Preparing for a Prototype

[Grench]

To keep the download legit, It requires some game data files and put into the appdata dir... The site went down where I got it seems, after all my New Years Eve debauchery I can PM a link to get the game data.

No worries. I'm poking around at random anyway to see what works.

I just managed to crash my Pyra. I was running about eight things at once and playing Hostile Takeover, doing esc-start on the game to check the other things. No, I wasn't on serial, so it wasn't logged. Pyra is doing pretty good though for an early unit on a still wrinkly OS.

 

[Grench]

Video playback of .mp4 through VLC is weird.
Movie plays, but -blends- with the desktop interface. Both wind up being ghostly on top of and through each other.

Running completely in software without acceleration (rather expected). Pegs both CPU cores at 100% and video is a bit choppy if I move the mouse during playback.

But, that it works at all at this point is rather cool. I wonder what it is going to take to get mp4 video decode acceleration up and working.

 

[Grench]

Audacious works fantastic. Playing Yoko Kano's Tank from Cowboy Beebop right now with the lid 3/4 closed on the desk in front of me. Speakers are 'bright' and lacking bass, but what do you want from a pair of speakers the size of dimes? Assuming no hardware acceleration at this stage, MP3 playback. Stereo 44100 Hz Bitrate 276 kb/s, ~22% CPU usage (both cores) according to Gkrellm (may not be accurate). Sounds a lot better than cell phone speakers. Have to make sure you turn the volume way down to start with - Pyra has way more power than her speakers can handle cleanly.

Switching to a cheap set of earbuds.
Good - so much power that the earbuds will clip. Plugging in earbuds switched output from speakers to headset.
Bad - music cuts out for about a tenth of a second every 6-10 seconds or so. At first I thought I must have a short in the connection - nope.
Weird - music playback doesn't cut out when I have the headphones out and playback through the speakers, only does that through the earbuds. No audio skip or cutout through speakers.

I would try a bluetooth headset, but I don't know which programs to install for that.

Makes me think - at some point we will want a 'Pyra Optimization Package' to install after or during the Debian install with all of the video and audio acceleration trickery included. It may as well include the right bluetooth drivers with that?

Continuous light show. Okay, the red flashing sets of two heartbeat from the lid LEDs is getting annoying. How do I turn that off or make the lid lights follow the left/right of power button status lights so they mean something?

Keep in mind the above is commentary on software support that is expected to be hit and miss at this stage. The important part to take away is that the hardware itself is checking out as -working-!

 

[Grench]

Any requests for things I should try out?
Restrictions: Software must be downloadable via Synaptic and not require hardware accelerations (we know those are not here yet).

I'm doing real well with the Pyra booted from the left SD card slot. I have a 64 GB SDXC card in there and I am really tempted to mount it internally and 'see what happens'. I can't think of any reason not to try it out again. It worked for me once before ED said not to because it wasn't tested - but then, testing things and seeing if they break is kind of my role in this isn't it?

Hmm.

 

[Grench]

Well, I have been running with my 64GB EVO card mounted in the internal microSDXC slot for the last 15 minutes.

Music playback via Audacious through the device speakers is just as it is when the card is mounted in the left SDXC slot (expected).
I can't get anything through the headphone port now (not expected). Weird.

But, it booted (hold left shoulder shift at power button press). It seems to work fine this way. Booted fast, seems stable.

 

[docbroke]

Any requests for things I should try out?
Restrictions: Software must be downloadable via Synaptic and not require hardware accelerations (we know those are not here yet).

I'm doing real well with the Pyra booted from the left SD card slot. I have a 64 GB SDXC card in there and I am really tempted to mount it internally and 'see what happens'. I can't think of any reason not to try it out again. It worked for me once before ED said not to because it wasn't tested - but then, testing things and seeing if they break is kind of my role in this isn't it?

Hmm.

Things to try
microHDMI for external display out
Libreoffice

 

[levi]

I think we've seen Libreoffice is almost every video posted about a pyra, although it's mainly focused on writer. What's your favourite bit of libreoffice?

And I'd like to thank Grench personally for testing out headphones and music playback. That's one of my main uses for these devices as I have quite a large music collection digitised that I need to check for errors, and I also listen to podcasts quite a lot.

Other ideas:
Test port speed, mainly the external sd cards and the usb2 port and if you're feeling adventorous the USB 3 port might be the ultimate in speed.
Report on wifi speed. The supposed 802.11n wifi nub I just bought doesn't go about about 5MBps (40Mbps) transferring files over the network, so I don't expect anything to actually hit the 150Mbps promised, but it might be nice to see what rates we can hit.
Testing font scaling. Most linux DEs allow you to set font sizes for text in window furniture and on the status bars, but it'd be nice to get instructions for people making videos to make their screens legible to cameras.

 

[docbroke]

I think we've seen Libreoffice is almost every video posted about a pyra, although it's mainly focused on writer. What's your favourite bit of libreoffice?

And I'd like to thank Grench personally for testing out headphones and music playback. That's one of my main uses for these devices as I have quite a large music collection digitised that I need to check for errors, and I also listen to podcasts quite a lot.

Other ideas:
Test port speed, mainly the external sd cards and the usb2 port and if you're feeling adventorous the USB 3 port might be the ultimate in speed.
Report on wifi speed. The supposed 802.11n wifi nub I just bought doesn't go about about 5MBps (40Mbps) transferring files over the network, so I don't expect anything to actually hit the 150Mbps promised, but it might be nice to see what rates we can hit.
Testing font scaling. Most linux DEs allow you to set font sizes for text in window furniture and on the status bars, but it'd be nice to get instructions for people making videos to make their screens legible to cameras.

I wanted to see libreoffice impress running on external display using micro hdmi out, including cloning of display and extended display which gives different views on both the displays.

 

[Djoga'Ro]

@Grench You paid a lot of money for the privilege to be among the first paying customers taking pictures. Don't waste it or ... you know ... all you describe didn't happen.

 

[Grench]

I went back to the left SD card boot. After doing a software shutdown, I could not get it to reboot with the microSDXC card in the internal slot. Switching back to the left SD slot fixed it. Something strange there, but it was fun to see it working from the internal microSDXC.

While I had it open, I installed my Google Fi data card. Yes, I know - a different set of bands than is ideal for this device. Works in my Planet Computers Gemini 'well enough', should be about the same here. Now, how do I turn on the mobile data on the device? I can't see an option to do that in the Debian networking - likely is going to need additional software support?

Reconnected headphones. They work when booted from the left SD slot but not when using the internal microSD slot. Appears to be a difference between the two. I have the speakers and the headphones both running right now. The speakers run fine - the headphones are doing the cut for a tenth of a second or so every 6-10 seconds again (as above).

The two bits above - reboot issues and headphone jack not working - are the only detriments I found to using the internal microSDXC to boot.

Does anyone have any tips on how to turn on a mobile data card on Debian?

 

[docbroke]

I went back to the left SD card boot. After doing a software shutdown, I could not get it to reboot with the microSDXC card in the internal slot. Switching back to the left SD slot fixed it. Something strange there, but it was fun to see it working from the internal microSDXC.

While I had it open, I installed my Google Fi data card. Yes, I know - a different set of bands than is ideal for this device. Works in my Planet Computers Gemini 'well enough', should be about the same here. Now, how do I turn on the mobile data on the device? I can't see an option to do that in the Debian networking - likely is going to need additional software support?

Reconnected headphones. They work when booted from the left SD slot but not when using the internal microSD slot. Appears to be a difference between the two. I have the speakers and the headphones both running right now. The speakers run fine - the headphones are doing the cut for a tenth of a second or so every 6-10 seconds again (as above).

The two bits above - reboot issues and headphone jack not working - are the only detriments I found to using the internal microSDXC to boot.

Does anyone have any tips on how to turn on a mobile data card on Debian?

I guess you are using network manager, in that case you will need modemmanager installed and running as a service, that will give option for connecting to mobile network in network manager applet.

Post automatically merged: Jan 1, 2020

Other more difficult options are wvdial, netctl or minicom, but make sure that you do not run multiple network client service at same time.

 

[Grench]

@Grench You paid a lot of money for the privilege to be among the first paying customers taking pictures. Don't waste it or ... you know ... all you describe didn't happen.

I have tried to take some pictures of the screen / device. Using the flash all I see in the picture is my ugly reflection in the screen. Without flash, it is out of focus and blurry.

This is about the clearest I have been able to get of it sitting on my desktop. To do this, I turned the keyboard backlight to near off and the display backlight down to two steps above off. Camera flash is off. My overhead light is dimmed about as far as it will go. It is still overexposed with exception of the nuclear powered power button LED.

But - here you see my Pyra prototype Marble playing a Louis Armstrong song during random playback using Audacious.

I tried to take a video of it - a blurry mess. Pictures and videos really aren't my thing.

 

[edgex004]

Well... if you (@Grench ) or any other prototype orderers run out of stuff to try, here is my wish-list:
- Once some mouse-free games are working, trying HDMI out with Bluetooth or USB controllers.
- Chat clients like telegram or slack. Wee-slack is a great cli slack option.
- i3wm !!!
- IDEs like geany or vscode
- reading ebooks (FBReader) and comics/manga (comix)
- mypaint and tiled for making game art/maps on the road
- redshift
- is there a working microphone? A test of that, maybe.
- looks like Debian has an anbox armhf package. No idea how well that willl work or if it requires hardware accel.

 

[Djoga'Ro]

I have tried to take some pictures of the screen / device. Using the flash all I see in the picture is my ugly reflection in the screen. Without flash, it is out of focus and blurry.

This is about the clearest I have been able to get of it sitting on my desktop. To do this, I turned the keyboard backlight to near off and the display backlight down to two steps above off. Camera flash is off. My overhead light is dimmed about as far as it will go. It is still overexposed with exception of the nuclear powered power button LED.

But - here you see my Pyra prototype Marble playing a Louis Armstrong song during random playback using Audacious.

I tried to take a video of it - a blurry mess. Pictures and videos really aren't my thing.

Seeing it sitting there like that, how does the hinge do/feel?
Maybe the screen would be less foggy in the picture, if the it was tilted further upwards in this situation.

 

[ptitSeb]

If you want to try an arcade game to test the buttons, you can build HydraCastleLabyrinth yourself. I haven't packaged it yet on dbp, but it's easy to build:

sudo apt install build-essential git libsdl-dev libsdl-mixer1.2-dev cmake timidity
cd ~
git clone https://github.com/ptitSeb/hydracastlelabyrinth.git
cd hydracastlelabyrinth
cmake . -DPYRA=1-DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=RelWithDebInfo
make -j

After the build (enjoy fast build!) simply run

./hcl

To run it. Fullscreen and Pyra button should already be configured.

 

[aTc]

The annoying heartbeat led is there so i can easily see if the prototype has crashed. It still seems to have some stability issues when the battery stops charging.
you can turn it off by editing /etc/default/leds, and changing "hearbeat " to "none" on logo:red:bottom, then running "sudo led-config start"
If you want to play about with the led config, you can get a list of possible modes by doing "cat /sys/class/leds/logo:red:bottom/trigger"

Speakers can probably sound a bit better, but there are some driver issues. worst is that the amplifier chip applies a dc offset to the output, so the speakers have only a tiny bit of range.
At louder volumes the entire driver can panic and sends out only noise.
bluetooth audio should work, but i haven't tried it in ages, there's no easy gui setup for it. The current audio config is hardcoded to work around some serious driver issues to get at least some sound out of the speakers, and would probably get in the way of having any other output devices.

mobile data works if you configure it manually, but i haven't set up the modemmanager/networkmanager to handle things automatically.
networkmanager does show the modem in the list of connections, but it wants to use it in a different mode than what the hardware supports.
The modem only shows up about 4 minutes after booting thanks to some initialization problem.
It does work, but i've only tested it by sending it the required AT commands manually ( if you really want to play about with it, look here )

 

[matzesu]

I would rather like to know how good the Pyra fits an a Pocket, as the Case Size is something that want change much,
The Software will mature in the next few month, so it’s cool to see what already works, but it could be that this changes until I have my Pyra..
I wonder what I make diferent by making pictures of my Pandora..

 

[sebt3]

Trying to get KETM to run. I downloaded four different .dbp versions of it.

Yup, you downloaded the data dbps. theses files only contain the games data and the launcher to use that data. you'll need the engine

All of them refuse to run for me. dbp-run error window pops up to tell me that, "One or more dependencies for package 'ketm_episode1_sebt3' is missing. The program may or may not work without these. Below is a list of missing dependencies.
System packages (no listing)
Movable packages
Package name Version
ketm_engine_sebt3
[Install missing dependencies] [Abort launch] [Launch anyway]

The dbp system have a dependency management system. When packaging ketm, I wanted to use this feature so I could built it into tthe repo.
By default, the repo only list the apps available, so if the engine dont sport any apps, then you wont be able to find it in the apps list. Yet the missing dbp is available on the repo (and dbp_get.sh would have automaticly install it with the games)
But still, you could have found it. on the Episode 1 page you have a "dependency" box which contain a single button, which drive you to : https://pyra-handheld.com/repo/packages/ketm_engine_sebt3
The missing package
Yet this might not work since that wasnt build for buster but stretch. Give me some days to setup a dev env and build this one, supertux and dosbox

 

[erico]

@Grench , anything to say about heat so far within your tests? I may think that if said nothing about it, the heat sincs are doing a nice job.

 

[rSl]

omg, this is all so nice. feeling like a kid in the candy shop.