Back to normal!


Sounds like the clear cases made at the original plastics firm in Athens might not be usable as real replacement cases even if they are sold on later. The original intent was to sell those to case modders and it sounds to me like that plan might be falling by the wayside to the mission to get a usable case.

I noticed the same. The whole cases story starts to get ridiculous. After endless back-and-forth discussions, ED decided to have those 500 clear ones produced by FormAction and then move the molds. News from Jul-22: "The molds for the cases are being moved AFTER UniquePlast comes back from holidays, and that is middle to end of August." Now it's middle of October, no clear cases, no moved molds, no explaination why. And now even the clear "final prototypes" seem to be not really useable.
 
I noticed the same. The whole cases story starts to get ridiculous. After endless back-and-forth discussions, ED decided to have those 500 clear ones produced by FormAction and then move the molds. News from Jul-22: "The molds for the cases are being moved AFTER UniquePlast comes back from holidays, and that is middle to end of August." Now it's middle of October, no clear cases, no moved molds, no explaination why. And now even the clear "final prototypes" seem to be not really useable.
Before you get all worked we don't know what Notaz was even given for a casing, it could have come from some of the samples prior to the 500 clear production run, which is what most developers got.
 
Talking about that, is there something 100% finish? Because ifair, nothing is REALLY 100% finish, only finished in theory but not "doable", due to little issue and/or third party issues.
 
@Xcl4m4t10n Talking about hardware - what's not finished? Well, testing isn't done, since software wasn't ready to enable proper testing, but unless testing uncovers design bugs, all HW could be considered done (design-wise). Or am I missing something?
And then it's just a matter of ordering, lead times, assembly, QM, and shipping, in't it.
 
Looks like Notaz has some issues with his unit, maybe its an older prototype -

Hi,

I think my latest unit is supposed to have all fixes, so I was
surprised to still have some of the fallowing issues. I though my old
unit was faulty, but now it looks some of the problems may be actual
design issues.

- the LCD is flickering at many brightness levels (same as older
unit). It depends on lighting conditions how much it disturbs, but I
can always see it and just can't stand it. There is no flickering on
full brightness, and it's almost invisible on the lowest levels, but
all others are unusable for me. FWIW I don't see flickering on any
brightness level on my pandoras.
- the wifi is extremely slow on my unit, tens of kB/s while the phone
does at least 1MB/s on the same router on the n (5GHz) band. On a
different b/g router it does 200-300kB/s and at least works (older
unit doesn't work at all there).
- the speakers make a disturbing loud crack while DE is loading (same
as older unit). No idea what's going on there, trying to play a boot
sound? I've turned down and muted everything in audio mixers and it
still does it. Ended up disabling everything audio related in dts just
to get rid of this.
- shoulder buttons are barely usable (tend to get stuck pressed)
- there are periodic sata errors in dmesg ("exception Emask 0x10 SAct
0x0 SErr 0x4040000 action 0xe frozen"), don't know what it means, and
I don't have anything connected
- still no signs of life from OTG port, but it's charging at least
- lid switch isn't working (old unit too)
- touchscreen is unusable on the edges. With dead nubs it makes some
UI elements inoperable
- (broken board?) nubs are never responding. On older board, they die
after some time (devices on the bus stop responding)
- (broken board?) noticeably draining the battery while off (older
unit doesn't do this)

confirmed fixes:
- USB squeek is gone
- write protect works on SD2 now
- wifi now works on b/g, but very slow on b/g/n
- keypad is a lot better


This is not looking good at all.
 
Thank god (or somebody or just well lets not go into this) that they're looking at that stuff, will only make the pyra better, worked for the pandora, I expect a lot of 'ironing' on the software side... It's good at this point to see what problems are hardware and which are software...
 
@ThinkPad I tried to hint at the journalistic quality of posting here just the conversation starting email, omitting its response and the response's response ...
It seems, my hint was too subtle.
 
Yeah, sorry, there is some discussion on this going on at the mailing list. Most of the issues are os related and being looked at.Looks like its a new untested unit.
 
@ThinkPad I tried to hint at the journalistic quality of posting here just the conversation starting email, omitting its response and the response's response ...
It seems, my hint was too subtle.

Your and the @TrashyMG subtle hints are looking more like damage control.
Hope i'm wrong. :)

no hard feelings.
 
Your and the @TrashyMG subtle hints are looking more like damage control.
Hope i'm wrong. :)

no hard feelings.

There are a bunch of responses (that I've read) in the newsgroup related to that post. Most issues were cleared up in subsequent replies to so don't worry about the apparent breadth of issues listed in that post.
 
Disabling the DLL function of the RAM chip makes the system run stable and without any freezes!

Normally the DLL (Delay-Locked Loop) should only be disabled to run RAM at very low clock speeds (for power saving).
Disabling the dynamic DDR RAM clock speed might also fix the issue.

That would explain why the RAM crashes when the device is idle and the RAM controller drops the memory clock.
It might be possible to turn DLL off before power save and re-enabling it when going back to full clock rate but it could be risky if that causes bus glitches during retraining/resync.

DDR RAM is always a pain to get stable.
 
@ThinkPad It is damage control. Just damage, that hasn't manifested yet and ahs no physical cause - i.e. purely informational.
 
Looks like Notaz has some issues with his unit, maybe its an older prototype -

Hi,

I think my latest unit is supposed to have all fixes, so I was
surprised to still have some of the fallowing issues. I though my old
unit was faulty, but now it looks some of the problems may be actual
design issues.

- the LCD is flickering at many brightness levels (same as older
unit). It depends on lighting conditions how much it disturbs, but I
can always see it and just can't stand it. There is no flickering on
full brightness, and it's almost invisible on the lowest levels, but
all others are unusable for me. FWIW I don't see flickering on any
brightness level on my pandoras.
- the wifi is extremely slow on my unit, tens of kB/s while the phone
does at least 1MB/s on the same router on the n (5GHz) band. On a
different b/g router it does 200-300kB/s and at least works (older
unit doesn't work at all there).
- the speakers make a disturbing loud crack while DE is loading (same
as older unit). No idea what's going on there, trying to play a boot
sound? I've turned down and muted everything in audio mixers and it
still does it. Ended up disabling everything audio related in dts just
to get rid of this.
- shoulder buttons are barely usable (tend to get stuck pressed)
- there are periodic sata errors in dmesg ("exception Emask 0x10 SAct
0x0 SErr 0x4040000 action 0xe frozen"), don't know what it means, and
I don't have anything connected
- still no signs of life from OTG port, but it's charging at least
- lid switch isn't working (old unit too)
- touchscreen is unusable on the edges. With dead nubs it makes some
UI elements inoperable
- (broken board?) nubs are never responding. On older board, they die
after some time (devices on the bus stop responding)
- (broken board?) noticeably draining the battery while off (older
unit doesn't do this)

confirmed fixes:
- USB squeek is gone
- write protect works on SD2 now
- wifi now works on b/g, but very slow on b/g/n
- keypad is a lot better

Ok this is super troubling...
 
Yep thats a big scary list, isn't it?

Now I see why big companies don't share their production prototype troubleshooting with consumers. Still looks pretty good to me.
 
Well, that's not really scary, and here's why:

- the LCD is flickering at many brightness levels (same as older
unit). It depends on lighting conditions how much it disturbs, but I
can always see it and just can't stand it. There is no flickering on
full brightness, and it's almost invisible on the lowest levels, but
all others are unusable for me. FWIW I don't see flickering on any
brightness level on my pandoras.

That's simply because the PWM is currently programmed to run at 82Hz, which flickers.
This is not a hardware issue but software, as the PWM can run up to 1MHz.

No one has yet worked on finding the perfect results.

- the wifi is extremely slow on my unit, tens of kB/s while the phone
does at least 1MB/s on the same router on the n (5GHz) band. On a
different b/g router it does 200-300kB/s and at least works (older
unit doesn't work at all there).

That's something that needs to be checked and confirmed. As we were busy getting the units to work without freezing, all the boards I have here (over 20) have not been tested yet.
Doing tests when the units freezes regularly is no fun ;)

- the speakers make a disturbing loud crack while DE is loading (same
as older unit). No idea what's going on there, trying to play a boot
sound? I've turned down and muted everything in audio mixers and it
still does it. Ended up disabling everything audio related in dts just
to get rid of this.

The audio driver doesn't work with the current kernel and needs to be fixed.
This is quite an annoying issue, and most probably the biggest thing we need to work on softwarewise right now.
Hardware is fine.

- shoulder buttons are barely usable (tend to get stuck pressed)

As mentioned multiple times if you followed the newsposts. They are still working on the shoulder buttons, but I don't expect them to be perfect until I actively work with the new company on them.
Pandoras shoulder buttons were the same, and we got them to work eventually in the Rebirth / Ghz units.

- there are periodic sata errors in dmesg ("exception Emask 0x10 SAct
0x0 SErr 0x4040000 action 0xe frozen"), don't know what it means, and
I don't have anything connected

No one has seen that yet, so it could be an issue with his board.

- still no signs of life from OTG port, but it's charging at least

OTG is working on Nikolaus unit, but it has been fixed recently, so it's very likely notaz doesn't have those fixes in his setup yet.

- lid switch isn't working (old unit too)

Probably magnet not strong enough. This is the first unit that has a magnet in the lid, but with the freezing units, I couldn't test them.
It can very well be that I simply need to source stronger magnets.

The switch itself works, as Nikolaus confirmed with his unit.

- touchscreen is unusable on the edges. With dead nubs it makes some
UI elements inoperable

The unit I've built for notaz has been built pretty fast, without any testing done (as he was leaving on a trip and wanted to take it with him).
The way it sounds like is that I accidentally grabbed one of the LCDs that I haven't approved for the production - as that was exactly the issue with them.
The ones I approved are working fine.

- (broken board?) nubs are never responding. On older board, they die
after some time (devices on the bus stop responding)
- (broken board?) noticeably draining the battery while off (older
unit doesn't do this)

That's certainly broken, as these are tested and working components.

Nikolaus has tested all the hardware and the design itself is fine.

Just as a reminder:

These prototype boards have MULTIPLE purposes.

1. They are needed to we can TEST if everything works well and then report back to GC, letting them know what's wrong. A high failure rate is normal for such production runs, as the reason you do that is to find out what can possibly go wrong when populating and then find fixes for them before you go into mass production.
Just a quck information (as most of you don't know this): The first production run of the 1GHz Pandora had a failure rate of around 29%! And basically the only thing that has changed compared to the previous version was the SoC! Later production runs went down to 2% failure rate.

2. Once the boards are fully tested and fixed, they go out to developers and the prototype-preorders so they can work on the remaining software stuff (like audio driver, making the desktop more usable on standard setup, etc.)
Except for some few people which do low-level stuff (like fixing the memory freezes!), thes boards won't be shipped before they have been fully tested. Thanks to the freezes, I couldn't test the mainboard notaz received, so some defects are nothing special but to be expected.

3. Now that the freezes are basically fixed, I can work on the tests, give feedback to GC, fix any boards that are broken and send the working units to devs / prototype preorders. This will take some time (I need to write the scripts to do the tests and then test all the boards), but it can be done now and couldn't be done as long as the unit I was working with froze every few minutes.

It's nothing new that there's still a lot of work to be done to the software, this has never been hidden. It can be seen on mailing lists and on the developer-website.
It's also nothing special that there are various priorities here. Fixing the freeze had a higher priority than testing the backlight flicker, especially as it was clear that this is not a hardware issue but needs to be setup properly using software.

The biggest issue were the freezes - as these held up all the testing and getting the units in the hands of developers. This was kind of a vicious circle.
And, of course, the case company, which is REEEALLY slow (which is also a reason we switch).

So, everything clear now?
[doublepost=1539619958,1539619835][/doublepost]
@Xcl4m4t10n Talking about hardware - what's not finished? Well, testing isn't done, since software wasn't ready to enable proper testing, but unless testing uncovers design bugs, all HW could be considered done (design-wise). Or am I missing something?
And then it's just a matter of ordering, lead times, assembly, QM, and shipping, in't it.

Yes, it's testing and tweaking the machine setup for mass production (but that's something GC does themselves based on our feedback on the mainboards, which I couldn't give them because of the missing tests).
Basically, there should be no known hardware issue left right now.
[doublepost=1539619996][/doublepost]
Before you get all worked we don't know what Notaz was even given for a casing, it could have come from some of the samples prior to the 500 clear production run, which is what most developers got.

Yep, exactly that. The one I still wasn't satisfied with.
[doublepost=1539620129][/doublepost]
I noticed the same. The whole cases story starts to get ridiculous. After endless back-and-forth discussions, ED decided to have those 500 clear ones produced by FormAction and then move the molds. News from Jul-22: "The molds for the cases are being moved AFTER UniquePlast comes back from holidays, and that is middle to end of August." Now it's middle of October, no clear cases, no moved molds, no explaination why. And now even the clear "final prototypes" seem to be not really useable.

Explanation? FormAction was still tweaking the shoulder buttons (I even mentioned that) and they're still incredibly slow.
Both are reasons I want to switch to UniquePlast, I guess you can now understand why.

The clear cases ARE usable. Even if the shoulder buttons aren't working perfectly from the beginning, they can be made to work with some knife.
Even thr final Pandora cases needed manual fixes on the shoulder buttons to make them work properly.
 
Edit: Seems I was a little slow in posting this and most of the points I made have already been made by more informed people.

Looks like Notaz has some issues with his unit, maybe its an older prototype -

Please see the reponses to notaz's post which I think had been posted by the time your post went up.

Notaz wrote:
Hi,

I think my latest unit is supposed to have all fixes, so I was
surprised to still have some of the fallowing issues. I though my old
unit was faulty, but now it looks some of the problems may be actual
design issues.

- the LCD is flickering at many brightness levels (same as older
unit). It depends on lighting conditions how much it disturbs, but I
can always see it and just can't stand it. There is no flickering on
full brightness, and it's almost invisible on the lowest levels, but
all others are unusable for me. FWIW I don't see flickering on any
brightness level on my pandoras.
Needs configuring. Currently it's a known issue, because ED and now Notaz can see it, but hns can't.
- the wifi is extremely slow on my unit, tens of kB/s while the phone
does at least 1MB/s on the same router on the n (5GHz) band. On a
different b/g router it does 200-300kB/s and at least works (older
unit doesn't work at all there).
- the speakers make a disturbing loud crack while DE is loading (same
as older unit). No idea what's going on there, trying to play a boot
sound? I've turned down and muted everything in audio mixers and it
still does it. Ended up disabling everything audio related in dts just
to get rid of this.
AtC's unit doesn't have sound so he never noticed this. Can now be fixed.
- shoulder buttons are barely usable (tend to get stuck pressed)
Clear plastics are shoddy as I already reported.
- there are periodic sata errors in dmesg ("exception Emask 0x10 SAct
0x0 SErr 0x4040000 action 0xe frozen"), don't know what it means, and
I don't have anything connected
- still no signs of life from OTG port, but it's charging at least
- lid switch isn't working (old unit too)
- touchscreen is unusable on the edges. With dead nubs it makes some
UI elements inoperable
- (broken board?) nubs are never responding. On older board, they die
after some time (devices on the bus stop responding)
- (broken board?) noticeably draining the battery while off (older
unit doesn't do this)
All under investigation.

It's a little disappointing that we're still at this point, but at least we now have people testing that can actually test this stuff. The rate of software fixes does seem to have picked up in the last couple of months too.
 
2. Once the boards are fully tested and fixed, they go out to developers and the prototype-preorders

Curiosity only - how many boards, how many developers and how many remaining prototype-preorders?
 
As mentioned multiple times if you followed the newsposts. They are still working on the shoulder buttons, but I don't expect them to be perfect until I actively work with the new company on them.
Pandoras shoulder buttons were the same, and we got them to work eventually in the Rebirth / Ghz units.
Let's hope it does not take till an "Rebirth Pyra" this time until the shoulder buttons are working perfeclty. ;) Besides, it sounded like this part of the Pyra was actualy finalized a while ago. They tinkered ages on these shoulder buttons, longer at least then I did when I made the first 3D concept renderings for. XD
Try some silcone oil by the way, should solve most issues with stuck parts like this.
 
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