Bought an defective Pandora, need help

[lunavorax]

Hello,

A few months ago, I bought a defective Pandora from Craig.

I received an email telling me he was selling a "100% Fully working refurbished unit (new silver case, LCD cable, extra battery and carry case while stocks last)" for £120.

I was completely unaware of all the scandals behind Craig and I was happy to finally get my hands on an affordable (theses things are insanely expensive) Pandora.

The Pandora arrived and it quickly suffered from different diffects. Right joysick doesn't work well, the device is incapable of booting GNU/Linux 3.x and the keys P/4/R/X/D are going insane at some point.

You know the rest of the story, we exanched a lot of emails with Craig. He told me the units were working perfectly. At some point he told me that he sent a new functionnal board and that I had to send him my defective board back. Of course I'm still waiting for the new board and he stopped answering my emails.

I've emailed Michael Mrozek to seek for some help, he told me that my troubles sounded like "some soldering issues below the BGA which changes when the system gets a bit warmer".

So now that I have a device that can't have an up-to-date OS and has keyboard keys that triggers all by their own ('P' is especially annoying because it means "Pause" in a lot of games), I have the following questions.

1/ Is this soldering issue can be "fixed" by reflowing the circuit? Or is it not worth a try?

2/ How can I deactivate the P/4/R/X/D keys?

3/ How did theses deffective units got to Craig or any reseller?

4/ Why was Craig a reseller? Was it official business?

 

[TrashyMG]

3/ How did theses deffective units got to Craig or any reseller?

4/ Why was Craig a reseller? Was it official business?

Well Craig and Micheal and a few others started the OpenPandora Project together and Craig actually was in charge of production before Michael (EvilDragon) took it over and moved it to Germany and did a much better job of it. Any units Craig had was most likely left over from then.

 

[Binky]

I have a device that can't have an up-to-date OS

 

Did you ever get a technical explanation as to how this works?

It seems like an odd sort of failure

 

[comradekingu]

First follow every advice here http://pandorawiki.org/Openpandora_Ltd#How_to_get_refunds

and keep us updated.

 

[mcobit]

The product should be under warranty if you bought it as fully working.


Try to find out if Craig really sent the new board and if not and he cannot prove it try to get a repair or refund from him.


If that doesn't work, sue him. He was definately an official seller and if he says the unit is fully working he has to get you one that does work.

 

[lunavorax]

It doesn't seem to be clear to a lot of people that I'm actually stuck with this device and I'm looking for technical help, nothing else.

And to be honnest, I'm starting to wonder if my Pandora wouldn't be more useful as a doorstep than anything else (actually, I'm sure it would break into pieces fairly easily as a doorstep).

The product should be under warranty if you bought it as fully working.
Try to find out if Craig really sent the new board and if not and he cannot prove it try to get a repair or refund from him.

If that doesn't work, sue him. He was definately an official seller and if he says the unit is fully working he has to get you one that does work.

I'm a college student, if I had enough money to sue him, I would have never bought an old and cheap Pandora in the first place.

Also, it's fairly easy to tell that Craig messed up in his lying process because he sent me the following message on 15 Nov. 2013 04:54

I'll have to send you a new board, can you also return the old one when you get the new one?

And replies, only 29h later

Has it arrived yet? It should arrive any day now.

Even if I was living in the same city that wouldn't make sense. But in that case, we don't even live in the same country.

Not to mention that it was the last message he ever sent me.

I have the feeling he wanted to get rid of me as quickly as possible.

First follow every advice here http://pandorawiki.org/Openpandora_Ltd#How_to_get_refunds

and keep us updated.

This doesn't apply to me, as I bought the OpenPandora by directly sending money via Paypal without a Paypal account.

 

[WizardStan]

You may be able to find a shop that can do reflow for a price but bga soldering is not generally something you can fix yourself at home.

Disabling the keys might be as easy as opening the case and just putting a piece of electrical tape over the contact. I don't know if there's any way of disabling them completely in software other than recompiling the kernel module. You should be able to remap them with xmodmap, but that won't work on all games; it's worth a try at least.

 

[lunavorax]

You may be able to find a shop that can do reflow for a price but bga soldering is not generally something you can fix yourself at home.

Will reflow work in that case or is it just a "last hope" try (meaning that I have chances to have a completely broken piece of hardware)?

 

[WizardStan]

It is a "last hope", but from the sounds of it that's what you're down to. Maybe you can do an upgrade. Maybe you don't want to spend more money but it sounds like Craig gave you an especially shitty deal and you don't have very many options.

In the perfect world you'd just go back to Craig and he'd be honest and replace the board properly but no one has been able to contact Craig for months, possibly a year now.

 

[rohezal]

If anythings fails (I hope it will not) , maybe you could use the Pandora as a mini server. SD cards are cheap and if the wlan if buggy you could get a wifi dongle. With an usb hub and an external hdd maybe even a big fileserver which almosts needs no power and can be accessed via owncloud from everywhere.

 

[GeBeCluck23]

Not sure if it's too late to mention this, but I too got a cheap Pandora from Craig a while back, and it too had a few problems. (I was aware it had problems, however it also had some I wasn't aware of.) Anyways, it wouldn't update to the latest firmware either, seems to be a problem with his. Anyways, I haven't used it much these days, but I've had success booting an OS from the SD Card directly. Unfortunately, it still wasn't able to update to the most recent firmware, but booting from SD allowed it to be much more updated than without. (As a matter of fact, if I boot it WITHOUT the SD Card in, it will still go to the lower firmware, haha.)

 

[levi]

What do you mean by 'still wasn't able to update to the most recent firmware'? You should always be able to copy the most recent firmware to the SD card (using another computer, probably) and run the latest firmware that way, unless it crashes on your system for some reason.


Taking the SD card out and it booting the old OS is perfectly normal by the way. If you're booting from an SD card (not to be confused with using an SD card to reflash the internal NAND flash, for the record), then the NAND OS is not touched and will still boot if it doesn't find an autoboot.txt to boot from on the SD cards.


But yeah, good advice that the system can boot from SD card if you're having troubles with your NAND, or just want to try out a newer OS without touching anything else inside your Pandora (though for those of us without Craig's dodgy refurbs, updating is pretty low risk, so not really worth the fuss).