Is there really a light at the end of the journey...?

[Grench]

That'll just fix my phone and will delay the Pyra. You need to accept defeat before things'll go smoothly.
And there's a lot of things wrong with my phone, not just the USB port, I basically need to rebuild it if I'm going to fix it.

What kind of phone is it we're talking about here? Old, yes - good thing. The older the hardware the easier it is to fix. Old hardware tends to be assembled with a few dozen screws and minimal adhesive. New hardware pieces seem to be dipped in gunk and stuck together like some 3rd grade art project.

 

[WizardStan]

Nexus 5. I've torn it apart and fixed a few things already but there are limits.
It doesn't really matter though, you're destroying my joke with reasonable solutions. Stop it!

 

[tarator]

...
Who uses QR and or NFC frequently?
I don't use it because the only wide use of QR in public is for advertisement.
And I have not seen a single use for NFC till now.
...

Actually I'm using QR-Codes quite often to quickly transfer URL's or (longer system) passwords from my desktop-pc to my smartphone. On Kubuntu you can create QR-Codes from your clipboard with one mouseclick.

For NFC I also don't have any useful task till now.

Anyway... I also wish there would've been a camera built into the Pyra. I hope there are some easy hacks out there to get a camera into this device.

 

[Letalis Sonus]

The battery life of the pyra as a phone will depend if the modem can wake up the pyra from sleep (S2 or S3 state) when it receives a call/sms.

There is no such thing as a sleep state on an ARM SoC. In fact, the Pandora's "standby" mode only does some aggressive throttling and turns everything else off, the CPU itself just keeps running.

Cortex-M does have some kind of basic short-term "sleep until event/interrupt" instruction, though, but I doubt the OMAP5's M4s are independent enough to be useful in this regard, anwyay.

 

[levi]

The Pandora's sleep state is (I think) turn off screen and any peripherals and set the system cpu clock max to something like 100MHz. On the Pyra we could perhaps keep on to the M4 cores running at a slow speed to detect calls and incoming SMS, and use that to wake the main CPU, but if we can only drop the A15s core frequency to some hundreds of MHz it should be more than enough to respond to things like that very quickly, so I'm not sure there's any benefit in even finding out how to use the M4s for this.

 

[WizardStan]

The Pandora's sleep state is (I think) turn off screen and any peripherals and set the system cpu clock max to something like 100MHz

That was the original sleep state. Notaz eventually pulled two more low power tricks out of it: the first actually put the CPU to sleep and was able to give an estimated 2 months between charging, the second was massive improvements to the governor and some other CPU tweaks that, when idle, consumed virtually no power, giving as much as 2 weeks of idle time, even while technically not sleeping.

 

[Djoga'Ro]

See, there's the problem: you didn't suffer long enough. My phone has needed to be replaced for various reasons for about 2 years now, I've just been suffering because the Pyra was "coming soon".

Ever tried doin smartphone stuff on an X10 mini?

 

[hns]

Does any SW need to be written for PYRA to be used as a phone?
If so, has development started on it?

It should not be difficult to adapt https://github.com/akemnade/simple-gsmgui to the different modem AT commands.
There is also ofono, freesmartphone, replicant and others which can be used as a base.
So yes, development has been started (or even completed) by other projects - but IMHO there isn't much activity for adapting to the specifics of the Pyra hardware.
Well, this will change as soon as real hardware is in the hands of more developers.

 

[Dark Pulse]

Who needs a smartphone when you got one of these bad boys?

 

[AndiTheBest]

Would it be possible to add encrypted SMS to this so it works with people who use Silence?

https://silence.im/

Source code: https://github.com/SilenceIM/Silence
[doublepost=1530113792,1530113647][/doublepost]Also I hope your wedding goes well!

Thanks, I hope that too

Seems silence is also using Signal-protocol, so there may be more implementations of this.
Actually i'm struggling with merging sms with more than 160chars or special chars.
They are not readable in text-mode, so it needs PDU-mode.
I didn't find a useable PDU decode library so i startet to code my own which is more work than i thought.
When this works fine i can think about encryption extensions

 

[Caine]

So what happened to the cases? Weren't they due last Monday?

Maybe I remember wrong and it is the next Monday.

 

[TrashyMG]

So what happened to the cases? Weren't they due last Monday?

Maybe I remember wrong and it is the next Monday.

Patience, ED may still be having fun playing with his Nubs.

 

[ClockworkCoder]

It just struck me earlier that it's been just over a year since I got to "play" with Pyra's sensitive nubs, when the sample keypads arrived.

It really doesn't seem that long, but I do now consider myself quite deeply nub deprived.

 

[levi]

It really doesn't seem that long, but I do now consider myself quite deeply nub deprived.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zy_Qlx_djCU?t=34m15s

Edit: gah, the video mangler takes off my carefully added start time.

 

[Caine]

It really doesn't seem that long, but I do now consider myself quite deeply nub deprived.

When I preordered the Pyra I was thinking the same, sort of like "You know... waiting for the Pandora did not feel THAT long". I was wrong, it felt like it took forever, I remember now...

Patience....arghhh, I want to play with nubs too.

 

[ZXDunny]

That's a pinball table, made 1980. There was a vertically scrolling shooter by the Bitmap Bros by that name in 1988, the prequel to it's much more famous sequel Xenon 2 Megablast. But my vote for X goes to Xevious, because it's a videogame by Namco from before the video games crash.

Which videogames crash? I don't recall a videogames crash, and I played new releases (out of hundreds per year) for the whole of the 80s. Was it a US-centric thing?

 

[levi]

Yeah, it was a bigger thing in the US and Japan than it was here as they didn't have the home computer market to such an extent to keep them going until the NES finally made its way out of Japan. As I understand it, Coleco crashed because they'd overstretched creating Pong clones, and the Colecovision as an afterthought wasn't enough to save them, Mattel's Intellivision did better, but releases started to dry up by 1983 I think, so the mantle was left to Atari who fumbled an open goal pretty much. Mind you, even in the US you'd plumped for an Apple II or a Vic-20 or C64 or something, you probably didn't notice the paucity of console software that much.

 

[Grench]

Mind you, even in the US you'd plumped for an Apple II or a Vic-20 or C64 or something, you probably didn't notice the paucity of console software that much.

Vic20...
I had a 16K memory cartridge and a tape drive. Tried to create my own basic adventure game - then ran out of memory. There wasn't enough RAM on the box to hold the potential character inventory.

Eventually the transformer in the back right of the unit melted down a bit and separated ever so slightly from the main board. I found that a 10 pound lead window weight perched on the back right corner of the Vic20 console would force contact and keep it alive. It probably acted as a pretty effective heat sink too.

Good times.

 

[FBnil]

@ClockworkCoder I've send your data (together with your personal data) to Watson and it's diagnosis is: You have HANDS: Hyper Acute Nub Deprivation Syndrome

 

[CFWhitman]

Which videogames crash? I don't recall a videogames crash, and I played new releases (out of hundreds per year) for the whole of the 80s. Was it a US-centric thing?

The video games crash was when the sale of cartridge video games plummeted toward the end of 1983, and both Atari's and ColecoVision's success ended in the home video game market. Nobody really picked up the slack until the Nintendo Entertainment System started to become really successful, which didn't really happen in North America until 1986.

Atari's crash was basically a result of Warner (the company that owned Atari by then) getting the impression that producing video games was equivalent to a license to print money, with no regard for what they were actually selling. They didn't keep their most successful developers happy, and the developers left to form Activision. They started shoveling poor games to the public, who predictably (to someone who actually played games) didn't buy them. They released a new generation of console (the Atari 5200), but they didn't support it with a good game library. Also, the 5200 controller's directional control was too sophisticated and the controllers tended to break down and not be liked by their audience. Atari also weren't ready to compete with ColecoVision or even Activision in the game cartridge market.

At the time of the crash, the conventional wisdom was that video games were a fad that was waning and being replaced by the home computer. This lead Coleco (rather than working on trying to develop better games) turning their attention to the home computer market, and the Adam computer. They didn't handle the Adam's manufacture and launch all that well, and quality control issues lead to it developing a reputation for unreliability. It turned out to not survive the home computer market shake out (which first lead to only PC compatibles, Apple Macintosh, Commodore Amiga, and Atari ST computers surviving, and a little later to only PC compatibles and Apple Macintosh computers being left).

When the Nintendo Entertainment System hit the market with innovative and complex (at the time) games like Super Mario Brothers and The Legend of Zelda, it was just what the gaming public had been waiting for, and it turned out that video games weren't just a fad after all.

Of course computer games picked up the slack to some extent in the meantime.

Edit: Incidentally, I knew a lot of people who worked for Coleco until their bankruptcy in 1988 (my grandmother, father, uncle, mother, and sister all worked for Coleco at one time or another). Their three biggest factories happened to be located in or near relatively small towns in the area where I lived (and still do). Their largest factory became a Hasbro factory before later being shutdown altogether.