Finished! (Well... the schematics, that is)


EvilDragon

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Still no time to slow down - so here's a summary of what happened lately :)

 

The PCBs

 

Finally, the full schematics for the Pyra have been finished by Nikolaus early last week!

Which means, that the hardware is basically done - the only thing left to do is to translate the schematics into the layout of the PCB.

 

It's very time consuming work, but Nikolaus will try to finish that in December, so that we can produce the first prototypes before the end of the year!

December 23rd would be a cool date for the prototype production run - as December 23rd, 2011 was the day we made the test production run of the Pandora at Global Components in Germany.

 

The OMAPs have already been ordered, we plan to produce 15 prototpe PCBs.

Will we be able to keep that schedule? It's a short timeframe for the remaining work to be done (we know that), but we'll try our best.

 

These prototypes need to be thoroughly tested then. Quite a few won't work at all (as such a test run is used to setup the machine properly). Some of the working ones will go to devs like notaz and maybe one or two will be auctioned off.

 

And after that? Well, all bugs we still find need to be eliminated, a new test run needs to be done.

And once the hardware fully works, it's time to setup the mass production and the preordering.

Hopefully, we won't need to many revisions before we have all bugs fixed.

 

 

The cases

 

Of course, a fully working PCB is nothing without a finished case!

Now that all specifications are fixed, the designer has resumed work on the case to do the final tweaks (and offer me two different solutions for the shoulder buttons).

I hope the final case will be ready for a 3D print in December as well.

 

 

The nubs

 

We took the chance to meet the designer and engineer of our current nubs at the Electronica exhibition in Munich. Basically, the part is end of life (EOL), because there weren't enough orders to keep the production alive.

All other nubs we tried won't fit, sadly (the 3DS one is twice as thick, so that won't work).

The only EOL part of the nub is the mechanical one which is basically a disc with springs that move a magnet.

The electrical part (which is simply a hall sensor) is available without any issues.

 

Our current solution is this one:

The deadline for placing the order is the current nub is end of December. We'll order 10,000 of those, which will be enough for 5,000 Pyras.

If these Pyras sell really fast, we can probably resume the production with a high enough order.

If these Pyras sell slow, we have enough time (and money) to find a solution, i.e. a company that can create a compatible mechanical frame.

 

I sure hope though we can get enough orders to make them resume the production though! The first order of 10,000 will be a first step to that!

 

 

3G / 4G

 

More good news from the Electronica:

We found a Tetra-Band Antenna that fits onto the reserved space of our PCB, which means that the Pyra will be able to do 3G/4G.

 

 

AMD

 

I've also paid AMD a visit to ask them about their upcoming ARM SoC for tablets.

Nothing to get excited yet, but I've got some contacts now to discuss with.

We know they'll release a 64bit ARM SoC which uses the Radeon GPU (which has working open source drivers), so that surely would be an interesting chip for a first Pyra upgrade.

 

IF (in capitals) we will be able to use it, it will still be a long time away. And if not enough people buy the Pyra or we we can't get it from AMD, it won't even be made.

 

The first release will be the OMAP5 Pyra - and the more people buy it, the more likely a future CPU Board upgrade will be :)

 

 

 

Videos

 

You probably know about the 'What would you like to see?'-thread (http://boards.openpandora.org/topic/17295-what-would-you-like-to-see//URL])

Well, I got the devboard prepared at work and will hopefully be able to produce regular videos of those requests from this week on - this just depends on the amount of spare time I have.

 

These will only be very short videos, just showing one thing at a time.

And we won't be able to show all of those requests yet, as our current OS still has some things like the 3D driver missing. But those videos will follow once we have it working as well.

 

 

Keyboard

 

Well.... as the design is basically finished, it's time to soon start for me to work on the keyboard layout. I know we've got hundreds of posts about that already, which I all need to browse and check and find the best suitable keyboard layout.

I'll probably make a few different layouts and put them up to discussions, so we can tweak them.

I plan to do this end of November / early December.

 

 

Phew, that was quite a lenghty post - but we certainly had (and have) a lot going on :)

See you at the boards!
 
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Oh hey this might mean sales soon! I need a job so I can get money... WOO
 
This mean: a bit less than 2 Months until the Prototyp of the CPU Board..


Great News, lets wish Money from the Nikolaus for the Pyra,,,


Also whitt the 4 g Antenna, which is also great..


5000 Pyra at the first Batch sounds like it also will be a quite rare device :)


Less Units than a Bugatti Vevnron
 
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giphy.gif
 
10k nubs with semi-reliable supply chain for 5k devices sounds like a potential problem if any of them fail.

Will get my order of small and big hall effects to do some testing. Can the pcb traces be made to accept both?
 
Well, you can get couple of Pyras so you can have enough of these nubs for spare :p .  I'm sure will get at least two Pyras when it comes out as thes nubs with hall sensors are too good to pass by :)
 
sweet, might give me a reason the celebrate christmas xD

I'd happily buy one or more AMD ARM SoC boards with Radeon GPU. Don't care about 64bit, open source drivers are reason enough!  ; )

How much is a nub at volume? Maybe we could collect donation for buying some number of replacement numbs? I'm interestet in buying spare ones as well?

Any news about the donation issue? Don't mind writing a bank transfer...
 
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Will get my order of small and big hall effects to do some testing
The hall sensors aren't the problem, it's the housing and plastic bits that seem to be end of life.I wonder why it's not feasible to just have the company making the case make the nub housing: slap some off the shelf springs and a magnet in there and you've got your own replacement.
 
Yep, and the hall sensor is exactly the same for the smaller sized mechanical part of the nub.

So the only thing is the mechanical part, and it should easily be possible to find someone who can build it - if we can't get a high enough order to resume production.
 
The hall sensors aren't the problem, it's the housing and plastic bits that seem to be end of life.

I wonder why it's not feasible to just have the company making the case make the nub housing: slap some off the shelf springs and a magnet in there and you've got your own replacement.
Possible, yes. But it might need tweaks to get the springs and disc working reliable and durable. This is possible but needs more time - and getting 10,000 nubs in advance gives us exactly that time.

The existing nubs are reliable - the sold half a million per year during the last four years of the smaller version, and they don't really break.
 
Maybe too premature.  I wrote a song to celebrate.  Sing to 'There She Is, Miss America':

There it is, the Pyra

There it is, your ideal

The dream of a million nerds who have prettier devices can come true in Germany

For it may turn out to the king of handhelds

..
 
AMD


I've also paid AMD a visit to ask them about their upcoming ARM SoC for tablets.


Nothing to get excited yet, but I've got some contacts now to discuss with.


We know they'll release a 64bit ARM SoC which uses the Radeon GPU (which has working open source drivers), so that surely would be an interesting chip for a first Pyra upgrade.


IF (in capitals) we will be able to use it, it will still be a long time away. And if not enough people buy the Pyra or we we can't get it from AMD, it won't even be made.


The first release will be the OMAP5 Pyra - and the more people buy it, the more likely a future CPU Board upgrade will be :)

I have not much heared about an upcoming AMD ARM SoC. I wonder how powerful that thing will be. 64 Bit? Sounds already interesting. ^^ From past PC expeciences I know that Linux Support from AMD never was as good as the one from NVidia but this may have changed over the years. And maybe it#s really much better now, especialy onto the mobile front.

10k nubs with semi-reliable supply chain for 5k devices sounds like a potential problem if any of them fail.


Will get my order of small and big hall effects to do some testing. Can the pcb traces be made to accept both?

The good thing is, they still can GET 10K nubs, which is a very good start. I first thought the nubs are not available anymore at all. But it seems that 5000 Pyras can be made before ED needs another Nub alternative, that's good. :)
 
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Just to clarify, what does this Tetraband antenna enable? I assume it's referring to frequency bands, so 2100Mhz for most 3G/UMTS installations, 1800Mhz for 4G/LTE, and a couple of others? Or does 'tetraband' refer to something else - last time I heard terms like triband and quadband was referring to 2G frequencies, which differed on different networks and in different countries.
 
Again, good news from ED. Is only the antenna 3/4G or will the Pyra also do 4G?
I assumed that's what was meant. GSM/UMTS only needs a tri-band antenna, which is what he had before I believe. There's an LTE drop in replacement for the cell module he was using (for $50 more) but in order to get GSM/UMTS/LTE it needs a quad band antenna. I'm guessing that this announcement means they've found such an antenna that is still small enough to fit in the space required.
 
AMD


I've also paid AMD a visit to ask them about their upcoming ARM SoC for tablets.


Nothing to get excited yet, but I've got some contacts now to discuss with.


We know they'll release a 64bit ARM SoC which uses the Radeon GPU (which has working open source drivers), so that surely would be an interesting chip for a first Pyra upgrade.


IF (in capitals) we will be able to use it, it will still be a long time away. And if not enough people buy the Pyra or we we can't get it from AMD, it won't even be made.


The first release will be the OMAP5 Pyra - and the more people buy it, the more likely a future CPU Board upgrade will be :)

I have not much heared about an upcoming AMD ARM SoC. I wonder how powerful that thing will be. 64 Bit? Sounds already interesting. ^^ From past PC expeciences I know that Linux Support from AMD never was as good as the one from NVidia but this may have changed over the years. And maybe it#s really much better now, especialy onto the mobile front.
It's crap.

I'm forced to run the open-source driver on my Laptop because the official one does not support my hardware any more (2008/2009).

Nearly no games run because the driver does not support required features (Awesomenauts for example).

It would work fine with the official Catalyst driver but then I would have to use old Kernel and Xorg.

Maybe it's better with mobile devices but especially for gaming the OpenSource driver is crap.
 
AMD is generally very supportive concerning Linux. However, the proprietary fglrx driver drags along a huge pile of crap from ATI that they failed to clean up so far. It would have been best to entirely rewrite the driver from scratch directly after the acquisition, but that wasn't just a huge task needing a lot of manpower, the wanted design just wasn't practicable back then. But now it is about to happen: The fglrx driver will be slimmed down to a simple OpenGL implementation built on top of the core components of the free driver.

Nearly no games run because the driver does not support required features (Awesomenauts for example).

It would work fine with the official Catalyst driver but then I would have to use old Kernel and Xorg.

Maybe it's better with mobile devices but especially for gaming the OpenSource driver is crap.
The issue isn't that the driver is bad, it's that hardly any of the companies behind those games cares about the driver - at all. The driver does have a good overall quality and there are quite a lot of native commercial games that run absolutely great with it, e.g. pretty much everything from Valve.
However, it's a world full of dirty hacks and workarounds, anything that is done to work around one issue with a specific driver may backfire with a different setup...
 
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