My Soul Died A Little Today.


@The community and OPT as a whole, I apologise for my post. Alcohol and forums don't mix. :wacko:

I was merely saying that I don't feel the OPT have a responsibility to RMA units that have been messed with in any way by the end user and that doing so is the users choice, own responsibility and should void any expected duties from the OPT. So you do so at your own risk/cost.

A few times already the OPT have posted comments that hint they have already RMA'd a number of units that 'clearly' have been messed with by unskilled hands but this is compounded by the issues of QC in that some units have shipped in a bad state already, with missing screws, or over tightened ones that cracked things for example. So where do they draw the line, as thus far they've been nice guys and they haven't?

Despite the open nature of this project in that the community had helped design the thing, have been privy to its troubled development at every step and can freely mess with it software wise, as its pretty unbrickable. I don't believe the hardware is open, or was ever meant to be, unless you wish to do so with your unit.

At which point you may achieve something others wish to risk theirs for, or you may kill it and have a handy paperweight, or an ideal murder weapon if you wish to create some free advertising. :ph34r:

The fact there are additional shoulder button solder points is a great one, (if you wish to use that) and frankly given that PSX emulation was a planned killer app, I am surprised the community opted to not have L2 R2 as default but there probably wasn't space. Perhaps a six button pad, shoulders plus analogue triggers for OP MKII with beefier hardware for DC PS2 etc?

@Someguy99 I wasn't singling you out by quoting your story btw, I simply wanted to re-read it again as it's quality. As was your scything reply which was strangely suggestive, as I found myself upon the rollercoasters this morning, wondering if Craigs fairground sold chocolate hotdogs(1) and if you also like the nobblets?

Then I remembered that 'its just a ride'(2) and as a would be dentist that will own a Tesla as his "first night it got stolen, didn't hear a thing" car, I thought fuck it, their bad for my teeth like fluoride but I hope I haven't offended him too much, as his guides were really useful. :wub:

I'm in the same boat of concerns anyway. I wait to get my RMA back for the cable issue and I had hoped it would be a real quick turnaround (one county away) of the same unit. My first was flawless bar the screen and your second is amazingly like-able, for a scene from cannibal holocaust(3).

I had imagined blindly (partly fueled by OPT posts and part ethanol & methanol via a sweetener that will blind me eventually and fermented fruit sugars) a church filled with souless pandoras, expectedly qeued, pew by pew, empty cases all of them, with fresh lcd cables and shiny screens, all waiting like Indiana Jones, for a ray of the Sun to bathe them with purpose. :eek:

Or to simply compare clothing as usual ;) , adjust accordingly (swap a new lid with, if any attempts to de-solder and correctly re-solder safely the old one had failed) and then get the hell out of there leaving a meagre tip.

@Prometheus Sorry I was off topic (I will again be) and dragged you in at all, except you have delightedly shared your wisdoms of 'buyer beware' for which I am thankful. :blush:

As I said though, and as others have shown, those laws are great in theory, as most are, and most prove to be.

There will always be those who flaunt them, fall foul of them, even ones they once backed by accident (when it applied purely to backpacking muslims), and those who make them and cant be held to them by those who wont uphold them, despite their pledges to do so or the broken pledges of those in question. :blink:

For example..... it is civil obedience to pay taxes to the UK mind control posse right?

Actually no.

It is a criminal offense to pay tax in the UK and yet civil dis-obedience of these acts of legislation is the norm. :huh:

If you were to uphold the legal system and not pay your taxes, so as to avoid commiting a criminal offense with a severe penalty, it would in fact be circumvented by the corrupted system and land you with free bean n egg and toast for awhile. :p

Strange isn't it? :unsure:

Stranger still is that the police who are their to help you, have sworn to uphold the law and who drive cars emblazoned with slogans that they are their to protect you, will in fact, when pushed to it, totally ignore their sworn oaths of office, commit dereliction of duty and will in-fact hand you over to an extra judicial system with its own remit. If that is, you attempt to push them to actually deal with a crime that has sufficient evidence to arrest and detain, for a very long time, if not hang, a large number of lawmakers in the UK. B)

They actually admit that the evidence against these criminals is so solid, that if they were to arrest just one, they would have to arrest them all and that they are not prepared to do this. :angry2:

This is a high level decision within the Met that shuts down all officers below them, yet at the same time empowers all officers below that level to actually do their job and arrest all of their own superiors upwards. By which they would become the first true coppers of the people and the start of the re-birth of real law and order. B)

Merely knowing this makes me a criminal with around a 7 yr sentence. :(

Informing a police officer of this, makes them a criminal if they fail to act upon this evidence. :(

Telling you does not though ^_^ , as I haven't said why but that further compounds my guilt and duplicity.

Though If I tell you and you wave me off as a conspiracy theorist with a tin foil hat :rolleyes: (I use foil only for solar cooking) -_- and if you fail to act upon the evidence you yourself, would also be guilty.

Yet there is no one who will uphold it :angry: and thus its just a ride afterall. :)


(1) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GkUI3SZyKCs
(2) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vX1CvW38cHA
(3) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cannibal_Holocaust
 
Mofokubik said:
SomeGuy99 said:
Chaser said:
^ I love this guy so much.
Pick up that can.

Hey_you__pick.jpg
 
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[quote name='SomeGuy99' date='05 August 2010 - 04:36 PM' timestamp='1281019004' post='901303'
^ I love this guy so much.
[/quote]
Can you provide a summary of what he wrote, please :p
 
mindlord said:
I'm so sad... My LCD cable has deteriorated to the point where the screen is purple all the time, and it's only a matter of a few more lid open/close cycles before it will break for good. I just emailed Jacquelyn to get RMA details.

I suggested, although I doubt he'll go for it, that those of us across the pond send our units to MWeston for repair. I hope the shipping costs isn't going to be too much, since I'm on such a tight budget at the moment. I'd hate to have to use the slow method. 18+ days round trip would be torturous.

* Mindlord goes off to sob softly in a quiet corner.

I am having this problem, and my Pandora is #90, it still works on most positions but will it fail soon then?
I would prefer to wait for the production to be in full gear before asking to change it, must stay without it the minimum possible time!
 
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yea, it will get slowly worse untill eventually the screen goes completely black at all angles. That's when I finally sent mine in. I was waiting for production to ramp up and for the new ribbons to come in and both have happened to the best of my knowledge. I'll let you know how long it take to get mine back.
 
MonkeyChops said:
yea, it will get slowly worse untill eventually the screen goes completely black at all angles. That's when I finally sent mine in. I was waiting for production to ramp up and for the new ribbons to come in and both have happened to the best of my knowledge. I'll let you know how long it take to get mine back.

Yes, we got enough LCD ribbon cables :)
About 600 :)
 
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I'm with MonkeyChops. I've already alerted Debs to the fact that my Pandora will be sent back soon, but right now money is tight, so tight that even the 20$ or so to send it back is too much to part with comfortably.

I'll continue using it until it becomes unusable or until I get some money to spare. It's very difficult to separate with my Pandora now that I have one.
 
craigix said:
And I hate to say this but with the returns a big minority of them have *clearly* been opened and put back together wrongly. We know. We build them. One of them was particularly bad. Sometimes with these units I can fix them by just putting them together correctly. Sometimes due to the user putting the screws back in too tight they have broken the case (screws in plastic will turn forever unit they go out the other side or crush something internally).

Tell me, GP32X, what should we do with such units?
That's a tough call. Probably the two most reasonable options would be eBay or offering them up sort of the way the one nubbers were. Personally I don't care which it is, although I'm partial to eBay if for no other reason than killing the market for people outside of the actual project flipping them there.

Personally, as somebody who has yet to receive his unit, these threads are always a bit annoying to me, as I haven't even received my first unit yet. Hearing that there are people taking them apart and sending them back is kind of painful.
 
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EvilDragon said:
MonkeyChops said:
yea, it will get slowly worse untill eventually the screen goes completely black at all angles. That's when I finally sent mine in. I was waiting for production to ramp up and for the new ribbons to come in and both have happened to the best of my knowledge. I'll let you know how long it take to get mine back.

Yes, we got enough LCD ribbon cables :)
About 600 :)

Would it be possible to be sent one of this cables and I replace it myself? I have no problems opening and changing PC parts, but have no experience with soldering of anything of this sort, would this be necessary?

Besides the time that it will take for the Pandora to come and go from Brazil, there is always the problem that I can be changed taxes (60%) on the mailing back.
 
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^ It's _extremely_ hard to disassemble the lid without breaking anything and properly assembling the hinge is not easy either. If you are not a Ben Heck type of guy you shouldn't try it, imo.
 
SomeGuy99 said:
MooTheKow said:
I too am a member of the defective Pandora club. My unit arrived with a right shoulder button that didn't work quite right. After about a week my left nub broke. This weekend my LCD started acting screwy. Color went all wonkey.. then picture started fading in/out and doing weird stuff before finally going out. After a while and some tweaking the picture came back - but something is still wrong. There are random green'ish outlines on items that I select in minimenu... and things like the image of the SNES for the SNES emulator have weird green spots around the edges..

I'm in the US (Michigan) -- not exactly thrilled with the cost (and time) for shipping it back to England.

All of this happened to my first unit. Guess what? My second one still had the broken right shoulder button problem... two months after they built my original. Good going guys!

They paid me the postage back, which is why I'm not getting mega stressed out about it. I do only live in the next county though, so maybe they don't do this internationally?

I can't imagine they are paying back international replacements, as I didn't get a refund for the shipping I paid out. The wait after sending it in blew too, especially since they didn't send any emails without me first prompting them, like having received it or expectations on when the replacement would get shipped out. Finally, my replacement got here 2 days ago (shipped out before July) and while the long wait sucked I'm pretty happy. Screen bezel issue aside, and a bit of excess plastic on the left shoulder button I removed so the button worked right, and it seems perfect. I do wish I had received a refund for the shipping, or that the screen bezel issue would have been addressed as I am compelled to believe this was someone else's returned unit that was repaired from the terrible smell of cigarette smoke in the box but seeing how the PS1 emulation goes I'm willing to content myself with that and try my best to forget the (recent) past.
 
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EvilDragon said:
Yes, we got enough LCD ribbon cables :)
About 600 :)

Are any of these available for purchase without the rest of the Pandora?

mali said:
^ It's _extremely_ hard to disassemble the lid without breaking anything and properly assembling the hinge is not easy either. If you are not a Ben Heck type of guy you shouldn't try it, imo.

It wasn't that hard.
 
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Alerino said:
guys, can you describe how/when did you start noticing the first bad lcd symptoms?


Yes, Pulled the pandora out of my pocket 10 minutes ago opened it up and played some comix zone, tilted the screen to see it better and the game started tearing as i moved around as well as tinted itself purple. Previous to then, it was perfectly fine. Now, if i hold the Pandas screen at anything above the locked position it gets a purple tint on the screen.
 
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emcee said:
It wasn't that hard.

Your screen was broken before already, IIRC :p
Mweston said it's hard to do and ED said it's possible to do, so someone with enough skill can do it apparently. People with two left hands shouldn't attempt it, imo.
 
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mali said:
Your screen was broken before already, IIRC :p
Mweston said it's hard to do and ED said it's possible to do, so someone with enough skill can do it apparently. People with two left hands shouldn't attempt it, imo.

I didn't break it any worse. I think the real issue though is that there are actually two LCD cables, one that's part of the screen, and a second, that that one connects to. The second cable goes into the hinge, and I would assume into the base of the Pandora to connect to the board. I'm pretty sure (if someone knows otherwise, correct me if I'm wrong) that's the one with the issue. So, more than just lid and hinge would have to be disassembled.

So I have to take my Pandora apart, since I'm having LCD issues. But, I'll get some help for that. I have a friend who's pretty good with fiddly little devices like this. I've replaced a few laptop motherboards before, though. I doubt it could be much more complicated than that. Really, it just taking your time, keeping tracking of screws, and remembering how it came apart so you can do the same thing in reverse when you're done. Oh, and just use common sense when you tighten the screws back down, it's a small electronic, not a jet engine.
 
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