Release Pandora System Info


How much does the power consumption vary between

1) internal-wifi and 2) wifi-via-USB-adapter

in a) wasteful B) powersaving operation?

Stats anyone?
 
New version of System Info on the repo. It now allows you to toggle wifi and wifi power-saving from within System Info, as well as overclocking the CPU and RAM. More info in the documentation.
 
I just want to say I love this app.  Nice work, its really something I'd like to run on my normal Linux machines sometimes, too! 

:)
 
:)

Thank you.

I'm also happy that select doesn't kill sysinfo any more.
 
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Okay, I think I have a feature request that is worth your consideration!

Over on this thread, there is a discussion going on about wifi calibration: http://boards.openpandora.org/index.php/topic/11416-wifi-mysteries-resolved-once-and-for-all-%E2%80%94-power-saving-is-clearly-the-culprit/page-7

What about adding a feature to Pandora System Info where the calibration data can be displayed?  This seems like it might be a perfect place for us to start collecting the WiFi calibration data to try to ascertain what exactly the situation is with regards to debugging the Wifi at a community level ..

So details from notaz about the issue are here:

http://pandorawiki.org/WiFi#Calibration

The dumping seems perfect for PSI, and also the fields are describe well enough here:

http://notaz.gp2x.de/misc/pnd/wl1251/nvs_map.txt

and a comparision with other models here:

http://notaz.gp2x.de/misc/pnd/wl1251/nvs_cmp.txt

.. that it seems to me that it would be a very simple task.  But!  Of course, I'm not the one doing the coding, heh heh ..
 
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:)

Thank you.

I'm also happy that select doesn't kill sysinfo any more.
Yes, and neither does the Pandora button. That was really annoying, every time I wanted to access the OpenBox menu I ended up killing sysinfo.

I just want to say I love this app.  Nice work, its really something I'd like to run on my normal Linux machines sometimes, too! 
Well, the source is in the PND and I don't see why it wouldn't compile on your normal Linux machine. There's some Pandora-specific stuff in there (e.g. the location of the battery info, two SD cards, etc.), so if you want to turn it into something that works on any Linux machine, it'll take a lot of work to generalize all of that, but it should be relatively easy to modify it to work on some specific machine.

I'll investigate the wifi calibration stuff. Looks like an awful lot of information to display though. Are there specific fields that are known to be relevant, or that would benefit from visualisation? (e.g. I could visualize calibration tables as a color-coded matrix) It could be a better idea to make a separate tool for this though.
 
 

I'll investigate the wifi calibration stuff. Looks like an awful lot of information to display though. Are there specific fields that are known to be relevant, or that would benefit from visualisation? (e.g. I could visualize calibration tables as a color-coded matrix) It could be a better idea to make a separate tool for this though.
The important fields, I think, are pointed out by notaz in the document at: http://notaz.gp2x.de/misc/pnd/wl1251/nvs_cmp.txt

But I'm not sure it'd be necessary to render the whole table, just the stuff that is different between Pandora users, somehow .. i.e. capture the data, send it to a server/compare it with a git repo, or something.  Like, you could pull the field data, display the overview, and maybe have a button to submit the resulting file to a common repository, so we can collect the data and start getting a view of the bigger picture, with regards to who has Pandora wifi working great, and who has it working poorly .. 

Well, anyway, just adding the calibration data as a sub-display for Wifi would be good enough for now, it'd surely be interesting to let people know that there is this factor in the performance-tweaking yet still to be done ..
 
[a repo comment]

CCF


30/03/2013 12:59 UTC


v0.6.0.0


Sorry 1/5 and would give 0/5 if possible. When I went to battery info window the Pandora screen froze and I had to hard reset [this happened 3 times].


Did this happen with anyone else? Is CCF on this forum? I would like to fix this bug, but I have no clue how to reproduce this.

Also, if you find a bug, please notify me first and try to help me reproduce it, before leaving bad ratings at the repo.
 
1) Never experienced that freeze bug before.

2) Glad that the 2 pandora projects I put my most efforts in (co-operation with _wb_ for sysinfo (this very thread), my detailed investigation of the WiFi problems), now receive such attention, and as @torpor suggests:

a ) to add the WiFi chip profile readout functionality to sysinfo makes absolutely sense, as sysinfo is THE pandora hardware monitoring utility (and meanwhile also has setting capabilities such as toggle WiFi/powersaving)

b ) I also like the share/upload-profile idea. Just keep in mind, that people with WiFi issues, may have such bad WiFi (as in my case) that uploading will fail! Thus there must be an option to save to SD card (i.e. possibly integrate that into the logging functionality, or a special dedicated "d"ump profile function), to then perform the upload from a properly networked device.

c ) I'd even more welcome, if sysinfo would allow to tinker the profile parameters, and load them into the driver. Then we'd have full featured WiFi troubleshooting functionality within sysinfo, one could edit the values, and watch the results (network graph) at the same time!
 
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I don't think it's that useful to add a visualization of the wifi chip calibration data dump to sysinfo, at least not until we have more knowledge about which fields are relevant. Maybe it will turn out that there is a setting that just works well on all chips, and it suffices to make the driver load those calibration settings. If that's the case, then it's just a matter of updating SZ to use the right calibration data, and it would be useless to view or tweak the data with sysinfo. If it turns out there are fields that are specific to the chip and everyone needs to find good values for their specific chip, then a view/tweak tool would be useful, and maybe I could add it to sysinfo. But it's quite some effort to create a GUI for something as complicated as this, and I don't want to make that effort unless we know for sure that it will be useful.
 
Point well made. I agree.

So for now "the explorers on the frontier to the WiFi lands" have to have there own rudimentary toolchain to make their explorations.
 
New version on the repo. Added a "model info" panel, which is basically the same thing as ekianjo's Pandora Model Check, so not much new here. Just thought it would be nice to have this information available from System Info so you don't need a separate utility for it. You can also change the cpu and system clock speed from this panel.

Other minor changes:

- Network panel: added "bit rate" information, made it explicit that you can toggle wifi and wifi power saving from this panel, and made the graph a tiny bit more smooth by using a 2 second average instead of the raw 1 second measurements.

- Themes: now toggles between the two normal themes. The nyancat theme is just for fun, I don't expect anyone to actually use it. So I made it hidden as an easter egg - can you find out how to enable the nyan cat theme? (spoiler: it's in the README if you can't figure it out)

- Improved compatibility: in case you are using an old 2.x kernel, some of the battery statistics are not available, so instead of freaking out, it now gracefully just doesn't display the info it doesn't know
 
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Thanks for the addition _wb_. Glad to see another utility showing that info. 

By the way be careful about the firmware information. It is not reliable if you use the "upgrade OS tool" - it only shows the right firmware if you do a full reflash so you may want to add a comment on that information there. 
 
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Thank you for inspiring me to add that stuff, and for triggering a discussion in your thread on how best to find out what model it is!
 
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