Official Blog- Preparations For The Near Future


Qwertyuiop

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New blog post by ED-


Preparations for the near future


This week should be an interesting week. The next (and hopefully final) sample cases should arrive at Michaels place. We're all excited, as they will look so much better than the already good-looking cases we already got.

In the meantime, while it has been quiet around here, a lot of other things have happened.

Preparing the Assembly


Michael has spend all his time preparing for the mass assembly.
He created a well documented assembly manual for the Pandora which contains several parallel processes that can be set up as stations. There are six sub stations and two main stations. The main stations (assembly of lid and assembly of base) require the most staff in order to crank them out faster. The sub stations require one person each (could be more if there are people) and are monotonous (ie. trim and solder speaker wires, apply copper tape, etc.). They could also be combined into more tasks and fewer stations.


Building the boards is a well understood process at this point and done very quickly. The pick and place machine can jam them out as quickly as you can keep the reels loaded. The boards are being built in batches according to how fast they can be tested. Currently that is going to stay at about 450-500 at a time. The process is to build 500, get them into testing and build the next 500 while the first ones are being tested. Once cases are available, the third parallel step will be to have a batch of 500 being assembled while a previous set is in testing and another new set is being populated.

All 4000+ antenna boards and LCD cables have been assembled and inspected. Things are progressing in the natural fashion a small run (by any big company's standards) like this should be done. When the cases show up, this parallel process will fall right into place and pump out shipments at a steady and predictable rate that has been expected from day one. We can't build and ship all 4000 in a day or even a week but it will be done as quickly as possible.

Michael himself will probably spend 12-15 hours a day on the floor helping to build building these bad boys to get them to you all as fast as humanly possible. It's going to be an exhaustive and miserable process, but that will help speed things up a bit. Yep. You read right - some of you guys will actually get a Pandora assembled by the creator himself!



Preparing the OS

The devs have continued to work on the OS. DJWillis fixed (and is fixing) quite a few bugs while also doing various tests to make it NAND-ready.
The OS itself is in a pretty good state. XFCE4 is working nicely, all those installed apps (AbiWord, Midori, ClawsMail, XChat, etc.) run flawlessly. PND Discovery and starting is also working fine. The standard stuff (closing the LID switches off the backlight, battery charging, etc.) is also included.

Here are the current issues still to fix:

* Include pmenu as second startup-option
* WiFi works, but can't be stopped once running. If we can't fix the driver in time, we'd probably put in a small tool where you can enable and disable WiFi on start.
* Bluetooth works fine but is missing a GUI.
* Some permissions need to be fixed (so a normal user can change maximum clock speed, etc.). Nothing spectacular :)
* Other minor stuff (keyboard mappings, etc.)
* Include scripts to enable TV Out.

So while it will surely not be perfect on first release, you can be sure playing, surfing, working, etc. works fine. It just is in need of more tweaking.



Preparing the shipping

I don't know how Craigs shop looks like at the moment, but I got over 700 empty boxes lying around, waiting to be filled with Pandoras. We're ready to ship them out as fast as possible when they come in!


So - everything is prepared from our side. And as soon as the cases are good... let the fun begin!
http://www.open-pandora.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=151%3Apreparations-for-the-near-future&catid=2%3Ablog&Itemid=2&lang=en
:)
 
My rss feed failed to show that post. :(
Thanks for posting this or I might of never saw it.

EDIT:It shows the post now.
 
hmmmm, never thought talk about assembling stations and soldering speakers would make me feel like... uhm... whell like i now do. But it (once again) sounds like it will allmost be ready.

Exciting times!!! (again :p)
 
That's massive. From that info, I can only conclude that Pandoras will be shipping in mass next month, or possibly sooner. I'm starting to get hyped again.
 
EXCELLENT! Let's just hope these cases are great! :pandora2ut4:
I have never been more excited about ANY device.

Is it just me, or are any of you guys going to take time off work just to play with the Pandora when it arrives????

I'm thinking a good week off should suffice! (9 days including weekends!)
 
kingoddball said:
EXCELLENT! Let's just hope these cases are great! :pandora2ut4:
I have never been more excited about ANY device.

Is it just me, or are any of you guys going to take time off work just to play with the Pandora when it arrives????

I'm thinking a good week off should suffice! (9 days including weekends!)

I'm a student and 4/5 of my classes grade partially on attendance (20% in two of them! Luckily I have Tuesdays and Thursdays off this semester and a ton of free time on Fridays. :lol:

Coincidentally, I'm playing God of War Collections and I just saved the Oracle and got sent to retrieve Pandora's Box. <_<
 
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I love the idea of:
"* Some permissions need to be fixed (so a normal user can change maximum clock speed, etc.). Nothing spectacular :) "


I'm absolutely unexperienced at linux so I hope this part is in the (online) user guide!
 
As always Ed, Awesome post! "2 weeks" is the new "2 months"! Let's all hope these cases get the go ahead, and we can finally see Pandoras shipping to customers within a few weeks. Hopefully some for of express shipping is in place for the cases and keymats! GO TEAM PANDORA! :D


Chris
 
This is good news.Hope the case revisions are good to go.The only thing left when pandoras box was opened was ,hope,according to the original myth.At least we have that.Ahem,Hope or a pandoraa?Ill take a pandora and take my chances.
 
Defo said:
New blog post by ED-


Preparations for the near future


When the cases show up, this parallel process will fall right into place and pump out shipments at a steady and predictable rate that has been expected from day one. We can't build and ship all 4000 in a day or even a week but it will be done as quickly as possible.

It was once said that the factory could make all the cases rather fast as in a day or three. Do we know yet just how many at a time are being made and shipped? The gap in between said batches of cases? That could really help in understanding just how long those of us past the first thousand are looking at. Then again this post could mean assembly/testing could take more than a week so hopefully ED could chime in with a guesstimate as to how many per week are expected to be produced. Just curious, excitement will do that to you. That case better be good now or I seriously may recruit an army to go to the Chinese factory!!!
 
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Poem58 said:
That case better be good now or I seriously may recruit an army to go to the Chinese factory!!!
It doesn't matter how big an army you recruit, they've got a bigger one.
 
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I can't wait for some news!
So excited about these!
Has anyone heard when the cases will arrive?
I still think it will be quite awhile until they're ready to ship. :( :( :( :(
I'm so damn excited though! I'm getting ready to go out and grab some big SD Cards!
:pandora2ut4:
 
javaJake said:
joshwaan2k said:
Good stuff 2 weeks instead of 2 months now I reckon :)

But that's just it: does anyone know when the Pandora's shipping?

I actually think 2 months is a good time frame. Considering all factors. 2 months seems pretty good/close.
 
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kingoddball said:
javaJake said:
joshwaan2k said:
Good stuff 2 weeks instead of 2 months now I reckon :)

But that's just it: does anyone know when the Pandora's shipping?

I actually think 2 months is a good time frame. Considering all factors. 2 months seems pretty good/close.
It has been every other time, after all. ;)

In all seriousness, though, based on past and present discussion about shipping and construction times, and assuming the current rendition of the cases gets the green light, I would think the first customers would be receiving their Pandoras right around the end of February. Time will tell, of course.
 
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Here are the current issues still to fix:

* Include pmenu as second startup-option
* WiFi works, but can't be stopped once running. If we can't fix the driver in time, we'd probably put in a small tool where you can enable and disable WiFi on start.
* Bluetooth works fine but is missing a GUI.
* Some permissions need to be fixed (so a normal user can change maximum clock speed, etc.). Nothing spectacular :)
* Other minor stuff (keyboard mappings, etc.)
* Include scripts to enable TV Out.

I noticed that the low power/suspend mode was left off that list, is that working with all the drivers now?
 
Sturatt said:
I noticed that the low power/suspend mode was left off that list, is that working with all the drivers now?

I think that's why it says: LCD off when closing the lid (but glad if proven wrong ; ) Some of that stuff is still being worked on. But with the battery life it has, you will probably be near a wall charger before it dies.
 
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