Current State of the Pyra

[EvilDragon]

Great! That should make assembly much easier for you! Is it the Quectel EG25-G?

No, the PLS83W, as it's even pin-compatible

 

[docbroke]

This https://www.thalesgroup.com/en/mark...ot-connectivity/products/iot-products/pls83-w

Looks nice.

 

[Magic Sam]

Hi all,

Any news regarding the audio issues ? I tried to set the output volume down to ~50% but to no avail.

As soon as I start playing Serious Sam Second Encounter for example, audio issues kick in (loud static noise).

Exiting the game is the only way I found to make it stop.

Am I doing something wrong ?

Cheers, Magic Sam

 

[Bosbeetle]

One thing I noticed that after moving to f2fs audio problems also became less, using exfat cards gave some irrepreducible behaviour, also made some games not start or seem slow.

 

[Magic Sam]

@Bosbeetle : I've been using F2FS on both SD cards since day one, but thanks anyway for the suggestion

Cheers, Magic Sam

 

[levi]

Any news regarding the audio issues ? I tried to set the output volume down to ~50% but to no avail.

Have you also muted the microphone inputs in alsamixer? I wonder also, how you set the game volume to 50%; is there a system app that sets some volume on some system or other, or did you use pavucontol or alsamixer for that?

 

[EvilDragon]

Muting doesn't help, only disabling. to my knowledge, no one is actively working on the audio driver at the moment, everyone is welcome to help out

 

[Magic Sam]

@EvilDragon : could you please tell me how to disable microphone input (I only found the mute check box in the sound preferences) ?

Nevermind @EvilDragon , I managed to disable microphone input with alsamixer

I'm afraid I don't have the technical skills required to work on the audio driver. Are there any other tasks in need of a system administrator ? I can write Bash scripts, and simple Python scripts too (not object oriented).

I'm willing to do my fair share of work, this is why I pre-pre-ordered

Cheers, Magic Sam

 

[Magic Sam]

Have you also muted the microphone inputs in alsamixer? I wonder also, how you set the game volume to 50%; is there a system app that sets some volume on some system or other, or did you use pavucontol or alsamixer for that?

I just left clicked on the speakers icon in the Mate taskbar, and lowered the output volume to ~50%. Alsamixer on the CLI reports the volume is down to 49%.

Cheers, Magic Sam

 

[Magic Sam]

Hi all,

Looks like the poor battery performance and the overheating issue (at least on my unit) are somehow related. I believe the system is drawing too much juice out of the battery, causing it to heat up.

Is my assumption correct-ish ?

Cheers, Magic Sam

 

[EvilDragon]

Nevermind @EvilDragon , I managed to disable microphone input with alsamixer

As mentioned before: this does not disable the audio stream for the microphone but only mutes it. This can improve things but not fix them.
Disabling the audio stream is only possible by poking a register of the Palmas Chip directly at the moment.

 

[EvilDragon]

eating issue (at least on my unit) are somehow related. I believe the system is drawing too much juice out of the battery, causing it to heat up.
Is my assumption correct-ish ?

Well, it could be that something is defective on your unit drawing more Power than it should.

You could try to let the unit sit around for an hour doing nothing (with keyboard brightness disabled and screen to lowest brightness so we have the same comparison base) to see how much the battery goes down during that time period.

Also, you can run htop to see if there's a suspicious program / task running that hogs the CPU.
(just don't run htop while doing the battery consumption test, as htop itself needs CPU time as well, so the comparison would be off)

 

[levi]

Plain old top only updates every three seconds rather than every second like htop does. It still uses some power, but a lot less.

If you want something that uses even less power then I suppose you could so something like: 'while true; do ps -ef --sort %cpu; sleep 10; done'. In fact if it's something regular then just doing the one 'ps -ef --sort cputime' might well show it

 

[wismerhill]

Plain old top only updates every three seconds rather than every second like htop does. It still uses some power, but a lot less.

htop has a -d (--delay) option which allows you to tell how frequently you want it to update (see manpage for details).

 

[levi]

Yeah, htop's -d takes a number of tenths of a second to be it's update time. Top similarly has a -d option but the resolution of that argument is in seconds. But on my system, top with -d 3 uses 1% of CPU on average while htop with -d 30 uses 3.2%.

 

[docbroke]

Try this script, it displays process using max cpu and max memory, every 3 second.

#!/bin/sh

cpu_sym=' '
mem_sym=' '
empty=

while :; do
    /bin/ps -eo %cpu,%mem,cmd \
    | awk -v prefix="$prefix" -v cpu_sym="$cpu_sym" -v mem_sym="$mem_sym" -v empty="$empty" '
        BEGIN { cpu_max = 1; mem_max = 1; }
        $1 > cpu_max { cpu_cmd = $3; cpu_max = $1; }
        $2 > mem_max { mem_cmd = $3; mem_max = $2; }
        END {
            print prefix cpu_sym, cpu_cmd, cpu_max, mem_sym, mem_cmd, mem_max
        }
    '
    sleep 3
done

Note: symbols used are from nerd fonts, if they are not displayed, you may need to use nerd font as your terminal font https://www.nerdfonts.com/

 

[Magic Sam]

Hi all,

@EvilDragon : OK I'll test my unit and report here ASAP.

EDIT: I charged the battery up to 72%, disabled the keyboard backlight and lowered the screen brightness to the lowest setting.

A simple Bash script is running in the background:

#!/bin/bash
while true ; do echo `date` ; sleep 60 ; done

./test.sh >> test.out 2>&1 &

This way we should have a rough estimate of how long the battery lasted.

Cheers, Magic Sam

 

[levi]

Yeah, maybe add a 'sync' call in that while loop, to ensure as much is written out to disc as possible?

 

[Magic Sam]

Hi all,

@EvilDragon : the results are in

First entry in test.out: Mon 6 Dec 17:34:57 CET 2021

Last entry: Tue 7 Dec 01:40:07 CET 2021

So the Pyra, sitting idle on the floor, went calmly from 72% to shutdown time in about 8 hours. If I'm not mistaken, Debian on the Pyra won't let the battery run completely out and make the system crash. Instead when the battery is low it'll properly shutdown to avoid any data loss. Similarly, it will refuse to fully boot if the battery is low, for the exact same reason. So there were certainly some battery left after those 8 hours...

Not too bad actually... I expected far worse results

Opinions ?

Cheers, Magic Sam

 

[matzesu]

Quite a good result for this early stage of Software Development, expacly for 72 % ^^