Preparing for a Prototype

[Grench]

Shipping labels out of the way and the packing tape cut:

First thing to be seen:

Well packed box:

Lots of stuff in there...

Here is all of it out of the packing materials:

The black box is a GPD Mciro PC - I bought one from EDs shop and asked him to ship it with my prototype.

The above were all taken on my Planet Computers Cosmo Communicator with the flash turned off. Looking at the picture I realized that the detail of the lid wasn't going to show up well with just an overhead flood so I turned on the flash and something magical happened.

I'm betting that there was something happening to the pigment in the heat that made it UV reactive in the LED phone flash. I think it is -awesome-. I may have to play around with it under a blacklight.

From that picture now, I have decided to name my prototype "Marble". As in, "I'm going to go play with my marble." (Note for the non-English speakers: It is a light play on a word - when referencing a game played with small balls of glass it is usually called marbles plural as in, "I'm going to go play with my marbles.")

Opened it up and - the top and right side lid tabs were detached a bit.

Mild pressure and they clicked into place. Note - in the above image it is -before- I clicked them into place. Having it 'loose' made it easier to get the screen film off anyway.

I made it through setup and It is charging now. Quick hint to the others: In the local setup, English US, German and one other are pre-selected in the -long- list. Odds are you will be able to simply select 'next'. The battery was low and I need to cook supper for the family, so it is now charging. I will try to put together more thoughts around a verbose write-up when I have had time to spend more than 15 minutes with it.

 

[Nintendo]

w0000000000000000t, so awesome

 

[edgex004]

I am F5’ing the boards so hard right now. Seeing other people receiving their Pyras has me way more excited than it probably should.

 

[EvilDragon]

I made it through setup and It is charging now.

Ah, small tip regarding that: Power off the unit while charging, as it uses less power then.

 

[Grench]

Ah, small tip regarding that: Power off the unit while charging, as it uses less power then.

And... I left it on and plugged into a USB 1A power source while I had supper and... I have fully depleted the battery. I have it hooked up now via a high gauge microUSB 3.0 industrial 12" device cable to a USB 2.0 charge port through a nifty little USB voltage/ammeter dongle. Currently pulling 1.86 A at 5.06 VDC with the unit powered down.

Red power button light is on, but it refuses to boot again for now. I'll give it an hour or so.

On a more interesting note - while I had it powered on I opened up Synaptic and installed VLC and Gkrellm. I didn't have a chance to play with VLC yet, but Gkrellm works pretty darn well. Displayed CPU usage and drive activity and seems to be getting input from some temp monitors.

 

[docbroke]

Pyra comes with a pandora case ? Is it for prototypes only, or preorderers will also receive the case ?

Congratulations @Grench. Waiting is getting difficult now, but it is exciting too.

 

[Grench]

Pyra comes with a pandora case ? Is it for prototypes only, or preorderers will also receive the case ?

Congratulations @Grench. Waiting is getting difficult now, but it is exciting too.

Prototypes got several extras, aka 'goodies'. From what I can tell we are each getting different 'goodies'. Pretty cool in my opinion, but then I'm obviously biased.

Battery charging current draw dropped down to 1A. Would not start or reset. Pulled the battery for 30 secs, reassembled, started right up.

Getting a weird status report on the battery.
"
Laptop battery 2 hours 50 minutes remaining (100.0%)
Laptop battery discharging (51.0%)
"
Why would it give two lines for that?

Plugged unit in while running = blank screen. Push & hold power button 8 secs powers off. Press again, back up and running. Clearly there are some improvements remaining to be made in how the software controls the power management?

Connects to WiFi well enough - though a bit weaker signal than most of my other devices.

Boots real fast!

Now that it is up and running with the 2A charging source and the meter between it and the source, I am reading 0.67 A draw.
Battery report now:
"
Laptop battery charging (100.0%)
Laptop battery discharging (77.0%)
"

At least it is seeing the charging now - when I had it connected to the lower Amp source it didn't say 'charging'. The 'discharging' side of the message is confusing though.

Disconnected from power source, now I have three messages about it.
Pop up says Battery Discharging 11 Hours remaining 84%.

On the status bar:
Laptop Battery 7 hours 5 minutes remaining (100.0%)
Laptop battery discharging (66.0%)

Got VLC playing back MP3 files now. Audio through speakers is very good. Have to be careful on the volume though - get too far up and it starts to crackle and distort (known that it can overpower the speakers). Plugging in headphones = very loud in headphones & speakers still playing. Known configuration bit. Figured out how to control it well enough. Volume wheel seems to work only for the speakers. To further control the volume on the headphones, I control the VLC output volume down to about 45%. VLC works pretty darn awesome with the D pad controlling FFW/RW volume up & down. Getting a whole lot of audio artifacts - line noise type stuff - when VLC is running. Might be something to do with VLC. Still, not bad for "eight o' clock day one".

I have a 256GB SDXC card in the right slot that I'm playing VBR MP3 (lossless bitrate levels) files through. (yes, I know, but MP3 are compatible with everything). It was my card from my Pandora, I thought that the music on it would be a good place to start.

Sitting idle, Gkrellm is showing 4-7% on CPU0 and 2-7% on CPU1. They seem fully independent of each other - i.e. they are not up/down locked (good thing).

Screen is clear and bright - if a bit glossy.

Screen brightness and keyboard backlight go up/down as intended - use the left shoulder buttons as modifiers when using the backlight adjustment button - works great!

After letting the system settle after playing around with VLC, I'm still getting dual messages out of the battery system.
"
Laptop battery 6 hours 55 minutes remaining (91.0%)
Laptop battery 2 hours 50 minutes remaining (54.0%)
"
It is like the tale of the man with two watches - never knows what time it is.

Don't take the above as complaints. This is a prototype - I do not expect it to 'all be working'. My overall opinion is that this device is going to be fantastic! Feels comfortable in the hands. No, I haven't gamed on it yet. That is all for tonight. Time for me to put my Marble away.

 

[docbroke]

Battery charging current draw dropped down to 1A. Would not start or reset. Pulled the battery for 30 secs, reassembled, started right up.

My guess is that is another manifestation of kernel not able to totally power off the device. Which also causes battery drain while shutdown. You may like to try letux kernel.

 

[Grench]

My guess is that is another manifestation of kernel not able to totally power off the device. Which also causes battery drain while shutdown. You may like to try letux kernel.

I am still getting myself into what it is as it is. I have only had a few hours with it.

 

[pmprog]

Mild pressure and they clicked into place. Note - in the above image it is -before- I clicked them into place

Hmmm. When I upgraded my Pandora to a rebirth, my screen came back like that, however when I tried to push it in, I've ended up cracking the case, which I try and keep together with electrical tape. I hope when ED starts shipping production units that they are given a check for things like that before shipping

 

[sebt3]

...

...

Nice to see pyra finally in some (power) users hands. Maybe my repo will finally receive some use

 

[EvilDragon]

Yes, the two battery reports are a software thing - Toastbucket has already fixed them in his driver setup (which also improves charging) but it's not yet on your device. A full reflash with the current intallation image would fix that.

 

[matzesu]

Nice to read some reviews; seems like the Device is allready pretty awesome,
Cool, so whe have only some Software Issues until now..
Whish lots of fun whit the Prototyps booth of you

 

[docbroke]

Yes, the two battery reports are a software thing - Toastbucket has already fixed them in his driver setup (which also improves charging) but it's not yet on your device. A full reflash with the current intallation image would fix that.

Can we create Repo for pyra specific packages, so that user can do apt update && apt upgrade, without needing reflash.

 

[matzesu]

Also please, May someone that Kind and change „Laptop Batterie“ to „Pyra Batterie“ ??
This is a Pyra, not a normal Laptop..

 

[sebt3]

Can we create Repo for pyra specific packages, so that user can do apt update && apt upgrade, without needing reflash.

I dont know why ED recommand a reflash, there's, maybe, a reason that couldnt in a deb package.
But there's an official debian repository for pyra (https://packages.pyra-handheld.com/debian/) and I'm pretty sure ED is aware of it (since he configured the webserver for it )

And then there's an unofficial community driven one : https://pyra-handheld.com/boards/threads/dbp-repository.80399/post-1422544

 

[EvilDragon]

Some of the fixes are in U-Boot, and I don't think debian packages can flash the bootloader.
The remaining stuff is already in a debian repository which is also setup in the units.

 

[docbroke]

That's unusual. I think boot partition can be mounted and flashed from any running Linux OS.

 

[EvilDragon]

That's unusual. I think boot partition can be mounted and flashed from any running Linux OS.

OMAP-Based devices don't have a boot partition. The bootloader (combination of MLO / U-Boot) is installed on the first sectors of the partition.
I'm happy if someone can correct me here, maybe it IS possible (I mean, grub can also be upgraded via debian and installs in a similar way), but at the moment, we don't have a tool setup for that

 

[docbroke]

I guess we are using MBR boot sector. I haven't used that in some time as my all devices use GPT, but I think we can write to MBR sector using dd.
I think this may help

Write MBR Code

I am an electrical engineer who has recently discovered the need to modify the code in the MBR. Basically I need the ability to execute code on the HDD before, the OS starts up and takes over. I ...

stackoverflow.com