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EvilDragon

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And here it is, as promised: The second part of my Pyra News post :)

 

 

1. The Hardware

 

Well, we had quite a few issues to solve which slowed things down a bit, but it seems the solution has been found.

I'll try to explain what happened and what took us four weeks to solve.

 

As you know, we were trying to get the Solomon (Rotator) chip to work.

This is not an easy task - there are quite a lot of timing settings between the OMAP5, the Solomon Chip and the Panel Driver which need to be properly setup and which even affect each others.

Calculating proper, usable values alone is quite a time consuming task, but it's even harder when you have a hardware issue you didn't really know about.. as you first need to find that out...

 

Well, without the rotator chip, the display works without any issues.

With the rotator chip included in the setup, we didn't really get a picture anymore - sometimes a bit of flickering, but nothing really.

Of course, we thought the timings were not properly done yet and tried to fix them... but without much success.

Nikolaus checked the hardware and found out that the voltage for the solomon chip was too low. So he started looking for the issue,

After some more tests, he found a quick workaround by adding some wires to the setup. Apparently the LCD cable and some traces were too thin for the power needed, which was a good guess.

With that workaround, the timings could be tried. Nikolaus managed to get a picture... but slightly shifted (as you can see at the picture).

 

DSC02289.jpeg

 

However, Nikolaus needs to continue to work on the hardware, so I made a setup at home involving the OMAP5 devboard connected to the Pyra Mainboard and the LCD, a Pandora and a webcam.

notaz can use that setup to fiddle around with the LCD and see the result - and he got it to work stable and properly, no shift anymore.

That's for the unrotated image, but fully going through the Solomon chip, which is the most important step! Next step is to enable rotation and find the proper setup, but with the timings we already found out now, it should (hopefully) be not a too hard step.

 

In the meantime, Nikolaus made a lot more tests found the weaknesses and improved the setup to be A LOT more stable.

Since today he knows what needs to be changed to solve these power issues, and once that's done, he can finally finish the CPU Board.

So it took quite a while, but the important thing is that there's a solution :)

 

As we got all parts to populate the prototypes already, once the CPU Board layout has been finished, populating it should happen within short time frame.

 

 

 

2. Financing

 

The closer we get to the production, the more detailled our cost calculation is.

As promised, there's enough money to fund the full development - but we will not have the money to fund the full production.

Which is nothing to be surprised with - as we need to buy a lot of parts upfront in high quantities, we need about 500,000 EUR (half a million EUR!) for the first batch.

This is quite a bit of money (at least for us ;) )

 

About half of that doesn't need to be paid before the production of the units is finished, which is great.

And I'll also try raising as much money upfront so that preordering will cost you as little money as possible!

 

There are multiple possibilities (looking for some more investors, getting a short-frame credit for the production run, the upcoming RetroPi2-project at Kickstarter, etc.)

 

I don't want to scare you, as we know we can do it (I managed to survive the Pandora!), but as financing the production is also part of the whole process, I thought I'd let you know that.

 

Well - and donations help as well, which I want to mention here.

As you might've noticed, we got a whopping 9000 EUR donation yesterday - THANKS A LOT to the sponsor :)

 

We'll have the next goal up within the next few days, as I'll get the accurate pricing for the case mold then.
 
Ah, so the 9k donation is legitimate after all?  That's awesome!

Good news on the LCD stuff too.  If you'll excuse me though, I won't hold my breath until the rotator chip is working.  I'll save the champagne until you can report that the LCD is working fine, the right way round with no flicker, misalignment or other glitch, but it does sound like you've done a lot towards that goal over the past month.
 
It's rather amazing how:

  • we can benefit from the smartphone boom and get a nice high-resolution screen that fits perfectly for the form factor we're aiming at
  • at the same time, smartphones all run Android (at least the ones whose screens ED can buy), and Android constantly uses the GPU to render everything so rotation becomes trivial (which makes sense for a variable-orientation device, I guess), causing screen manufacturers to get away with making only screens that are portrait at the hardware level
So it's really a mixed blessing, these smartphone screens: thanks to the smartphone spec race, the Pyra will get a significantly better screen than the Pandora, but now a lot of effort (and an additional rotation chip) has to be spent just to get a normal, landscape screen (without keeping the GPU busy all the time, which is battery-consuming).
 
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I will certainly back the program once crowd funding begins. The more time that passes, the better prepared I am. I am very excited about this project!
 
I was like wtf! when I saw the green progress bar xD   Thought it was some bug at fist...  very nice, thanks! : )

an option for just the two boards kinda interests me too. I'd be nice for people who want to do a bit of hacking and/or modding.

regarding the first batch, I'm totally in! no problems, ready to trade my flatware for hardware : )

nice progress, thx!
 
Hm, seems the rotator chip will keep ED's team busy till the end. I had hoped that all problems are solved now but if I read it correctly in all the time the damn chip was only able to display an unrotated image. Evil chip. :D   I hope this little devil piece of hardware is worth all the pain. I more and more think that a simple software solution for the rotating (like all smartphones do today out of the box) would be the less stressful solution.  At least it's still the last option when it turns put that the rotator chip doesn't have any benefits compared to a software (or GPU Hardware) solution.

Well - and donations help as well, which I want to mention here.
As you might've noticed, we got a whopping 9000 EUR donation yesterday - THANKS A LOT to the sponsor :)
Wow, not bad. Whoever this is, send him alot of hugs! ^^
 
Someone here is either spectacularly rich, or wonderfully generous. Big thanks to them either way!

Also, the rotator chip may be a right pain now, but it will be worth it in the future when it makes dev'ing low-level software easier.
 
Someone here is either spectacularly rich, or wonderfully generous.
Or they made a big mistake and don't know how to say "I meant to donate 90, not 9000. Can I have it back I need to eat kthxbye" :p
 
Or perhaps it was 9.000 € (as in "9 euro and not a fraction of a cent more"), which is written 9,000 € in some locale settings...
 
Pretty sure it isn't.

Unless someone changed the rules of mathematics while I wasn't looking?
 
Hell yeah, I've started looking into a Pandora recently and after I found out that there are none available I found the pyra, and hell, this thing looks really neat! :)

And I'm really looking forward to the crowdfunding - does the ~500€ price include the cell-module for 3G access or is it extra? :)
 
So it probably will take quite a while still until the CPU board is in its proper state... nice to see progress though :)

As for the 9000 euro donation thats really cool! I always wonder how it can be that these amounts of money can float around while others might struggle to pay for their daily meals. But I guess thats a totally different discussion.
 
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