As a home computer

[GiraffeeDreams]

Ive been waiting for tv out cables for a while with my iCP and a USB keyboard and mouse to use the Pandora as a home computer as much as a handheld, then I wondered if there would be any way to get the OS running on a pc tower? So I could take the SD card from the Pandora into the computer and continue playing PicoDrive or whatever on the big screen, maybe with internal HDD support so I could move my larger ROMs from tower to pandora?


Probably be shot down but I like the idea, maybe the Raspberry Pi?

 

[Grench]

Actually - that has some merit.


CraigIX had talked about using current Pandora motherboard hardware as a set top box.


The biggest obstacle I see to that is to make a converter/cable/plug to take the LCD output to an HDMI output for the TV.


Otherwise, a bluetooth keyboard/mouse covers the from-couch typing requirement.

 

[Pickle]

The biggest obstacle I see to that is to make a converter/cable/plug to take the LCD output to an HDMI output for the TV.

you wouldnt, the board would need to be redesigned to include the native hdmi connection.


I dont see this happening with pandora 1 with the way production has gone, I think when craig had this thought he was assuming he be able to crank out as many boards as needed. If it did happen I could only see it being supported though the tv out.


If theres a pandora 2 it should drop the old rca tv out and include a mini hdmi connection.

 

[Mr_Loon]

Not sure about the suitability of using the pandora as a desktop PC replacement as video out is pretty low resolution i.e. Pal /NTSC. This would be fine for classic gaming of course but browsing the net or word processing might be a bit of a struggle.


As for running the Pandora OS on a PC tower then it would have to be an ARM system to start with & I'd imagine some serious tweaking would have to be made to the OS to get it running on something as superficially similar to the Pandora as a beagle board.

 

[Binky]

An arm-based minipc/console with built-in retrode would be awesome


IIRC the current SOC has a digital and an analogue video output - the digital is connected to the screen in a pandora - Newer SOCs have dual digital video outputs

 

[Exophase]

you wouldnt, the board would need to be redesigned to include the native hdmi connection.
I dont see this happening with pandora 1 with the way production has gone, I think when craig had this thought he was assuming he be able to crank out as many boards as needed. If it did happen I could only see it being supported though the tv out.


If theres a pandora 2 it should drop the old rca tv out and include a mini hdmi connection.

It could be possible to interface a relatively cheap HDMI encoder daughter board with the LCD connection on the current Pandora board. If you're willing to drop the LCD, of course.

 

[ckblackm]

Wouldn't a beagleboard basically do this? Or maybe the Rasberry PI?

 

[Exophase]

Wouldn't a beagleboard basically do this? Or maybe the Rasberry PI?

You could spend all day thinking of set-top devices that'd be cheaper than Pandora, or even cheaper than a set-top only Pandora board would be.. None of them would have the Pandora software verbatim but I really doubt this ever had enough pull on its own to make such a thing sell.

 

[Pickle]

you wouldnt, the board would need to be redesigned to include the native hdmi connection.
I dont see this happening with pandora 1 with the way production has gone, I think when craig had this thought he was assuming he be able to crank out as many boards as needed. If it did happen I could only see it being supported though the tv out.


If theres a pandora 2 it should drop the old rca tv out and include a mini hdmi connection.

It could be possible to interface a relatively cheap HDMI encoder daughter board with the LCD connection on the current Pandora board. If you're willing to drop the LCD, of course.

Yeah sure, but i think it would be pretty bad since the omap was supposed to support HDMI directly right.

 

[Exophase]

Yeah sure, but i think it would be pretty bad since the omap was supposed to support HDMI directly right.

No, OMAP3 doesn't support HDMI directly, you need the encoder chip no matter what.

 

[lunixbochs]

QEMU has the "dgles2" passthrough for hardware video acceleration of emulated mobile devices. You could feasibly create a Pandora emulator for the desktop, though I don't know how CPU performance will compare.


MeeGo has a QEMU-based emulator for it in the SDK, and it's a similar setup.


The Raspberry PI is only ARMv6, while the Pandora is ARMv7, so Pandora binaries aren't guaranteed to be compatible there.

 

[Pickle]

Yeah sure, but i think it would be pretty bad since the omap was supposed to support HDMI directly right.

No, OMAP3 doesn't support HDMI directly, you need the encoder chip no matter what.

I forgot that, i was thinking Mweston gave cost as the reason it was left out.

 

[Exophase]

I forgot that, i was thinking Mweston gave cost as the reason it was left out.

OMAP3 has one digital video output. Pandora needs it for the LCD. A theoretical LCD-less Pandora like the set-top concept Craig mentioned would probably bring the LCD connection out to some other digital encoder/connector.

 

[Pickle]

Are you aware if the newer soc's are supporting multiple outputs directly meaning hdmi and lcd are indepenant or using some kind of mux output?

 

[Exophase]

Are you aware if the newer soc's are supporting multiple outputs directly meaning hdmi and lcd are indepenant or using some kind of mux output?

There are SoCs newer than OMAP3 with multiple digital outputs, including OMAP4. It's probably a pretty standard feature. Integrated HDMI is getting standard too. A lot of mobile devices have screens and HDMI out these days.

 

[GiraffeeDreams]

Would the raspberry Pi have any chance of working?

 

[Nardella]

Well couldn't you use HDMI with the LCD turned off?

 

[Binky]

Well couldn't you use HDMI with the LCD turned off?

Surely you'd have to disconnect the lcd as well...

 

[Prometheus]

Would the raspberry Pi have any chance of working?

As lunixbochs mentions above, the CPU of the Pandora and the Raspberry Pi are of different generations - the RPi is ARMv6 (ARM11, confusingly ), and the Pandora is ARMv7 (Cortex-A8).


I know that ARM CPUs often tend to have backwards compatibility, but forwards compatibility I'm not so sure about.

 

[kojack]

Something like the Pandaboard would work well for an arm based desktop. It's got dual core cortex a9, 1GB of ram, hdmi and dvi, usb, ethernet, runs ubuntu 12.04 and android ics, etc.


Although be careful, I got the pandaboard es model (faster cpus, more features) but there's still hardly any driver support for it's different cpu speed and power management. Everything is for the older non es model.


(I can run ubuntu 12.04 easily, but with no 3d gfx, video or other hardware, until ti finish the new drivers)