Miscellaneous Pandora Questions

[mmielke]

Here are a few questions I still have regarding the Pandora Project:


1) What is the Wi-Fi signal range? I had a friend that could get a signal by the window in the middle of the house with his PSP, but when he moved away from the window,the signal dropped. I have no idea where the signal is coming from, but it does come up as a Motorola router (cellular perhaps?). Is there a Wi-Fi signal extender that works on the Pandora?


2) If you have a hotfix on your SD card and flash the Pandora, will the entire contents of your card be wiped out? I've read that the hotfixes should be the only thing on the SD card while you are updating it, but I don't see why you couldn't have anything else on it. The PND's are self-contained, am I correct?


3) Does the PDF reader support fully graphical magazines?


4) Is anyone working on a 3DO or Sega Saturn emulator?


5) Many community members mentioned Invisible Shields, which one should I purchase from the website? There are many device sizes and shapes, plus full-installation, easy-installation, and screen only options. If there isn't an Invisible Shield that fits the Pandora, is it possible for ED or Craig to send them the specifications so it will be listed as a device option?


6) Is the TV-Out cable a proprietary format (I have ordered one anyhow, but I'll ask anyway)?


7) Will the 500 Pandora's per week assembly schedule hold up? How long does it actually take the board and nub combos to reach the UK where they are assembled? I would imagine that shipping to the UK would be the biggest holdup, due to constant holidays and flight delays. On that note: Is CircuitCo paying for the shipping of the boards to the UK? Some sort of discount should have been negotiated because of the delays, no matter what there reason was.


8) If I program something in C++ or Visual Basic and would like to convert it into a PND, how would I accomplish this task? I would like to use .cpp files to accomplish this, although I am open to other suggestions.


9) Is there a general compiler such as Notepad++ ported to the Pandora? I would love to code and run programs directly on the Pandora.


10) Oh.......... and is there any way to test Pandora code without having a Pandora?


Thanks in advance for your response. Pandora's here at last!

 

[WizardStan]

1) Connections seem to vary. I can connect to the router on the top floor of my house from the basement, so at least 16 feet through two floors and a wall. There's also another router I can see somewhere around that I could probably connect to if I had the password (although the signal strength is low so it wouldn't be a strong connection), and my nearest neighbour is about 30 feet away.


2) Don't know where you heard that. Hot fixes don't touch the SD card, just the NAND. Generally all they've done is update things, so you don't even have to worry about your NAND getting erased and losing your settings, but HF5 seems to be the exception.


3) PDF reader supports PDFs.


4) No and no. A 3DO emulator just recently released its source (seemingly) so maybe eventually. Saturn is a tricky one that no one has volunteered to tackle yet.


5) The one for the Nokia N900 supposedly works. Personally I recommend against it: the clamshell keeps it pretty safe.


6) The Pandora has an EXT port which contains a lot of hackable stuff, including the TV lines. So technically yes, you need a special cable to access it, but the specification is open so if you can find a source for the connectors, you can build your own cable as well as make use of all the extra things on the EXT port.


7) Optimists can hope, but no one can say for sure.


8) So long as you're targeting Linux and not using any x86 specific stuff (ie, assembly, or x86 only libraries) then you should just need to recompile your program with a cross compiler. Not that hard. Or even compile right on the Pandora itself.


9) No, you're free to use whatever you want. Unfortunately that generally means you need to figure out what it is you want yourself But someone will help if you have an idea.


10) For most stuff, if it runs in Linux on your desktop it'll run on the Pandora. There are many exceptions, but just go with that for now. Alternatively, someone occasionally puts his Pandora on the internet for people to VNC into and have a play; that's about as close as you'll get to testing without a Pandora.

 

[GunPei2X]

5) Many community members mentioned Invisible Shields, which one should I purchase from the website? There are many device sizes and shapes, plus full-installation, easy-installation, and screen only options. If there isn't an Invisible Shield that fits the Pandora, is it possible for ED or Craig to send them the specifications so it will be listed as a device option?

I bought a Zagg (Archos605 fits Pandora) but decided against using it after trying the stylus on it - I could tell it would reduce responsivness enormously - just dragging across it was difficult. If you lived in Australia you could have mine.

 

[rabidpoobear]

I Have a zagg also, in TX. Not sure if i'll use it yet (pandy in the mail.)


Also, have you programmed a lot? Visual Basic is a Microsoft language, it is most likely tied to x86 and windows, unless you're talking about a CLR version of it, in which case look up the Mono compatibility to see if it might work... C++ would be better off portability-wise, but if you're just starting out programming, might I recommend Python?


Also, Notepad++ is not a compiler, it's not even an IDE, it's just a text editor with syntax highlighting. There is definitely going to be a highlighting text editor on Pandora of some kind.


But disregarding that, yes you can run and program on the Pandora. I will probably do this extensively - but again, I use Python (which also has the advantage of working cross-platform without any compilin').

 

[Christoph.Krn]

5) Many community members mentioned Invisible Shields, which one should I purchase from the website?

You might want to read this: http://boards.openpandora.org/index.php?/topic/1021-invisible-shield/page__view__findpost__p__19518

9) Is there a general compiler such as Notepad++ ported to the Pandora?

If I got this right that by "compiler" you mean text editor, and you like Notepad++, you might also like Geany.

 

[AquaAnalogue]

you might also like Geany.

Hell yeah! Geany! I love that IDE. My girlfriend has satellite internet at her home, and when I went there for our anniversary I was on a fresh Ubuntu install without an IDE. I wanted to download Eclipse or maybe Code::Blocks but they were huge and their insanely-low bandwidth cap (less than 30 GB per month) was almost up. Geany to the rescue; tiny-ass IDE which does just as good a job as anything else. I now use it exclusively.

 

[darfgarf]

Hell yeah! Geany! I love that IDE. My girlfriend has satellite internet at her home, and when I went there for our anniversary I was on a fresh Ubuntu install without an IDE. I wanted to download Eclipse or maybe Code::Blocks but they were huge and their insanely-low bandwidth cap (less than 30 GB per month) was almost up. Geany to the rescue; tiny-ass IDE which does just as good a job as anything else. I now use it exclusively.

and it has a scribble area, aswell as a terminal down the bottom (just don't run anything with an infinite loop+sdl, you'll have to quit geany to kill it)

 

[XxionxX]

Speaking of wifi range... Are there any antennas we can attach to the Panda to boost its receiving range? For example a cantenna?

 

[Coldbird]

Wow... totally useless. But cool. Would be very useful for using in my garden when Im out of reach to our houses Wifi.

 

[urjaman]

Speaking of wifi range... Are there any antennas we can attach to the Panda to boost its receiving range? For example a cantenna?

Techinally you propably could replace the internal antenna (U.FL (IIRC) connector on MB) with an external one with some case modding, etc - but then you would be forced to use the external antenna always (or take the pandora apart and change the connection, and the connector propably wont take many cycles - it is not supposed to do cycling.)