A daily report from the Rebirth


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Any Chance once you perfect your design that you would upload it for those of use with 3d mills ;)
It's not my design, just took the now-offline 3d model. Size isn't correct so the only usable part is the stylus.


Link went alone at the office today 'cause i'm staying in bed now, sick from yesterday's drinks :/. Headache, stomach upside down etc.


Hope i can go in a few hours.
 
I don't know how long Linux-SWAT will be staying in Ingolstadt, but I'm wondering if it'd be possible to have him bring back Pandoras for us Parisian pre-orderers (at least for me ;) ).


I pre-ordered from Craig but I'd rather have my Pandora come directly from Germany to me than from Germany to England to me with an unreliable and slow air mail.
 
Alive and NOT kicking.


I have to return to Paris the 22 or 23.


I may come back in Ingolstadt around 26 or 27.


I'm sad i will not see the Global Components first mass prod run TT.
 
I don't know how long Linux-SWAT will be staying in Ingolstadt, but I'm wondering if it'd be possible to have him bring back Pandoras for us Parisian pre-orderers (at least for me ;) ).


I pre-ordered from Craig but I'd rather have my Pandora come directly from Germany to me than from Germany to England to me with an unreliable and slow air mail.

Can't answer to this as i'm not part of the business.


I haven't many space left in my bag so can't take a lot :) .
 
My update for today:


Well, to start I was alone for most of the day working on lids from a little past 11 until 15:30. My speed wasn't quite as fast as yesterday, but I think the quality was definetly much better. I'm learning that the Chinese are sabotaging some of my quality with some locking pegs near the LCD exit cable once the lid is being snapped together. Sometimes these pegs can be bigger than they are supposed to, which in turn create a small gap between the two pieces of plastic being pushed together. Its quite frustrating, but now after 3 days of working on them, this is another thing that I must keep an eye out for, and if it is too big, it can be cut off anyway with no harm to the assembly overall. Part of me wonders if some of these small pegs and so forth might be causing the cracks that occur around the lid for some people, and obviously, they create unevenness which was a complaint from early adopters. Hopefully the newer case design will modify some of these areas to support them better etc.


Let's just say this community, putting these things together is NO EASY TASK. From beginning to end, a worker should be able to assemble a Pandora from button, to keymat, to LCD lid, etc in about 15 minutes. The work we are doing now is to cut down this time once population of the PCBs starts happening next week. So basically we'll be able to drop in a fresh off the P&P PCB, finish assembly, and test the units.


The reason I mention this is not easy as today was my third day working on lids, and my hands were sore last night, sore this morning, and as the afternoon progressed, there was some strange sensations setting in from the amount of pressure I was using to snap the area around the wi-fi antenna in place, another area where a bulge can occur due to the unseating or miscutting of the wi-fi antenna.


Assembling the lid for me starts by securing the peg/hinge area where the LCD & wi-fi cable exit the lid, then immediately moving to the wi-fi antenna housing area. Should someone for the 2nd step not do this, the wi-fi antenna can easily joggle out of its area of housing and create a bulge or unevenness in that area, a lesson I learned late in the day on day 1 of lid work. This was quite frustrating as the lid is totally snapped together, and then it needs to be taken apart. EvilDragon pointed this out to me, but it took me many failures to ask him what I was doing wrong. Pretty frustrating, and hard on the hands. So today I learned about this bastard of a little peg that can be too big, which is also valuable to know.


Since my hands hurt, ED said its a good idea to mix things up a bit because you get tired and complacent with doing the same thing over and over again, so we started assembling lids into the keyboard/PCB housing. Again, NOT AN EASY TASK. the wi-fi antenna slides through like a snake, but the LCD cable is a challenge as it shouldn't be pushed together unless the cable is all the way through the slot and moving freely. If this doesn't happen, the cable can be trashed due to being stuck opposite of the hinge between the lid assembly and keymat housing. There's a learning curve here that needs to be overcome, and over time, confidence improves, and efficiency. I think by the days end, we had 64 ready for buttons, light pipes, and keymats/D-Pads tomorrow. Linux-SWAT has pics of course as he arrived just in time.


Tomorrow I'm going to attempt to video tape these two processes with my GoPro, perhaps with the chestmount, or maybe the suction cup will be OK too. I'll make two separate videos on this. Give me the weekend to do some editing.


Another highlight of today was I broke down and bought a plane ticket to stay an extra week to see the ReBirth late next week. Boards shipped yesterday from China, and Global Components is doing some work ahead of time on some boards sent in advance for calibration and populating the one side of the board. Sorry ED if I'm giving your good news here. So I get to stay an extra 8 days to witness the rebirth fo-reals. :D


That's all I've got for today. Thanks for the support from everyone viewing these updates.
 
Finally went to the office just for 2 hours. I continued to feel bad so i didn't helped much apart taking photographs.


Another tricky stage, because we again have to manipulate the lcd cable. ED is so fast it's embarrassing ^^.


As Link just mentioned, it's not a job that can be done blindly and i totally understand why not-so-good first generation lcd cables has caused so much trouble.


Then they went to a pizzeria with ED's girlfriend while i took a walk to fight my remaining headache and clean my blood.


It's kinda carnival here. Pretty girls everywhere :) .


I dislike flash so some pictures are a bit dark, sry for that.

Link went alone at the office today 'cause i'm staying in bed now, sick from yesterday's drinks :/. Headache, stomach upside down etc.


Hope i can go in a few hours.
This is a thread of pure joy. I like.
Wow, that's harsh man :p
^^

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I just love you guys. After a small sleepy period, I return to the scene to find this amazing thread .. go, guys, go!!!
 
Just got back from the hockey match, Ingolstadt won 6-4, and they were ahead 6-1 at the end of the 2nd period. Worked on some more lids today and we got buttons, keymats, and light pipes into 64. Linux-SWAT was working on 130 units in which we have LCD/lid assembly into the keymat housing, just need to finish droppping buttons, light pipes, in those on Monday. My lid assembly and LCD work is improving still. Video of that to follow soon, and it meets EvilDragon's time standard of 3:00 minutes. I was happy to see that when I reviewed it, I'll try and work on that tomorrow.
 
As requested, picture of the team here :





More pix tomorrow 'cause ZzzZzzZzz ^^.
 
Yesterday was a nice day. I had my own personal rebirth ^^ and we doubled our workspace size, adding another room + table to the mass production effort.


I trashed a lcd cable while putting together the scren and the keyboard parts on the second unit, and it was quite a positive experience as i totally saw and understood what i was doing wrong. Now i can even assemble while standing up, something ED himself admits to be difficult ^^.


Link also mastered the lcd/screen process so the workflow should be really smooth in the next days.


Not having the populated motherboards yet isn't even as frustrating as before :) .


We finally made the team photo as a Craig tribute.


Too bad he isn't here, i'm sure we woulda have great moments ^^.


Then we were invited at a hockey match by ED, as VIP 'cause as he and his team are the video and sound guys of the Saturn Arena, the 9 years old Ingolstadt hockey stadium.


Being a VIP is cool. We had access to free food, free drinks (no alcohol - i really wonder why), and probably the best spot to see the match.


We saw a great one. The home team is good, they've quickly spanked a little disbanded Koln team.


Supporters here are great, all ages, making a lot of noise.


Weren't that much people partying out, probably because of the hangover. Today night should be great.

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Yesterday was saturday. Was about sleep, food, sleep, Pandora and sleep.


I tried to work a bit on the Slackware port, but was mostly reading a week of slashdot news, OP boards, game sites, usual geek browsing ^^.


Arm Slackware-current is now rebuild for armv5 instead of v4. 13.37 is already fast so i have high hopes for it.


I now have to figure out why some pnd doesn't run as user, and why some other doesn't run at all :D . I also have to put my nose in the firmware git repo in order to understand how to compile the 3d driver. Previous attempts failed miserably.


New firmware rocks. I wish i could help kernel development, but i'm no dev.

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I am happy you're documenting what a nightmare building these is, if you get the jobs spread out just right 3 people can build, test and pack 60 Pandoras in 8 hours.


That includes the copper tape which you don't have to do with the new LCD cable so maybe a few more is possible.


I'm in Europe at the end of March so I might see Ed then.
 
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