It reminds me of the Pandora!

[Swordfish II]

For me the worst part is this:



Is this bug solved or reasonably avoided?

Is this bug commented in a entrance in Pyra Forums, and where is it?

That's what surprised me the most i know there are idle power consumption issues, but i had heard that was related to the governor needing some work.

First I had heard of it being a hardware issue.

Brad alludes to what I thought in the comments by talking about underclocking to 200mhz but seems to imply scaling isn't doable.

The article seems...poorly researched. I do think @EvilDragon might want to address some of those things in an email to Brad as the liliputing regulars are the target audience.

 

[EvilDragon]

It's a bug in the OMAP5 hardware without any known workaround.
The idle mode of the CPU is the low-power mode that the Pandora uses to reach 30 hours+ as standby when you just have it lying around.
This unfortunately crashes the OMAP5 occasionally.
It's no design or layout error we made - it's a hardware bug in the OMAP5 TI never resolved.

Had Microsoft not bought Nokia, both the much less power hungry mobile version of the 5430 would have been released (which is the one we actually wanted to use in the Pyra) - and that bug would also have been fixed, as standby is important for smartphones.
But as the OMAP5 is only used in automotive, no one except for us cared about that idle mode.

Is there a proper workaround for this bug? Maybe. Nobody knows, but none is known yet.
Except for disabling that low power mode for the moment.
Any future CPU upgrade will fix that.

 

[EvilDragon]

That's what surprised me the most i know there are idle power consumption issues, but i had heard that was related to the governor needing some work.

That is something different. I was talking about that the Pyra needs too much power when just idling (sitting on a desk doing nothing).
This is mostly because some processes, drivers, etc. keep the CPU alive, as it often stays at 500MHz / 1GHz instead of 250MHz even though it shouldn't really do anything.

That's some unoptimized or buggy stuff that keeps the CPU alive.
We also haven't implemented the possibility to disable unneeded hardware, as we did for the Pandora. It's all very unoptimized right now - just as the first version of the Pandora has been

 

[Swordfish II]

That is something different. I was talking about that the Pyra needs too much power when just idling (sitting on a desk doing nothing).
This is mostly because some processes, drivers, etc. keep the CPU alive, as it often stays at 500MHz / 1GHz instead of 250MHz even though it shouldn't really do anything.

That's some unoptimized or buggy stuff that keeps the CPU alive.
We also haven't implemented the possibility to disable unneeded hardware, as we did for the Pandora. It's all very unoptimized right now - just as the first version of the Pandora has been

Yeah that's exactly what I thought.

It might be worth your while to contact liliputing, brad has seemed fair. It seems that the target audience for the Pyra are pretty much liliputing readers

 

[pyrat]

The idle mode of the CPU is the low-power mode that the Pandora uses to reach 30 hours+ as standby when you just have it lying around.
This unfortunately crashes the OMAP5 occasionally.

Is there a proper workaround for this bug? Maybe. Nobody knows, but none is known yet.
Except for disabling that low power mode for the moment.

But does it have so much impact? I mean I thought idle was for some minutes. If you want to last 30+ hours wouldn't be better to hibernate (I mean suspend to disk: stop peripherals, save RAM to disk, shutdown and resume when powered up)?
That should consume 0 power, or what ?
Or does suspend and hibernate not work on the Pyra ? And then it is just work on software to make it work, or there's some reason it can't ever work ?
Ah, I see it. You want the modem on, tracked by telephony towers and wake up the whole system when a call comes, is that the problem ? Then you would need some small cpu somewhere to wake the system up, but could miss the handshake with the phone network, the call or whatever, if awakening is too slow.
I tend to think of the Pyra as a small laptop with internet access on the go, not so much as a mobile phone with proper software and peripherals.
But that is also a usecase, of course.
[EDIT: I was maybe wrong, see correction]

 

[Confuzzled]

My favorite editors are Emacs, Vi, Geany, and TECO.

Ahh yes, TECO. The editor where one interesting exercise is to work what your username does a command sequence.
I used to use TPU a lot. I'm not a programmer as such, but the configs I edit are mostly done in nano, and vi if nano is not available. Modifying the configs on embedded systems means you use whatever low-footprint editor is available on that system.

 

[EvilDragon]

Yeah that's exactly what I thought.

It might be worth your while to contact liliputing, brad has seemed fair. It seems that the target audience for the Pyra are pretty much liliputing readers

I'm not really in the mood running behind the media. He could've asked me anytime about the status.
And as long as we haven't shipped out the preorders, more sales aren't that important.

And as soon as we start shipping out, there will be a lot of user experiences out there - and that article will most probably be forgotten later on.

 

[EvilDragon]

But does it have so much impact? I mean I thought idle was for some minutes. If you want to last 30+ hours wouldn't be better to hibernate (I mean suspend to disk: stop peripherals, save RAM to disk, shutdown and resume when powered up)?
That should consume 0 power, or what ?
Or does suspend and hibernate not work on the Pyra ? And then it is just work on software to make it work, or there's some reason it can't ever work ?
Ah, I see it. You want the modem on, tracked by telephony towers and wake up the whole system when a call comes, is that the problem ? Then you would need some small cpu somewhere to wake the system up, but could miss the handshake with the phone network, the call or whatever, if awakening is too slow.
I tend to think of the Pyra as a small laptop with internet access on the go, not so much as a mobile phone with proper software and peripherals.
But that is also a usecase, of course.

Stuff like suspend and hibernate are always dependent on the drivers, so yeah, these should work once all drivers have been adopted.

Not sure why anyone uses hibernation - as usually, shutting down and starting up seems faster for me

But yes, if you want to use it primarily as a phone (something I personally cannot understand), then the missing idle mode is kind of an issue.

That said, it still can be powered on for about 10 - 12 hours if it is just lying around, even without idle mode.

 

[ClockworkCoder]

That said, it still can be powered on for about 10 - 12 hours if it is just lying around, even without idle mode.

That's pretty impressive... is that with the screen and keyboard off? It's only going to get better with further updates too.

I'll likely not use my Pyra as a phone, but I may toy with the idea of using it to ping text notifications from IoT or servers...

 

[gunrock]

What @EvilDragon said is very true, it was ages before the Pandora became as power efficient as it is. Notaz worked on it for a long time and over several SuperZaxxon releases to make it work so brilliantly.

I my Pandora.

 

[Blue Shadow]

If there is enough Pyra users interested, it would be nice to be able buy an "accesory": spare LCD display for Pyra without resistive touch-screen layer because those layers add a lot of irregular reflection to display (at the same time it lower brightness a bit). It can be appreciated in this picture, and I know about that problem as I owned a lot of other devices with resistive touch displays a lot of time ago (Palm-type to PocketPC PDA, to Nintendo DS to Zaurus SL-C).

We would lost touch display, but I think it would not be so bad in Pyra as there are other ways to control cursor, and I think I lost more with those reflections than without pen use.

And if we are enough, and ED can shop it, it would be other source of income to the shop, more benefit from Pyra sales. I don't know the minimum number of users interested to make this profitable (it would be same BOE LCD screen but without resistive layer applied; that layer was in fact an addition to original BOE screen).

IIRC that is not possible, as the screen would be too thin, and therefore wiggle in the lid. What would work is using the matte touchscreens that were tested at the beginning, but were considered too grainy by ED. This, as I call it "grain of matte-ness mod", would be a great accessory IMO, as I probably would not notice much of the grain anyway.

Another possibility would be matte screen protectors. I have no experience about how good that would look, but ED already mentioned that he could sell those in the shop, as one of his suppliers also produces those. I hope he will also offer to apply them directly to the pyra, so clumsy folk like me does have trouble with it.

 

[Confuzzled]

Stuff like suspend and hibernate are always dependent on the drivers, so yeah, these should work once all drivers have been adopted.

Not sure why anyone uses hibernation - as usually, shutting down and starting up seems faster for me

But yes, if you want to use it primarily as a phone (something I personally cannot understand), then the missing idle mode is kind of an issue.

That said, it still can be powered on for about 10 - 12 hours if it is just lying around, even without idle mode.

I use hibernation to preserve context. If I have several/many applications open, it's nice to come back to where I was. Desktop Managers and applications themselves are getting much better at preserving context between restarts - e.g. Firefox with its 'Resume' button, but they need to be written to support the capability. The easy way is just to hibernate. It's not just about short reboot times: it is also about getting back to where you were in various applications.

At least, that's my experience. Others will have different approaches, which is fine.

 

[pyrat]

Not sure why anyone uses hibernation - as usually, shutting down and starting up seems faster for me

I don't use it normally. But with such a mobile device as the Pyra I guess I might want to have it eventually,
not to use conciously, but to save my ass when I suddenly leave working in the device to attend something in the physical world
around it and forget to close it properly. If I know than in a few minutes, or a little before running out of battery, it will reliably hibernate
itself and I won't lose the work I was doing on resume, it would give some more peace of mind, than if the only option I have
is to save everything and shutdown in a hurry.
Like you're in the train bsorted in what you're writing and suddenly realise this is your destination and have to run to get down
and on the next transport, or whatever.

But yes, if you want to use it primarily as a phone (something I personally cannot understand), then the missing idle mode is kind of an issue.

Well, I can understand it given the few choices one has on what to use as a phone. And people may prefer to carry around/keep charged one device fewer,
specially if they do very little voice calls/voice messages.[/QUOTE][/QUOTE]

 

[Swordfish II]

You got it exactly right. Lots of other bullshit will be written too. I don't understand why hardware customers do nothing but complain.

I don't think it was intentionally done.

Liliputing typically has manufacturers contact them and send them preproduction demos. I think this was a case of he knew it was coming out and did some cursory research but didn't really look into it.

 

[monty]

The guy earlier saying his laptop cannot handle webpages fast enough is a bit strange. There may be other issues going on there.

Its not that it won't handle it.

Rather that
A) those sites take an age to load everything (because of dozens of fetches, and network speed limits; things that don't change depending on the speed of your processor),
B) you get non-relevant bars along the top and bottom which severely limit reading space and mess up scroll-up/-down functionality,
C) the modern tendency to give a full screen blocker telling you about their cookies and/or newsletter (which typically will load about two seconds after you start reading an article),
and D) and intermittantly spinning refresh icon atop the tab (even after all the above is done) as it loads in 'live' info that may well bump the layout (by up to ten ems in the worst cases).

Trying to stay very slightly on topic: I'm sure Pyra will have just those same issues and no more.

 

[PowerGod]

Auto-hibernation before battery goes out of fuel could be really cool to have

I remember the first time I saw hibernation at work on a Windows PC, I was playing Starcraft campaign for the first time on a portable PC and at some point, when I was winning, black screen "Battery low - Shutdown"... I was like "NOOOOOOOOOOOOOooooooo....." !!
Then I plugged the cable, turned on the PC and WTF !! It turned on with Starcraft exactly at that point !!
That was AWESOME !!

 

[bradlinder]

I've updated the article to reflect that while low-power idle mode is not available, that the 10 hours of battery life is an expectation during "normal" usage. I'm sorry I misread that, and sorry about misspelling your name @EvilDragon, I've corrected that as well.

Anything else I got wrong? Somebody pointed out that the 2GB RAM option is no longer available? I still see it on the pre-order page.

I do care about getting things right, and will do my best to correct any errors anyone points out.

But I also believe that with this kind of niche product, it's worth pointing out the strengths and weaknesses, because you don't want people misunderstanding the current state of the software or capabilities of the hardware when they place an order, and I don't want to mislead my readers into thinking that a device can do more (or less) than it's really capable of. Sorry if some of you saw that as my being harsh on the Pyra, but I'm actually quite excited to see how far it's come and that it's finally ready to ship!

 

[Null]

Somebody pointed out that the 2GB RAM option is no longer available? I still see it on the pre-order page.

From the (Evil)Dragon's mouth: https://pyra-handheld.com/boards/threads/2gb-and-4gb.99157/page-2#post-1677341

 

[bradlinder]

Got it, thanks!

Both the DragonBox Pyra technical specs page and the pre-order page still show 2GB and 4GB options, so that's what I originally went with for the article originally, but

 

[monty]

Anything else I got wrong?
...
Sorry if some of you saw that as my being harsh on the Pyra ...

Its not something you got wrong as such, but it is a curiously narrow take to single out ports as an area where the Pyra falls short. Fair enough to say that USB-A 2.0 is not as good as 3.0, and Micro USB is less current than USB-C. However the Pyra has more port options than almost all new 14" laptops, let alone comparable sized devices. I've got two laptops on this desk and Pyra has more port options than both of them combined.

Its your editorial call on what's important, but its hard to see how using yesterday's standards on three of the nine ports+slots outweighs that general advantage.