asks about unfulfilled Pandora orders,  just say that the company those orders were placed with went out of business, and is not involved with the Pyra.


Mudslinging tends leave mud on the one slinging it, so one should avoid engaging in it, especially in front of an audience.  


-Neelix

 

[mclien]

I would disagree with that.   Better not to mention Craig at all.   If he comes up in Q&A mention only that he's left the community and is not involved with the Pyra.  


If anyone asks about unfulfilled Pandora orders,  just say that the company those orders were placed with went out of business, and is not involved with the Pyra.


Mudslinging tends leave mud on the one slinging it, so one should avoid engaging in it, especially in front of an audience.  


-Neelix

Agreed. Just forgot to mention it. Basicly the talk is intents to encourage people to support/do projects, so no bashing planned (and no time for that anyway). It's more about giving an abstract what errors to avoid and how to get things done.


So more interesting would be how to avoid such a situation, which from my view is mostly: be honest and give prices after you collected costs. Did I miss a point in that case?


So my list what went wrong with the Pandora (please correct me in the things I got wrong!)


-price before costs


-splitting responsibility of producing in two hands


-trying to hide problems from the community


-case designer and producer in different countries


-bad luck (defective boards and company bankrupt (? I'm getting that right))


and the good list:


-starting from a already existing community (GPX boards)


-making it easy to contribute (like PND repro)


-communicate with the community/customers (IIRC the pandora was revived because people were rather paying double to then loosing half AND did/do donations for the unlucky ones)


AND lessons learned for the Pyra:


-have good contact between case designer and producer (now one company)


-have a short distance between PCB designer and producer (Nicolaus/global components)


-have a real common language together with all producers


-never take money(as in preorder) before you are sure you can produce/deliver


-make it upgradeable (Mainboard, Processor board, LCD board)


PLEASE correct and expand.


@Wally


Can you explain your point a bit more to a non-gamer/programmer (like me, who "only" wants the desktop in his pocket)


Thanks to all in advance

 

[Neelix]

Well if it's lessons learned we're after:


"Make sure you have an alternate income stream as there is no guarantee that your project will be profitable."


I got the impression that one of Craig's biggest mistakes was that he stopped selling the the non-pandora stuff that was his bread and butter because he was afraid it would somehow detract from the sales of the Pandora,  ignoring the fact that he needed the income from those other sales to keep afloat.  That put him in a hole, which he never managed to dig himself out of.


-Neelix

 

[mclien]

Update: seems I got a 1 hr timeslot (so I'll go for 10/20/20 min, or a bit less, so 20 min Pyra!).


Anybody atending 32c3 btw, except me?


EDIT:


Strange yesterday the schedule was online, now it's gonne again...

 

[Urben]

Will skip this year but I will view the stream of your talk

 

[ibisum]

Pimp repo.openpandora.org .. I have found that its a good way of explaining what the Pandora is, and can do: its a portable, open computer, and the repo has all kinds of goodies on it that you can run on your Pandora.


Pyra, even better of course - be sure to make sure folks understand that its a grass-roots/DIY project that has survived, in spite of overwhelming opposition from the universe (the fucking volcano, ffs...) and that will continue because of the efforts of the few hero's with great honor being supported by an outstanding community.  


Talk about how its a "cool, elite computer" being made in 2015 to compete in a world of walled gardens.  The fact that we have a garden, and it is not walled, and it is flourishing and prospering, speaks mountains.  Seriously, pimp the repo ..

 

[mclien]

Hi Folks,

sorry for the silence, according to murpys and universe rules, almost everything got fucked up in preperation for this. I still think I'll get it done, but still need some response from you.
The talk will be at 30.12, 14:00 (so I guess I end up by editing my slides on congress still.
1) is anyone at Congress from you guys (to give a bit support by looking over the slide and general mentaly?) or might be reachable via mail for me for support?
2) to the repro: @ibisum : by pimping you mean, point out how much software was rissen by community?
3) to the vulcano thingy: I know it seams a running gag, but somehow I don't get it (at least not in a way to inclide in the Talk), so please hint me a bit.

@wally: can you give me a short abstrat to the the points you mentined earlier?
Like GLShim is the open driver for the openGLS -ES chipset? something like that.

 

[mclien]

So I survived my talk, even so I had a really bad time until directly before it (which was cause by totally different reasons). It's not only so far, but I'd like to thank all of you who contrubuted to it and want to appologize for the things I missed in the talk. I was in a bit of a hurry timewise at the end, mainly because I feared not to have enought time for the Q&A, just to find out, that there weren't hardly any questions.
So sorry for not having the time to point all helpers aout more thouroutghly.
I'll do better next time.

 

[FBnil]

Will the talk be on youtube soon?

Thanks for doing the talk by the way... gathers momentum for Pyra...

 

[Urben]

All talks including mclien's will be online soon on the 32c3 database. I can say many of them are worth watching.

 

[Inqui]

https://streaming.media.ccc.de/32c3/relive/7369/

 

[mclien]

Thanks Inqui,
didn't find that one. Watch from the begining to see the beautiful lady holding the rigth before me. Watch fraom aboout min 12 to see me fiddeling around with my x-screen, watch from min 15 to see from the point of intreducion and at about min 19 Talk starts.

mclien

 

[FBnil]

@mclien: Not bad. Nervousness was gone at the end. Too much tech data at the beginning (chipset and all), the focus was the process. Cool music before your presentation. Was that in the room too, or post-added?
Interesting bits for me: Imperial measures, debugging a board/resistor, what not to do/what to do, customs!

 

[mclien]

Thanks. The main problem was to get the huge other troubles out of the head. That resulted in not having any time to run the talk through (not even mentally) before. As you could see some of the slides still had the [WiP] on it, which was the note to myself that the slide wasn't done. So I basicly stopped myself editing the slides 20 min before enterint the hall, which was 20 min before my talk. (otherwise I would have shortend some of the data after the first dry-runs).
So I had no idea at all, if my timeframe would fit, which made me hurry in the end to have some time for Q&A, but nobody seems to have questions.
I myself didn't feel nervous after about slide #5.

Music and the dark 32c3 slide is gap filling by the brilliant Angel team over there. (At least these are: a livestream-overseer [kind of director], a video mixer [decides what to see/hear], two camera angels[each side of the stage], a microphne [sound] , four simultan translator [per language], a stage manager [timetracking for the speaker], a herald angel [introduces the speaker, kills time], sometimes subtitles, a internet angel [relays questions from livestream visitors] and differing trainee agels for all the above angels).
More info should be in the ccc wiki.

 

[pmprog]

Has it been posted to YouTube yet? The CCC site wants flash installed

Was this in one of the "Lightning Talks"? (There's a few of them in https://www.youtube.com/user/CCCen/videos).

 

[mclien]

No, it was a regular talk, which is now online:
https://media.ccc.de/search/?q=mclien
(the second one is an old one in german about something comletly different.)
BTW: it's downloadable from that source

mclien