Our New Machine, Pandora

[zaffercharles]

Also, didn't the lynx eat up those 6 batteries in about 3 hours or so?

or less! The screen was lost in the original machine :lol:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/comm...ynx-1-1000.jpeg

 

[kfuse]

Ah yes, Game gear and Atari Lynx (didn't the lynx require 3 batteries at each end?). I remember those well.

Also, didn't the lynx eat up those 6 batteries in about 3 hours or so?

hey don't diss gamegear...gamegear was awesome back in the day...man sonic in portable was awesomeness...only thing wrong with that system was the battery life so I wouldn't really say the design was bad it just didn't have a way to supplement the power requirements...same with lynx... and they did make a rechargeable battery set with gamegear cept it only lasted so many charges...then they brought the same concept to the nomad which died because of the battery issue...because the idea of li-ion hadn't even been conceived yet. and I don't think even NIMH was around back then either. <_<

 

[atomicthumbs]

the first consumer NiMH batteries came out in the 1980s, and the first commercial li-ion battery came out in 1991

 

[kfuse]

the first consumer NiMH batteries came out in the 1980s, and the first commercial li-ion battery came out in 1991

Really man I must have been under a rock or sumthing I never knew they came out that long ago... I didn't buy a set untill like I think 1999 or sumthing like that.

 

[StealthBagel]

The Game Gear and Nomad used so much power because they relied on the design of home consoles, the Sega Master System and Genesis/MegaDrive respectively. They still used 5V logic and so they needed lots of batteries to handle the current draw..... had sega redesigned the hardware in a format it could use less power, like modern handhelds which operate on 3.3v or even 1.8v as their logical high level, it would not be necessary to use 6 batteries and they wouldn't die nearly as fast.

Same applies to the new handheld and gp2x. 2xAA is enough for a handheld, although LiIon is superior in nearly every way, and the way to improve battery life is an efficient power supply design and a power efficient chipset..... OMAP3430 offers a whole host of power saving features and a very modern transistor process, I think 65nm. So if no critical blunders are made battery life should be very good even on a meager LiIon pack or 2 high capacity AAs. But it doesn't sound like AAs will even be used at all so it's probably a moot point.....

 

[leathco]

Argh, the flames burn!

Just to defend my idea, I really don't think 6 AA's would weigh a lot. The GP2X with 2 AA's seem a lil light to me, so 4, or possibly even 6, should be workable in my opinion of a handheld. Especially if you seperated ithem into two on left two on right and if the other two were needed them on the bottom. On the other hand, if the rest of the community says no, than definately don't listen to me, lol. I just wanna see a platform with impressive sales that supports the homebrew community.

Another idea I had was a flash chip with a second chip that also had basic firmware on it. That way in the event of a firmware upgrade failure you could still run the system off of the original read-only firmware chip until a re-do can be done of the firmware upgrade. Hell of a lot easier that way than a BoB.

 

[zaffercharles]

6 AAs would still take up a decent chunk of the internals, or not as the case may be. I really feel like we can trust this machine to be exactly what we want it to be. It was good in one way that GP2X used AAs, but thie 'next gen' system is sure to benefit from something with more juice

 

[quartercast]

Argh, the flames burn!

Just to defend my idea, I really don't think 6 AA's would weigh a lot. The GP2X with 2 AA's seem a lil light to me, so 4, or possibly even 6, should be workable in my opinion of a handheld. Especially if you seperated ithem into two on left two on right and if the other two were needed them on the bottom. On the other hand, if the rest of the community says no, than definately don't listen to me, lol. I just wanna see a platform with impressive sales that supports the homebrew community.

How about this? Why don't you create, for yourself, a dodgy battery pack out of a plug, some wires, contacts and gaffer tape, then you can stuff it with 6x, 12x or 24x or however many AA's you want to. Meanwhile, I will be using my nice, expensive, sleek, light, rechargeable Li-ion based handheld. Sounds good? Thank you very much.

 

[atomicthumbs]

I plan to make an emergency 4-AA thing to charge the main battery a little.

 

[sam fisher]

the first consumer NiMH batteries came out in the 1980s, and the first commercial li-ion battery came out in 1991

Really man I must have been under a rock or sumthing I never knew they came out that long ago... I didn't buy a set untill like I think 1999 or sumthing like that.

You mean Nickel Cadium? I dont think NiMh existed that long ago :rolleyes:

I plan to make an emergency 4-AA thing to charge the main battery a little.

Great idea, you better hope the charging cut off features are built into the handheld itself and not the power supply else when you use your own supply and over charge it, the craiginator's battery will go BOOOM.

 

[cappuchok]

Another idea I had was a flash chip with a second chip that also had basic firmware on it. That way in the event of a firmware upgrade failure you could still run the system off of the original read-only firmware chip until a re-do can be done of the firmware upgrade. Hell of a lot easier that way than a BoB.

If I've understood Craigix's and his team's posts correctly, the boot loader will be write protected (thus it can't be destroyed by a bad firmware upgrade) and can boot the device from an SD card. This means that if ever a firmware update should fail, the device can be easily unbricked by running the upgrade from the SD card once more.
Also, presumably there will be no BoB for the Craiginator, as it will integrate all the hardware that was on the BoB for the GP2X (TV-out connections, USB Host interface). The TV-out cable adapter will be included in the package. All that will be needed to use USB peripherals with the Craiginator will be a USB-OTG-to-USB-2.0 adapter cable (can be bought in any computer store, or it might come included with the device) and possibly a USB 2.0 powered hub if you wish to run several peripherals at once (gamepads, external harddrive, dance pad... )

 

[Squidge]

Another idea I had was a flash chip with a second chip that also had basic firmware on it. That way in the event of a firmware upgrade failure you could still run the system off of the original read-only firmware chip until a re-do can be done of the firmware upgrade. Hell of a lot easier that way than a BoB.

or we could just a bootloader that knows how to read sdcards, so that if you brick your firmware, you can just insert an sdcard with the latest firmware on and it reflashes on command (chances are to brick the device you were upgrading anyway, so if you brick the device by the power going out, you can just restart when power comes back). Thats the current idea, anyway.

It could even be made automatic - when a firmware upgrade finishes, it could write to a certain sector in flash to say the firmware is ok. If the flag isn't there at startup, it automatically goes into reflash mode rather than executing code which might not be complete.

Hmmm, I like that idea Would limit the amount of firmware upgrades though to about 10,000. Anyone think that would be a problem?

Great idea, you better hope the charging cut off features are built into the handheld itself and not the power supply else when you use your own supply and over charge it, the craiginator's battery will go BOOOM.

It would be kind of stupid to put it in the power supply to be honest. Since you need to keep track of temperature and voltage, it's best to do it as close to the battery as possible. That may open the door to usb-based charging then, too (depending on power requirements of course).

 

[Tobriand]

Oh no! 10000 updates only?! What are we going to do?!

Unless the flag gets overwritten every boot (which I can't see it being coded to do), I doubt that'd be a problem. And that's only if the flag is a 1/0 value; you could always have a metaflag that tells the bootloader where to look for the flag, and can be updated if it stops changing, I suppose.

Say you have three variables, one which has the address of the current flag, and presumably that of the counter, one which has the number of times it's been written over, and the flag itself. If the one which has the number of overwrited ever reaches, say, 7000 (just to be on the safe side), the metaflag changes, and the flag gets moved (as does the counter, which I imagine would also be approaching it's limit).

Not that I can see a need to upgrade 7000 times for any but the hardest of the hard core. I mean, that's upgrading your firmware once a day for almost 30 years! Not going to happen...

 

[Squidge]

Yeah, it would only ever be written on firmware upgrade. It would only be read on bootup.

If more than 10,000 updates is required, what I thought is that you could have three variables. The system reads all three and uses the highest number, and then randomly sets only one of them to the highest number + 1. This means the same place is not updated all the time, but it's easy to find the current one.

 

[atomicthumbs]

the first consumer NiMH batteries came out in the 1980s, and the first commercial li-ion battery came out in 1991

Really man I must have been under a rock or sumthing I never knew they came out that long ago... I didn't buy a set untill like I think 1999 or sumthing like that.

You mean Nickel Cadium? I dont think NiMh existed that long ago :rolleyes:

Don't worry, they existed. Nicads started being produced commercially around 1906. :rolleyes:

I plan to make an emergency 4-AA thing to charge the main battery a little.

Great idea, you better hope the charging cut off features are built into the handheld itself and not the power supply else when you use your own supply and over charge it, the craiginator's battery will go BOOOM.


I'm pretty sure that it's not going to have a straight line from the AC adaptor to the battery cells. Lithium-ion battery packs almost always have an internal overcharge protection circuit.

 

[linoleum13]

You guys are almost at 200 pages! Keep it going

 

[Squidge]

You guys are almost at 200 pages! Keep it going

Really? I'm only on page 75.

Maybe "Nearly 3000 replies" would be better, as it's more universal (not dependant on user preferences)

 

[leathco]

Argh, the flames burn!

Just to defend my idea, I really don't think 6 AA's would weigh a lot. The GP2X with 2 AA's seem a lil light to me, so 4, or possibly even 6, should be workable in my opinion of a handheld. Especially if you seperated ithem into two on left two on right and if the other two were needed them on the bottom. On the other hand, if the rest of the community says no, than definately don't listen to me, lol. I just wanna see a platform with impressive sales that supports the homebrew community.

How about this? Why don't you create, for yourself, a dodgy battery pack out of a plug, some wires, contacts and gaffer tape, then you can stuff it with 6x, 12x or 24x or however many AA's you want to. Meanwhile, I will be using my nice, expensive, sleek, light, rechargeable Li-ion based handheld. Sounds good? Thank you very much.


Have fun changing out that nice, expensive, sleek, light, rechargeable Li-Ion whenever it won't charge 7 years down the road.

Really, just an idea, no need to flame away.

 

[kfuse]

omg 200 friggin pages FTW!!!

Man I can't remember the last time I seen a thread this huge

 

[Orkie]

Still 75 here...