Pheww, that was quite a while ago that I posted news!
I had ENOUGH new stuff to post, but I'm stuffed with different work right now - not only Pyra-related but also in my normal daytime job (yep, the job is not my main job).
This resulted in having about 4 hours of sleep each night last week, so I really didn't find the time to summarize everything that happened.
But now it's Sunday, and while I had to work yesterday and last Sunday, I didn't have to work today and therefore can finally give you some up-to-date information!
It was a pretty crazy time since the last update, and I've got some good and also bad news for you. I had hoped to only have good news... but well, bad things can happen as well and I won't hide them from you.
So, let's start, shall we?
1. The case
The final changes have now all been implemented. FormAction plans to produce a bunch of cases tomorrow (at least thirty, so enough for all prototypes).
They also already created the molds for the silicon that's needed to seal the speakers, and hopefully we'll get those preapplied to the cases as well.
Can't wait for them
Once we got them and the keymats, I can finally build the prototype units for devs and the ones who ordererd one.
We might sell a few more of them as well, but not before they're ready to be shipped.
2. CPU-Board
Well, we got some good news, some bad news and something inbetween
First, here are the good news:
29 out of the 30 produced CPU-Boards work fine!
That's a perfectly fine failure rate and a definitive improvement over the first production run (where only 10 out of 18 produced CPU-Boards worked, and even some of those needed rework).
So Global Components is now ready for mass production, there shouldn't be any issues with that.
Now for the bad news:
The 1,5GHz freeze has not yet been fixed. We had hoped that the one trace we cut was the issue, but it wasn't
Therefore, the last 1,5 weeks we spent quite a bit of time figuring out what's going wrong here - and I guess we're pretty close!
The OMAP5 (and probably all new SoCs) are A LOT more picky when it comes to power supply and voltage stability than the OMAP3 or other SoCs.
We've spent nights figuring out whether it's purely hardware based or whether it can be fixed with software.
And we really got some improvement: My unit now runs stable at 1,2GHz, but that's the maximum we were able to achieve with our current setup.
Getting the power supply is actually a pretty complicated thing. It depends on a number of capacitors with different values, different traces and trace lenghts, the amount of layer in the PCB, the number of vias, and and and.
So this is not something generic you can build - if the power management chip is a bit further away from the OMAP5 than on a different board or you got more or less layers, you need different capacitors.
And as there's also other stuff on the CPU board (like the DRAM) that has special requirements as well, you can't simply design a perfect power supply circuit.
It's a puzzle with compromises, and with the correct set of changes and capacitors at the right places, you can improve things until they're good enough that everything works.
Nikolaus already included numerous improvements last week (he had to read A LOT of OMAP5 design documents for that...) and he will also try changing the capacitors on our CPU boards as well to see if that improves things or makes them even worse.
We're still doing more tests with both the CPU Boards and the EVMs to find out more improvements and I'm sure the next bunch of CPU boards will work perfectly fine, but it means we need to produce another small batch to test our fixes as well.
BTW: I had to smile a bit when I read today that the GPU driver crashes of the GPD Win have a similar issue: Power supply instability.
It only affects a couple of SoCs and can be fixed by replacing some resistors, but it's actually very very similar.
Yes, these modern CPUs sure are evil beasts!
We're not that far off though - 1,5GHz single core runs without any issues as well as 1,2GHz dualcore. So it's probably just a small improvement we need - and that's certainly a good thing.
So, what about the "inbetween"?
Well, memory prizes are currently going haywire!
Memory is getting more and more expensive, so I had to order the memory for the mass production right away, otherwise, it could be that it would be twice as expensive!
The problem is: While we have CPU-Boards with the 4GB RAM chips assembled already, we haven't had the time to update the kernel and bootloader yet.
We know that 2GB work perfectly fine (even with the 4GB RAM chips installed), but we don't know whether the additional 2GB will work properly as well.
They should, though, as it's a software change that enables the usage of the additional 2GB RAM, but it's untested.
Well, testing that is one of the next things on our to-do list. And in case they REALLY don't work, we can probably sell the 4GB chips for a higher price than we bought them for
3. The schematics
As promised, the Pyra will be more open than the Pandora and Nikolaus had some time to clean up the schematics!
Attached to this post are the schematics for the current revision (5.1.3) of the Pyra. Unless a bug is found, these won't change anymore.
Feel free to look through them, learn from them - or report any potential issues you find to us, so we can check them!
License is CC-BY-NC-SA which means you can use and distribute them - except asking for money for a copy of this document or parts of it.
This does not exclude that you study the ideas and make your own (commercial) designs, because that is not covered by a document licence. But please let us know if you do that... We might be interested in learning your ideas as well
So much for today, I'll post news as soon as something happens AND I find the time
Feel free to ask any questions here at this thread!
I had ENOUGH new stuff to post, but I'm stuffed with different work right now - not only Pyra-related but also in my normal daytime job (yep, the job is not my main job).
This resulted in having about 4 hours of sleep each night last week, so I really didn't find the time to summarize everything that happened.
But now it's Sunday, and while I had to work yesterday and last Sunday, I didn't have to work today and therefore can finally give you some up-to-date information!
It was a pretty crazy time since the last update, and I've got some good and also bad news for you. I had hoped to only have good news... but well, bad things can happen as well and I won't hide them from you.
So, let's start, shall we?
1. The case
The final changes have now all been implemented. FormAction plans to produce a bunch of cases tomorrow (at least thirty, so enough for all prototypes).
They also already created the molds for the silicon that's needed to seal the speakers, and hopefully we'll get those preapplied to the cases as well.
Can't wait for them
Once we got them and the keymats, I can finally build the prototype units for devs and the ones who ordererd one.
We might sell a few more of them as well, but not before they're ready to be shipped.
2. CPU-Board
Well, we got some good news, some bad news and something inbetween
First, here are the good news:
29 out of the 30 produced CPU-Boards work fine!
That's a perfectly fine failure rate and a definitive improvement over the first production run (where only 10 out of 18 produced CPU-Boards worked, and even some of those needed rework).
So Global Components is now ready for mass production, there shouldn't be any issues with that.
Now for the bad news:
The 1,5GHz freeze has not yet been fixed. We had hoped that the one trace we cut was the issue, but it wasn't
Therefore, the last 1,5 weeks we spent quite a bit of time figuring out what's going wrong here - and I guess we're pretty close!
The OMAP5 (and probably all new SoCs) are A LOT more picky when it comes to power supply and voltage stability than the OMAP3 or other SoCs.
We've spent nights figuring out whether it's purely hardware based or whether it can be fixed with software.
And we really got some improvement: My unit now runs stable at 1,2GHz, but that's the maximum we were able to achieve with our current setup.
Getting the power supply is actually a pretty complicated thing. It depends on a number of capacitors with different values, different traces and trace lenghts, the amount of layer in the PCB, the number of vias, and and and.
So this is not something generic you can build - if the power management chip is a bit further away from the OMAP5 than on a different board or you got more or less layers, you need different capacitors.
And as there's also other stuff on the CPU board (like the DRAM) that has special requirements as well, you can't simply design a perfect power supply circuit.
It's a puzzle with compromises, and with the correct set of changes and capacitors at the right places, you can improve things until they're good enough that everything works.
Nikolaus already included numerous improvements last week (he had to read A LOT of OMAP5 design documents for that...) and he will also try changing the capacitors on our CPU boards as well to see if that improves things or makes them even worse.
We're still doing more tests with both the CPU Boards and the EVMs to find out more improvements and I'm sure the next bunch of CPU boards will work perfectly fine, but it means we need to produce another small batch to test our fixes as well.
BTW: I had to smile a bit when I read today that the GPU driver crashes of the GPD Win have a similar issue: Power supply instability.
It only affects a couple of SoCs and can be fixed by replacing some resistors, but it's actually very very similar.
Yes, these modern CPUs sure are evil beasts!
We're not that far off though - 1,5GHz single core runs without any issues as well as 1,2GHz dualcore. So it's probably just a small improvement we need - and that's certainly a good thing.
So, what about the "inbetween"?
Well, memory prizes are currently going haywire!
Memory is getting more and more expensive, so I had to order the memory for the mass production right away, otherwise, it could be that it would be twice as expensive!
The problem is: While we have CPU-Boards with the 4GB RAM chips assembled already, we haven't had the time to update the kernel and bootloader yet.
We know that 2GB work perfectly fine (even with the 4GB RAM chips installed), but we don't know whether the additional 2GB will work properly as well.
They should, though, as it's a software change that enables the usage of the additional 2GB RAM, but it's untested.
Well, testing that is one of the next things on our to-do list. And in case they REALLY don't work, we can probably sell the 4GB chips for a higher price than we bought them for
3. The schematics
As promised, the Pyra will be more open than the Pandora and Nikolaus had some time to clean up the schematics!
Attached to this post are the schematics for the current revision (5.1.3) of the Pyra. Unless a bug is found, these won't change anymore.
Feel free to look through them, learn from them - or report any potential issues you find to us, so we can check them!
License is CC-BY-NC-SA which means you can use and distribute them - except asking for money for a copy of this document or parts of it.
This does not exclude that you study the ideas and make your own (commercial) designs, because that is not covered by a document licence. But please let us know if you do that... We might be interested in learning your ideas as well
So much for today, I'll post news as soon as something happens AND I find the time
Feel free to ask any questions here at this thread!
