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Moving this discussion from here.
Grench: I think you're overestimating the size of a smartphone mainboard. See ifixit's teardown of the HTC one - a phone similar in size and shape to the one I linked above. It's quite tiny, and unlike a RPi, it is designed from the beginning to be in a mobile device. The mainboard and display of any modern cellphone would fit easily into the lid of the pandora. Hell, my sony Z3 - with its 2-day battery and all - is thinner than the pandora's lid. You would need to have the lid shaped specifically to support the display/board, but volume-wise, there's more than enough room for it.
Yes, the pyra is a general-purpose computer. So is any modern smartphone. A phone may have had all its peripherals removed, but it's still a computer. Everything the pyra has that a phone doesn't have are merely accessories, and those can all be added back. If you want entirely bespoke game controls, you can have them. You need to make a custom lower PCB anyway, so do it up however you wish. Personally I don't think the QWERTY keypad needs to be custom, but it still can be if that's a sticking point. Simply not having to design, test, and manufacture a 10-layer PCB mainboard will save a heck of a lot of time and money all by itself.
It's like saying the analogy is that you want a wooden chair with a cupholder in it and you have to pay thousands to get it hand made. You don't really care about getting a hand made chair, you just want this one modification. And you wish the other companies would make a chair like that because they're already doing the other 90% of the work to make it and they know how to/have access to methods for making cheap chairs.
What if there was a company that bought off-the-shelf chairs and glued off-the-shelf cupholders onto them? Anybody who is paying attention can see how much work is involved in making the pyra. They're engineering this thing from scratch, and that's no small feat. A lot of the cost of the project-as-a-whole comes from designing, testing, prototyping, re-prototyping, and setting up manufacturing for what will end up being a relatively a small run of finished products. What if instead of completely reinventing the wheel, you find something that's already 90% circular and just round off the edges?
However the hell they're doing it, there are any number of no-name chinese factories pumping out decent-spec smartphones for practically nothing. Here's a phone with a 5" 720p display, MT6735 SoC (64bit A53 w/ mali t720), 2GB RAM, and 16GB flash for all of $122. They've already designed, tested, and tooled up to build the system board. They've already sourced the components and are manufacturing these in (presumably) decent quantities. Why can't you just call up Mr. DOOGEE and say "I'd like to place an order for 2000 of your finest Valencia2 Y100 Pro phones please - do you think you can cut me a break on the price if I don't need the frame, glass, battery, back cover, packaging, or accessories?" I'm not an expert, but I suspect the answer is "Absolutely!"
Now obviously have no idea how conducive this particular SoC would be to a pyra-like project, but out of the hundreds of cheap chinese phones out there, somebody has to be already making something suitable. Asus and lenovo are both making inexpensive intel atom-based smartphones - if you could rope one of them into this kind of deal, imagine what you could do with an x86 SoC that is well documented and already has linux support. That's a good chunk of your development and manufacturing work already sorted.
What about the rest of it though? I admit you're going to have to make the case and lower PCB from scratch, but there's still room to be clever. With the brains of the system up in the lid behind the display, your lower PCB will likely only need 2 layers - much easier to design and cheaper to make. Some parts can still be outsourced. Instead of making your own QWERTY keymat/keycaps, buy a bunch from whoever makes this thing - if they can sell the whole deal for $27, the keypad can't cost more than a dollar or two. Maybe you can find a cheap gamepad with decent buttons/dpad and buy those as well. Anything you can buy pre-made will cost less than designing and making it yourself.
I have to think that a franken-pyra would be cheaper and faster to make than the ground-up approach. I'm almost afraid to guess how much cheaper, because there are a lot of variables that I can't make educated guesses about. But certainly it would be cheaper. If only I had a few hundred grand lying around and some reliable Chinese manufacturing partners...
I know this is getting borderline offtopic, but this concept has been stuck in my head for the last couple weeks.
Now obviously have no idea how conducive this particular SoC would be to a pyra-like project, but out of the hundreds of cheap chinese phones out there, somebody has to be already making something suitable.
You can't 'frankenphone' anything on the market to something that meets Pyra design specs. Just one example: None of them have Dual-SD slots.
Klapse: Assuming the donor phone has OTG, additional SD slots (and whatever else you want) are easily added by way of a hub controller on the lower PCB.Actually - to meet the Pyra spec, it would need to be tripple SD slots. But, you have the right idea.Now obviously have no idea how conducive this particular SoC would be to a pyra-like project, but out of the hundreds of cheap chinese phones out there, somebody has to be already making something suitable.
You can't 'frankenphone' anything on the market to something that meets Pyra design specs. Just one example: None of them have Dual-SD slots.
A Raspberry Pi is a pretty small motherboard - not far from cell phone sized. In order to 'make it portable' using off the shelf components, the resulting franken-portable-pi winds up being the size of a 1980s laptop. Use of off-the-shelf components that were not designed to fit together both snug & perfect will by default result in a device that is, "larger than it absolutely must be".
Remember that a primary constraint on the Pyra's design is that it MUST fit in a pocket. The current Pandora and Pyra designs are already at the stretched limit of that primary constraint. THAT is why everything MUST be custom created. There are no 'off the shelf' components that perfectly fit the design constraints.
Combine that size constraint with needing two analog controllers, a VERY nice game pad, two shoulder buttons, a full-on PC capable multi-lingual keyboard, high quality speakers, ports out the wazoo, wireless, high resolution screen, clam shell design so it is self-protecting, etc all crammed inside that limited space constraint and you have a Pyra. A unique design that should not be compared to cheap Chinese cell phones.
The Pyra isn't a phone. It is a multi-function general purpose clam shell Linux Debian computer with high quality gaming controls, audiophile sound, wireless networking, more connection ports than many current laptops which, by the way, still fits in a front pants pocket. Anyone who tries to compare the Pyra to a phone simply doesn't get it.
Grench: I think you're overestimating the size of a smartphone mainboard. See ifixit's teardown of the HTC one - a phone similar in size and shape to the one I linked above. It's quite tiny, and unlike a RPi, it is designed from the beginning to be in a mobile device. The mainboard and display of any modern cellphone would fit easily into the lid of the pandora. Hell, my sony Z3 - with its 2-day battery and all - is thinner than the pandora's lid. You would need to have the lid shaped specifically to support the display/board, but volume-wise, there's more than enough room for it.
Yes, the pyra is a general-purpose computer. So is any modern smartphone. A phone may have had all its peripherals removed, but it's still a computer. Everything the pyra has that a phone doesn't have are merely accessories, and those can all be added back. If you want entirely bespoke game controls, you can have them. You need to make a custom lower PCB anyway, so do it up however you wish. Personally I don't think the QWERTY keypad needs to be custom, but it still can be if that's a sticking point. Simply not having to design, test, and manufacture a 10-layer PCB mainboard will save a heck of a lot of time and money all by itself.
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