As mentioned before, I met with Nikolaus for a day in order to find one of the most annoying issues we had with the prototypes:
Power supply. And as usual, the fix is just adding two lines of code...
1. The problem with the power supply
Here is a summary of the issues we had:
Charging was unreliable when the unit was running. Sometimes it was charging slowly, sometimes it just didn't charge at all.
Running without a battery was even more unreliable. With a 5V 2A USB AC Adaptor, it crashed most of the times during the boot, sometimes it booted but froze shortly afterwards...
The most reliable way to run it was using an AC Adaptor together with a battery.
Without a screen attached, it booted up reliable all the time.
With some AC Adaptors (i.e. Nikolaus' one) it also was a lot more reliable.
So clearly, it sounded like we really had some issues with the internal power circuit.
But what could it be?
Is the connector between the CPU board and the mainboard a problem?
Does one of the traces have a too high resistance and causes the power to break down?
There are many, many different possibilities with such a complex system.
It could be the charger chip, the battery monitor, the PALMAS (power supply chip of the OMAP5), the traces itself, a software configuration issue, etc.
It puzzled us for quite a long time now and was the main reason we didn't send out more prototype units to software developers yet.
And now, we fixed it.
What was wrong and how did we find it out?
Read the spoiler if you're interested in the details
Well, the result:
I was able to run my Pyra without battery from a stock 5V USB AC Adaptor without any instability.
I tried to max it out: Running a high-load script while running apt-get upgrade while playing around with GIMP.
All LEDs and the LCD brightness was also set to maximum and it was one of the units where the SSD was still included and which has wrong resistors for the LEDs, meaning the power usage of those also is 10 times as high as it should.
I let it run for 1 1/2 hours without any issues.
So yes, that last remaining known issue is now fixed as well! And it was a very troublesome issue, as it could've been anything.
I'm really relieved it turned out to be a simple change in the configuration in the end...
2. Why the numbers of preorders suddenly went down
I didn't really want to say much about that, but as some were asking whether we suddenly got so many cancellations... nope, that's not it
Here's what's happened:
As you know, we offer various payment methods, for example a bank transfer.
Unlike credit card payment, a bank transfer needs to be done manually by the customer, it's not automatic.
All I did was delete all the orders of customers who preordered but never actually did the payment (from May 1st until August 1st).
And those were about 20 orders. So no cancellations, just preorders that never have been paid.
3. What's left?
Well, it seems we fixed all the hardware issues we found.
The bare CPU boards are expected to arrive around October 20th, we'll produce 30 more prototypes then, these will be enough for more devs and the Prototype orders.
The case is currently getting the remaining tweaks, the keymat as well... well, that's it.
We're getting closer
And I'll keep you informed - as usual!
