Quotes Thread For The Blog

[Mithrildor]

I built a 'blinkenlight' for when the battery gets low; for awhile I was blinking the power-led (green), but now I've switched it ot the charge led (red), so it stands out more (doens't look like a SD access

I had briefly considered (it was 3am a few crazy LED patterns, for fun (easter egg?) -- a knight rider (cylon!) stryle swoosh back and forth across the LEDs is not hard to do. Or have it blink them relative to whats going on musicly, etc Lots of goofy stuff can be done, for sure.

The LEDs are devices that can be set at the shell or code levels by anyone (assuming permissions are opened up, I forget if they are open past root or not right now, but easily changed), and libpnd includes functions for working with them easily. (ie: get current brightnes,s set current brightness.) And since you can do it with a sh-script (notaz rules), you can easily fusk with things all you like.

Check libpnd for lots of handy stuff -- read the controls, work with the leds, get/set the cpu speed .. I've tried ot make a lot of things really easy, so folks can spend their time on their game code/etc, withotu futzing so much with the pandora-specific gunk.

jeff

 

[Qwertyuiop]

More boxes (pic)-

http://twitpic.com/19rikd

Craig Twitter-

Going to visit a factory in Scotland next month to see if we can bring more of the Pandora production to the UK.

 

[mali]

Hiya,

working on WiFi at the moment, I didn't have much time to check out all other stuff
AFAIR the eMails I got, there was one slight problem that didn't show until the first cases had been REALLY produced.
Nothing big, AFAIK it's already fixed and production is going again.
Hopefully they'll make it until tomorrow, but it might also be a few days more, you never know with such things.

However, this is one of the reasons we decided to start production on April 1st (as stated already in the last blog entry).

We expected some delay, either from board production or from case production.
Therefore, we added a week of safety buffer

Most important for me though is that the Chinese have started production, as could be clearly seen by the pictures.
It's a big step further than what we last were
And it's going to be finished eventually.

Also in regards to the board production, I think about 360 boards are already tested, so it's also getting there.

Okay, back to debugging - we want that last component of the Pandora (WiFi) working, too.
Michael, notaz, DJWillis and me are almost working 24/7 on that issue. Never thought WiFi could be so complicated, but we'll handle this, I'm sure

So1e april only 500 will be made?
And the other 3500 a month later?

I want mine before summer holidays thats for sure. Im gonna be mad and cancel if mine aint shipped by then.

Those cancelling threats do nothing, they get a bit boring now... we all are aware of how close to edge we are and you can be sure we do everything to finish the units as soon as possible.
I nearly had a breakdown this weekend because I had too much stress and work at the moment, so it's no real fun for us, you know?

Anyways, that 500 for a start is nothing new, if you read the blog post, it's even stated there for over a week...

Thanks guys, it's really helpful to have a lot of back support.

Well, I also do wonder how many would really cancel it that state. So far, mostly only those have cancelled who either ran out of money or did order the Pandora way later.
I haven't had much cancellations compared to how many orders I have - and I still get daily eMails with stuff like "I know all the risks - let me send you my money and I'll wait for it forever!"

So there's still a lot of fans who can imagine how hard everything is... and that we'll work our ass off

Well, I'm trying to accept the following scenarios:

a) Nothing will work out. We couldn't get Wifi to work and the cases are not usable. We have to refund all money and all are blank. The servers will be shut down which means the end of the file archives, the gp2x shop, maybe even gp32x.de or gp2x.de. We'll lose everything we worked for during the last 12 years.

B) Same as a), but there are a lot of people interested to buy the finished boards. This probably give us as much money back to not lose everything, but have a lot to pay back during the next 150 years.

c) We'll get the cases and can build the Pandora but somehow can't get WiFi working. A lot of people will want to cancel. Others don't care about - they'll either try to get WiFi working (maybe even successfully) or plug in a cheap stick in the back. Most of them only want to play anyways. We probably lost a lot of money with this, but we'll surive.

d) We'll get the cases and get WiFi working. We'll deliver and are happy everything worked out. Best case scenario

e) We give up and sell everything to some big company for a few millions. We wouldn't have lost anything - but we also wouldn't have achieved anything


I still think the most likely thing is d)
March 26th will still be in time for April 1st assembly, and that WiFi bugger will also eventually be fixed
The OS is working quite well, that's why we're concentrating on WiFi at the moment, games and emulators can be played.

I personally wouldn't mind sticking a cheap WiFi stick in the back of the Pandora until everything is working - after all, it doesn't even get in your way while playing, that USB port is really placed well
We'll continue or search for the working wifi

I'm serious, I don't want to read the word "breakdown" or something similar here on gp32x.de ! Pandora is not important enough to ruin one's health, really.
What do you guys think about that ?

Well, I guess we're all involved in it too much.
Of course we'd all want to take a break - however, what would you do if you knew that your whole existance could be basically wiped out with that project?
If anything goes wrong and most will want a refund, we'll either have to go look for an investor (true, possible to find with an almost-finished device with so many press reports) or give up and lose everything (well, of course we'll never do that).

Therefore, if all you have is endangered, of course you try to fix everything as soon as possible.
I guess every issue that occurs in that project does hurt us more than it does for everyone else. I still wonder I didn't suffer a heart attack yet.
Just think about how much money a preorderer could possibly lose and how much we could lose...

Maybe we should've done everything with some kind of sponsoring or shares instead of preordering: Everyone willing to pay the amount of money could do so but it might happen he'll lose that one if anything goes wrong. Instead of preordering and we'll HAVE to pay it back (or deliver).
We'd have fewer orders for sure, but we wouldn't have that huge amount of money sitting in our backs which would put a lot of ease on our mind which would've made production a lot more easy.
Who knows.

Anyways, I'm sure we'll manage. It's just that we have a lot on our backs right.
Just got the information from the chinese company that everything is back to normal. The issue delayed it a bit, but they're sure they'll ship on March 26th.
Still in time for assembly.

Now all we need are the boards

And I'm back to WiFi debugging and testing... we can connect, but we still lose some packets which slows down things a lot.
Might be an easy fix, but as usual: Even if the fix is easy, it can take weeks to actually find it. Or it could happen you eventually stumble over it and it works tomorrow.

I'll keep you updated!

Things will probably speed up once it started.
Of course testing takes a while longer at the beginning. After a while once you done it quite a few times, things will speed up.

(PCB population in Scotland?)

As the current boards are already populated and tested in USA (and 360 boards are already tested, I think 700 are produced), I'd say it's an option for the next batch.

However, with all the places where different parts originate from, we should have a "Built in various wicked places all over the goddamn globe"-Sticker on it

Just looking at the Pandora and thinking about the awesome stuff we will be able to do with it keeps me going. I'm so happy we went with what, at the time, looked like an insane design.

You tell me... I got a Pandora at home with tons of fullspeed Amiga games and don't even find the time to play them

But, wow, the OS is evolving so well at the moment, it will be cool

 

[mali]

Na-Noo -- I try to be impartial about things, as I have been doing mobile development (professionally and as a hobby) for >10 years now, with some highly successful products, and my great fun open source homebrew, etc. I like to think I can be critical and fair .. not being 'over hard' on something jsut cause I can, or to show people I can be tough something I'm working on, and not 'too soft' on something because its a pet, etc. So I like to think I can favourably compare gp2x, wiz, Pandora, and I will be honest. I will try not to 'lie through omission' and such. Over the long years I've been in this forum, people tend to think i'm pretty even handed when discussing PSP vs 2x, etc, so hopefully I'm succeeding. (Think of it like 'woman CEO' or 'woman cop' syndrome .. many peopel will think a woman cop tough to prove she can do it, or because being jaded by asshole men their whole career etc; I'm not a woman of course, but being a pandora devver might suggest to you I'll go easy or too hard on it, but I try to use the _metrics_ or say statements, or label an opinion when its an opinion.)

All that said, I did not weigh in on the overclock discussion much, for those reasons -- I didn't do such comprehensive testing, when people were very sensitive about the topic, with a thermometer or whatever the 'industry'/community would require for real testing. I ran it overclocked like a mofo with a book on top (Neal Stephenson, so a thick ass book , and it didn't barely feal warm to touch. But to be 'real' test, it should have temperatures taken with a therm stuck in the headp[hone jack or something (dunno?), with well defined paramaters (ambient temps, type of SD cards in slots, etc). So I didn't say much. It was an easy thing to do, and not something I put thought into .. 'hey, the forum is exploding, I'll just do this and see how it goes for myself'. I'm as much a post-whore as the next guy (if anyone thought I didn't notice it, you'd think me a fool. I write stuff for the joy of coding, and the 'dev arrow' .. getting it to where people enjoy it; so feedback and quick releases are mhy way, akin to the open source mantra. I don't like coding in a isolated room with releases once a year. So thats why I post so damned much, I like to keep a 'accurate target' through frequent feedback. I'm not a fool!) .. but I didn't want to weigh in on that otpic, as I'd just get flamed or cause trouble .. people will interpret or misinterpret every single thing you say in a forum, especially if you're Craig (who has pretty much given up to saying anything, knowing it'll be wildly flamed or over-dramatacized, and so I think he enjoys some of the mystery he now brings

The 'to the metal' rev2 pcb I have (red pcb, no case/nubs/keyb/etc) is a speed _demon_ -- barely an OS, just a kernel running on it, its goddamned fast, as I said a year or more back; with a full OS on the newer rev3 proto unit, its still a beast But a few things are rough, as we've all been over .. the only real weak spots right now are wifi and video playback. A number of things could be improved, but that is always the way on all devices and I and others have gone over it all before. (and I've noticed things like, you can buy an Archos 5 with similar hardware, that is completely unworkable when purchased for some $500 or so! (until recent patches have made it useful), so Panda isn't the only one with growing pains I did muck up one of my buttons on the device, but MW was already aware of and fixed that problem (was noted in the forums a few months back), and my LCD cable is a little funky (MW noted that as it was one o his first assemblies he mucked it up a little; as this is a proto case with alterations and before experience and such, I've not mentioned this much, but things seem ok. No one else has reported an issue so I consider it a my-proto-only thing.)

I've gone on before that I really ike the hardware -- davec's subtle design isn't function over form, but I like how it looks anyway.. even if it is a little brickish. If only it coudl be just a touch smaller (gee, its already one of or the smallest of all umpc's with a keyboard, and I want more , but such is life and I noted that in the forum; the software _I think_ is great already .. I'm sure we're going to ship with a few little nits (I'd like to add some minimenu docs to the menus and xfce, but likely won't have time; I'd like to have an icon to run minimenu in xfce, but who knows. Little tiny stupid stuff like that theres lots of.) But I can fire it up .. I fire it up to my own mmenu right now, or to xfce (and mmenu can run xfce from within itself, easy enough.) I can play games, and we've got the new documentratin links I brought up a couple weeks ago working nice (yay, I like it myself .. watching sensibly encoded videos works fine, mp3 playback is fine, PDF reader works great. I use the terminal/console quite a bit, and typing away on the keyboard is great (thumbs, not fingers). I've been building Kronos for IF/text-advents and it plays sweet. Quake3 is pretty damned good actually, despite being an early port.

So when you fire it up, its solid. Liek anything else -- 10% of the people will make 90% of the noise, and they'll make it look like the walls are falling down; they're not. So when you get your unit, you'll be 90% impressed, but a few forum peopel will scream like mad if Wifi isn't fully sorted out yet. But you know about that already, so I don't count it in comments I make -- I take it as given that video decoding is fiddly, and wifi is broken, so fine, I move on. (And hope thats fair, but I don't hide anything.) (Hell, if you transcode to a 320x200 type res liek a lot of devices and upscale, you'll have no problem. I'm talking 800x480 video here, thats hard for it to keep up with without hw.. so using sensible encodes, you're okay, no need to go tiny. Just don't go high def with touch codecs like h264

The screen isn't as good as a Wiz's (few are!); its also much larger and such, so a lot more for it to do.

And blah, how did I turn this into a reivew?

If you want, I can try to do an organized and considered 'had it a few weeks' review, rather than my 'holy wow!' inital impressions, but It hink I've gone over it before.

So yeah, fun hardware, pretty solid software with a lot of cool-ass stuff we built in, whats not to like?

As others have said -- if you back out, thats fine, but do it because you need the money or whatever. The device is damned well coming, we've put too much into it for it to stop (And I say that from doing it all for free, since I'm a moron who believes in the damned thing, with hopes of making a few b ucks down the road if the guys whose mortgages rife on this actually make a penny back and feal generous

Suffice to say, when I signed up I 'wrote off' the cash, figuring at worst I'd likely get it back if everything flew apart, and at best I'd get something I've been wanting my entire life. I coudl afford the investment, and so its a worthy risk -- wicked-awesome gadget on one hand, or some amount of cash 'goes away for awhile, likely comes back' on the other. If you couldn't afford the bones, thats a different decision. After all this time, we're _nearly there_, and I'm still calling it wicked-awesome, and worth the wait.

jeff

edit: Mith, yes, currently I have a rev2 red-pcb thats been running more or less for >1 year since I got it; it is just a pcb and old-LCD. After allis said and done, maybe I shoudl try to get a case and keypad/etc for it to 'semi complete it', but for now it serves as a remote-login for testing apps while out and about. (ssh over usbnet.) the rev3-case proto with rev4 pcb I do most of my hacking/abuse on.

Hmm where to start....

I guess ill never have to cancel since ive got some hw, although its actually quite fortunate I did get involved. Otherwise my wife would be on me to cancel
Also I like and agree with many of the things skeezix rambled on about...;-)

I say one thing im looking forward to is all the goodies the community is going to cook up for this thing. Theres alot of talented folk out there that i think can make a lot of neat things. It be nice to get back to the gp2x days where something new to try would pop up on a regular basis.

I really believe that once everyone gets there hands on one they will be glad they waited. Even though its been way longer than anyone expected in my opinion theres still nothing out there that can give the same experience. Thats really been the reason ive done all the videos to show people what to expect and what types of things can be done.

FYI anyone can still see me with a pandora here: http://www.mug.org/twiki/bin/view/Mugwiki/WhereAndWhen

We're told to expect photos and courier details tomorrow.

 

[Prometheus]

They sent a list of all the parts to be shipped and a bill.

No photos yet.

 

[mali]

(carry case)

http://twitpic.com/1apjqg - The (carry) case 1.0

http://twitpic.com/1apjux - The carry case open! (Your extra contents may vary)

Aww! it looks so cushy and cuddly!
Good thing I ordered one.

Hmm, it doesn't seem like the TV-out cable has a place? unless that top part is zippered and can contain stuff?

Because the TV out cable is so long and that it has 4 TV connections and a Pandora connector it is actually pretty huge. I decided that the carry case should not have a space for it because, seriously, it would almost double the height of it.

There is space for SD cards though. You can have 2 in the Pandora and 4+ in the top of the case.

Another thing is when you look at the case with the Pandora in it it's pretty awesome to think there is basically a tiny laptop in there.

Yeah, that makes sense. I forgot that they are cables and not just adapters.
So have you officially decided to include both the hard and soft cases? or do we have to pick?

I think I said last time the original (hard) case was pretty shitty quality. That's why we decided to use another factory while we had some extra time. This new case is sort of half way between hard and soft, you can really throw it about and it feels solid with the Pandora in it as it's well padded.

I'm not too keen on sending out those hard cases at all, they are very poor, and I don't want to give more business to that factory.

Looking really nice Craig!

Would it be possible to attach a shoulder strap to it if I have one?

There is a belt like thing on the back: http://twitpic.com/1apqc3

We're not letting them ship without sending us the photos first. Should have photos in the next 10 hours.

(final MP case pics)

Final inspections:

http://picasaweb.google.com.tr/mfk.pandora/MassProductionSample1?feat=directlink

As you might guess, we're very busy to put everything (including plastic parts, screws, bumpers, felt materials, gaskets and many tiny details.) together for first production. I'll try to post more pictures later. Keep an eye on forums and our official blog. Thanks for your support!

 

[mali]

Does the batch of cases also include the keymat. And did they have all the parts in china so they could show you the assembled unit, or is this a unit you assembled fatih?

Yes, they have all other parts to check if the plastic parts match with them. The keymats are also ready to go.

There isn't any accepting to do, these are the MP cases.

We just wanted the photos for a sort of insurance that they had built units.

(skeezix) More mmenu info http://www.gp32x.de/board/index.php?/topic/52651-out-of-the-box/page__view__findpost__p__831907

(Linux n00b info) Shortcuts http://www.gp32x.de/board/index.php?/topic/52663-teach-me-shortcuts/

Hey everyone,

Oftentimes I am pretty busy, so I can't hang out on the forum a lot, but I want to be up to date on everything that Craig & co post. While Pandora Press and the Quotes Thread are pretty good, I want the raw news

So, I sat down last night and cobbled up a little script that scrapes the latest forum posts from Craig, ED, MWeston and Fatih, and puts it up on a webpage. It gets updated every half-hour whenever my computer is on. I would guess I'm not the only one who'd want this, so here you go:

Enjoy!

(PND)

Yes, you can put pnd files wherever you like.

1) When we say /pandora/desktop for example, you can actually put them in /pandora/desktop/foo/bar/bam/biz/AwesomeApp.pnd and organize them there.. it should find them

2) You can put them any old place you want, and then just use a directory browser to find them and run them (file-associate .pnd to pnd_run and bam, good to go most of the time)

3) You can change the search paths in a conf file, so if you want it to search the entire SD, you can, or have it look in /whizzo instead of /pandora

4) Or you can run them from the command line if you want to, using pnd_run

You can do pretty much whatever you like.

The onyl thign that is Unwise is running a pnd-app, then yanking the SD out _while_ its running.. since the fileystsem is still mounted, it'll piss off a lot of things. It won't hurt anything beside the apps thats running (you likely will crash it and loose changed data), but its still uncool

It really is a pretty nifty system

jeff

(ED) PND info http://www.gp32x.de/board/index.php?/topic/52662-moving-pnd-files-on-sd-cards/page__view__findpost__p__832368

[...]
notaz did code a small gamma changer program. I changed the gamma to let the display look more like a CRT (this also changed the contrast).
It made things WAY better. Sonic looked amazing to me

 

[bzar]

AFAIR the TI plugin is binary only and requires a higher kernel.
We won't risk to break the OS shortly before release and switch to a higher kernel without having the time left to discover and fix bugs.

But that's all on our To-Do list for the next big OS release

With that plugin, the Beagleboard uses 15% CPU while decoding a 720p H264 AFAIR, so yes, this is definately gonna help.

 

[mali]

"No post today... "

Pheewww... so much things have happened. So many stuff to tell you... and that's what I wanted to do tonight.

However, I just came home from a 13-hour workday after having 3 hours of sleep and having another 17-hour workday before...
I'm too tired to do anything except for closing my eyes and rest a while... I hope you do understand.

I will use the weekend to recover and try to get you all informed latest at the beginning of next week.

Really sorry about that... had so much work to do. Didn't even find a few minutes to use twitter, update the buglist or status page here on the website...

 

[Qwertyuiop]

ED Twitter:

Wow, 11 days no tweet? I really had a lot of work to do... I have a recovered a bit during these weekends, finally feeling alive again.

I wrote together a blog post today, but need to confirm some stuff from the other guys (I think they also need to find out some things).

It might take a few days until I can put that post online. I don't want any speculations so I first want to make sure everything is correct.

I haven't seen Fatih online this weekend, so I cannot even confirm or deny if the cases have been shipped... please be a bit more patient.

Sorry for not posting a while... a lot of things came together at the same time:
A lot to do in normal life's work, stupid stuff like doing taxes paperwork, Dingoos and WIZ were sold out and new ones just arrived a few days ago (so I'm still working on packaging up all the orders that were made while I didn't have any)... geez.
I guess I did work a bit too much a I couldn't do anything on Friday when I came home except for posting that small entry and then go to bed...
Today (Sunday) I already had to work again (normal life's work) and only had the Saturday to recover.
While I'm feeling better already there's a lot to catch up.

I can't tell you if the cases have been shipped or not - I haven't spoken to Fatih yet (he's smarter than me - instead of risking his health he's actually trying to keep his weekens free), so I can't do an update yet.
I already wrote together all I know that has happened lately, but I need the other guys to send some more information to me (I don't want to post anything wrong and start anymore discussions because I didn't know it any better).
It might even be that they also need to gather some information themselves, so I can't tell you when the new blog post will come online.

Me posting any speculations doesn't make sense, and as I didn't have the time to follow everything last week it would certainly be more speculation than knowing what really has happened.

So as hard as it is (and as high the suspense is): Please be a bit more patient. I know how you feel - I want to know if everything went fine or not myself

 

[mali]

Would love to - but I still got eMails to reply, more paperwork to do and work on the instructions manual so we can get it printed next week

I should have more photos for you this week.

I wish we had never put a bloody wifi chip in the Pandora, it has been nothing but trouble. We should have just used a generic wifi dongle.

Okay, got some news. Cases are fine so far, they managed to make it look much better than what we saw last Thursday (they got a new machine and asked if we could give them two more days to test if that does a better quality... Fatih agreed and they did a new test today and according to them, it does a MUCH better quality). Can't wait for the pictures.
Shipping and production will happen this week, so yeah, we lost a few days for assembly, but got much better cases.

About the WiFi... well, we're currently discussing things and will do the blog post (finally!) when we decided everything (hopefully tonight).

We'll probably let you decide if you want your Pandora NOW (and we might even throw in a free mini-WiFi-Stick(Info from the German boards: 150Mbps, 1.5cm long) so you can use WiFi with your Pandora!) or wait until everything is sorted out. And when I mean YOU, I'm not talking about a public discussion - every single customer can decide if he wants it now with stick or wait until internal WiFi is sorted out.

Yep, we don't want to keep you waiting anymore.

Probably going to have to throw in something like this with the first ~1000:

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/41HdtFh-oZL._SS500_.jpg

Because the driver for the internal chip is only working at ~30kbps. We don't mind people wanting to switch to the 3000 batch if they are not happy with that. We won't ship the 3000 until we have it working faster.

(Wifi problem)

raw wifi is working, thus the chip is working.
indeed a driver issue.

It depends on what you describe "working".

It's currently SDIO and that is causing a world of problems.

Unfortunately no.

notaz is working on the kernel, but not deciding with us.

Well, the module initializes and talks to the board, that's what we know for sure.

One thing I can promise: If it REALLY turns out to be a hardware fault, you can be sure we'll either fix it for you or exchange your board for free as soon as we can afford it (maybe after the second batch, when we got some money back).
So either way, you won't be screwed. (I remember I had to fix over 200 gp2x First Editions as they had a flickering LCD...)

We just wanted to make an offer that you can use WiFi right from the start, that's why we want to offer you a small WiFi dongle and your Pandora NOW.

The problem is, you can never be 100% sure if it's hardware or not when you don't have the software properly working yet. As we don't want to lie to you, we surely cannot promise
All we know is that the module gets everything according to specs (Michael checked it) and does initialize and work so far (though slowly). It does report the Signal strength and Link Quality correctly, so the antenna also seems to be fine

However, we have no money to pay a team to get WiFi working. And to not let you wait for too long, we decided we'd go this way.
You can either wait until we completely fixed it, but we cannot tell how long you will have to wait yet.
Or you can get it right away including a dongle so you get a full functional Pandora including a minimal WiFi dongle which surely won't get in your way - starting delivery in April. And if there really is something wrong (as said, there's always a chance), we offer to fix it.

 

[mali]

We just wanted to make an offer that you can use WiFi right from the start, that's why we want to offer you a small WiFi dongle and your Pandora NOW.

So are you saying that if we choose to get the Pandora now, we will get a Pandora with a dongle, and if the problem was in hardware you will let us exchange the board (and the dongle?) for a new board?

Exactly. We sure hope it's not a hardware thing, as it would mean quite a lot of work and some more cost for us... but there's no need to let you all wait.
If it's really hardware thing, we have to fix those boards anyways - regardless if you have them or if they are still lying around in the MP facility... so no need to hold them back at all.
And if it's software, someone else might find a fix, so it might even speed things up.

So either way, it surely does make sense to me.

Or you can get it right away including a dongle so you get a full functional Pandora including a minimal WiFi dongle which surely won't get in your way - starting delivery in April. And if there really is something wrong (as said, there's always a chance), we offer to fix it.

Will this be the first thousand preorderers only or including the other 3 thousand people who ordered.who get their pandora now

The hardware fix / exchange? Well, anyone who got a faulty Pandora from us will be valid for an exchange, that's for sure.
But as we are still working on finding a fix while the production and assembly continues, we sure hope we'll get a fix after the first 1000 have been delivered.

At the moment, we get about 45KB/s max.

ED, please use full words when describing data rate. You've now said both Kb and KB, which mean different things. Either KiloBits or KiloBytes please

bytes, peak.[...]

And there is no such thing as "Linux SDIO problem".

True. People are just blaming SDIO here for no reason, where it has been supported in Linux since somewhere around 2.6.22 (2007).

 

[mali]

(Wifi problem, continued)

18th March 2010, a post from Notaz gives the casual observer the impression that there are SDIO problems - because he is submitting fixes.

There is some recent activity here (wl1251 gmane linux kernel updates) concerning the wl1251 wifi chipset (SDIO fixes as well) that pandora is using.

Guess where that came from

This was not a fault of SDIO code itself, it was about how certain chip register is supposed to be accessed using SDIO (as opposed to SPI) by the wifi driver. Incorrect SDIO method used to access that certain register resulted in SDIO errors, which looked like SDIO problem to DjWillis (not suprisingly). This did also happen on G1 when using Nokia driver (if you google for logs), however it still worked much better than for us. So this is not the root cause of our problems, unfortunately.

The speed is about 50KB/s (400kb/s) which is slow but the real problem is My understanding is that the kernel needs to move to a newer version where a better SDIO driver exists and access to an IRQ driver so that data won't get lost.

That has been tested, it doesn't help.

SDIO doesn't work on latest OMAP kernels too. There are some patches being posted for that but there are reports of basic SD card functionality breaking because of them. It's all still under heavy development..

Stupid me. Forgot to stress it's SDIO interrupt support that has problems on OMAPs, not the SDIO stack itself. This has been shown to be the cause of slowness of wifi chip on Overo boards. However we have an option not to use SDIO interrupt at all as we have GPIO connected directly to wifi chip's IRQ line and can use that instead.
Unfortunately it doesn't help our case either.

So I just want to stress is that there is no need to blame Linux SDIO stack, there is no "long time problems" that some of you are claiming and that SDIO choice over SPI was not wrong.

 

[mali]

1. How is Openpandora going to pay for 4000x 150e ( I dunno the exact price, it might be more) for each new board? Or do you have to wait a year for a new board if it seems to be a hw issue

If it turns out to be a hardware thing, it could be that only a resistor or capacitor needs to be changed. The GP2X First Edition had the same problem - I remember fixing 200 a few months after delivery...

If the board REALLY needs to be exchanged, you don't need to calculate the full costs - because there might also be people who would love to get a board without working WiFi for a few bucks less. So all we need would be the money to compensate that.

2. What is the chance of this being a hw issue (cause everything seems to be working from here as someone who reads the boards, but it seems to be working just not good enough.

Hard to tell, it's similar to playing lottery. We're doing all we can to find this out right now. Michael bought more equipment to do some more in-depth measurements and he also asked the module manufacturer if they have any idea.
We'll let you know as soon as we get more information about it.

3. Do you promise youll give us a new board?

Well, a hard thing to promise
If we all die because of a heart attack before that, we can't do that. If everyone cancels from one day to the next it might also be hard for us coughing up the money to do that.
You can be sure if it's somehow possible for use, yes, we'll do that.
It might take a bit until we sold enough units to cover all the costs (we're not Sony, you know), but as said above, if [I'm stupid spammer] the non-WiFi-Units a bit cheaper, it shouldn't be too much.
Fingers crossed it's not necessary at all, for sure!

4. Cant you make a small setup to test if its a hw issue or sw issue?

I think that's what Michael is planning to do - but the board needs a bit of a change for that, so it needs a few weeks until he can do so.
Until then, we don't want to stop delivery... would be wasted time if it's really just a software issue, and as you can see by the responses and polls, there are quite a few people who are fine with that solution. Ship, find out what's the cause and fix it.

BLOG POST!!!!
To ease our spirits! :lol:

At the moment, I couldn't tell you more than I could tell here.
We're discussing about how exactly we'll manage everything and finding out how quick we can now get all the produced boards and cases to UK (yes, we stopped the shipment of the boards because of WiFi - Michael first wanted to check once more if there is something wrong with the hardware and maybe find a very simple fix they could apply before shipping).
But as we're not sure yet what's causing it, no need to hold back and keep you waiting anymore. We're now trying to get the stuff as quickly to UK as possible so you can start playing - and fix it if it's really broken.

 

[Mithrildor]

The completed tasks should have caught the wifi issue:
1. Board Design (I'm assuming the wifi chip was chosen, and the driver was available at that time)

If you followed the blog, you knew there were problems with getting the driver to work correctly.
It does run, but it has a max peak of 45KB/s. The module itself does work though.

2. Burn-In and Stability Tests for the 105 Boards (Testing before or after to burn-in should have had testing for all components.)

Each hardware component is being tested, also the WiFi module. It does start, connect to an AP and can ping a server. That's all we could to for a hardware test.

3. testing for FCC/CE compliance (How did the FCC test this if WiFi was not working?)

As said, the WiFi module does work. It can be switched on and connect to the internet. FCC/CE compliance doesn't care about slow speed.

After the FCC/CE compliance task, there is no other task listed to test the Pandora. I really do not want a rushed product, but some of these delays could have been caught prior to the cases being built. If testing is lacking, what else was over-looked?

WiFi was the only thing where our couldn't get the driver fully working.
We hoped it would work out until now, and things got better. We can get stable speeds without packet loss, but we don't know yet why it's slow.

Every other aspect (nubs, Audio, 3D processor, keyboard, screen, DPad, SD-Card slots, USB-connector, TV Out, charger, etc.) are working fine as we are working with all that already on our units for months.

We still hope it's a software issue, but who could tell it is for sure until you get it to work 100%?

One thing we don't want to do is hide that from you, so we didn't want to silently build the Pandoras and ship them to you, telling it can't possibly be hardware, and then later it might turn out it IS hardware indeed.

I know other companies probably wouldn't have cared about that and simply delivered...
But I do think this project is based on trust. I trust you guys will support us if we openly tell you what's happening.
Even if we find out it's hardware within the next days, I do think being open about it is the right way to go. The way to keep you guys supporting us.

We are no big company with billions of USD nor are we magicians, we cannot snip with our fingers and make WiFi working.
All we can do is offer to assemble and ship the units we have right now and fix it later, so you can finally start using your Pandora and know this last thing will be taken care of.

If it turns out to be wrong - and you'd all immediately abandon the project because we told you of problems instead of silently ship it anyways... it would really hurt me a lot.
For me, this community is the coolest one I've ever seen. It always kept me motivated to work on the Archive, the website, the server in my free time and to open up a shop to make sure you can easily buy such handhelds with the best customer support I can possibly provide.
I never charged anything for let you use the archives nor for hosting this website (and yes, it does cost me money).
It's what I want to give to the community, as the community gave me a lot of cool games and apps for all the open handhelds.

And I still do think that if you help someone, he will also help you when you're in need. So let's go on and play with out Pandoras soon!

 

[mali]

(WizardStan reviewing Jeff's prototype Pandora)

Tempel, Skeezix, and I met today for lunch and had a grand ol' time breaking his Pandora. Skeezix reminded us several times that not only was it the prototype case and board, but he'd also opened it up several times and kind of broken things. His LCD cable, for instance, had cracked in the repeated disassemble/reassemble process, resulting in a forever blue tinted screen. Unfortunate, but things like that are to be expected. I've got some video that may or may not be interesting that I'll post up later. See, I thought I was clever. I had a brilliant idea to get around the whole "so hard to play and take video at the same time" problem. I picked up a pair of spy glasses with a camera built into the bridge! The camera sees what I see, no need to mess with lenses and stuff. Except, upon viewing the recorded video, I realized that I was looking down with my eyes more than my head, so all the video I took has the Pandora at the very bottom of the screen, when it's even visible at all. Sorry, I'm a slouch. I'll do my best to assemble something that looks good tonight or tomorrow.
ONWARD! To a review of sorts.

First impression: it's bigger than I expected, thicker especially. At first I was worried about it, but after handling it for a few minutes, it actually felt a lot more comfortable. My DS now feels too small in comparison. The extra size makes it seem to fill your hands, like a large sammich. I don't really know how to explain it. I put my fingers around it and they fit. With my PSP and DS, I have to curl my hand slightly to get the same kind of grip.

The keys are shiny, bubbly, when you squish them they go straight down, no wiggle. I was constantly looking at the keys to remember where certain keys were (such as the /, ~, and -), but I imagine this will change with usage. Regular typing was pretty easy and only took a little bit to get used to. The location of the space bar is about the only thing I imagine anyone will have any problem with. On a fullsized keyboard I'll hit it with whichever thumb is convenient, but here it has to be the right thumb. More than once I found myself trying to press the B key with my left thumb. Practice!

The nubs! Oh my! Tactile and responsive. You can see in a video later Quake 3 being played with the nubs and I didn't completely suck, just mostly. The nubs moved smoothly, and snapped back when released. I think "frictionless" is the right word, or as close as possible. They just moved when pushed, didn't resist at all. I liked it!

I didn't get as much play with the D-pad as I could have. It felt good. Played Giana's return a bit, it worked smoothly, didn't scrape or poke my fingers. I can believe this would be good for extended play.

The sound was also a lot quieter than I had expected. I knew it wouldn't be able to fill a room or anything, but I expected to be able to hear a little better than I did. That pub wasn't exactly loud, and it was hard to hear sometimes. What I could hear was nice and clear though, including video and MP3 playback. Not a real problem, that's what headphones and the line out on the EXT port is for, just don't expect you and a couple friends to be able to sit around and watch something without some kind of external speaker.

This was the first time I'd run jzintv and Dink Smallwood on an actual Pandora and it made me very, very happy. They just worked. It was beautiful! That should demonstrate how easy it is to code for the Pandora if you're coming from a PC background. They're both simple SDL apps and they just worked. A little bit of keyboard mapping and they'll be perfect.

Yes, there is an outline on the lid of the case, that square that has been pointed out, but under a flat light it disappeared. I could only see it when looking at an angle. It might also be visible under brighter light, but it is faint enough that I can see the finish making it disappear. That's my hope anyway. If it doesn't, it's not that bad. Not perfect, but still very good.
I also went looking for other anomalies. The plastic, in general, was not perfect. There were spots where it was slightly more dull than others, but again, only under the right light. These should disappear with the finish (knock on wood). The "dent" on the right side of the keyboard we've seen in other pictures wasn't there, and I didn't see any sign of shrinkage around the side. I ran my finger along the seam all the way around the edge and it was smooth. Under the battery, however, was some very noticeable distortion. It almost looked like it was stressed and ready to crack. You may be able to see it in the video, we'll see if I got it. This is a prototype, I've got faith that the stress has already been taken care of. I hope.

I didn't see any ghosting, even when I was told I should be seeing ghosting. I do see ghosting on my PSP1000, so any ghosting on the Pandora is not as bad as on the PSP1000. I'm sure there is some there, but how many people it will actually affect has yet to be determined.

Both XFCE and Jeff's minimal menu felt very familiar and intuitive. The touch screen needs a bit of fuzzy logic for the double tap. I was only able to actually double tap an icon a few times, all the other times I gave up and just hit enter. The problem seems to be that it only counts a double tap if you're tapping the exact same pixel twice in a row. Really, it should have a reasonable dropoff, say 10 pixels on any side. The fact that I got it a couple of times proves it works, it just needs to be less sensitive.

I started Abiword, it came up fast. Happy happy, type away, "Hellollo" in big, bold, underlined, italic letters. This will serve all your rapid note taking needs, once you get used to the keyboard.

Obviously we didn't test the wifi, but Tempel did accidentally start Midori. It loaded pretty quickly, 3 tabs open, one of which was the list of recently used tabs in windows thing. He scrolled it up and down, it was smooth. Here's hoping the wifi gets solved.

We stress tested the hinge, giving it a hard twist. It squeaked, as old plastic tends to do, but it didn't seem like it was going to give. My DS, in contrast, I just gave a twist and I'm fairly confident I could rip the screen off if I wanted to.

I don't know what else I can say. Is it worth the wait? I think it is. It does everything I wanted it for (excepting wifi) back in May 2008, and there is no one device that matches it.
Is it worth the hype? That's a tricky one, but only because the last year has seen more and more hype built on it. When everyone finally does get theirs, there will be a huge fanfare, followed by a collective "now what?". I just hope the response will be big enough to generate enough momentum to carry them through a few more batches.

(More MP case pics)

Found by Alec's forum post scraper http://alec.mooo.com/lol/cxs.php

http://picasaweb.google.com/mfk.pandora/FromThe1000sClub#5454417329241715394
http://picasaweb.google.com/mfk.pandora/FromThe1000sClub#5454417202320282818

 

[Prometheus]

From ED, about the double-tapping mentioned in WizardStan's excellent review;

Oh, about pixel-perfect doubleclick: AFAIK you can change the jitter area in /etc/ts.conf, so you won't have to be pixel-perfect anymore
It's just not tweaked yet.

 

[mali]

[...] I'm still waiting for some responds from the other guys, regarding how exactly we will handle everything.

The blog post most likely wouldn't have more information than I wrote here on the page anyways, just some more confirmed things.

We had a long night yesterday in IRC where we thought about all possible issues how to find out what could cause the slow speed.
Michael is going to modify a board to be able to read out the debug data from the module itself, that might also help a lot.

Regarding the first boards produced: As it looks like right now, Michael will test the debug output and then we'll either let the boards we have already ship immediately (if he doesn't find more about it) or will let them apply a fix if he finds out it's hardware and it can be fixed easily.
That's the last thing we can try out pretty quick, if it won't help, it's shipping and assembling time!

So yes, we're working on it. The fewer we post, the more busy we are with it.
It will be solved, that's something we are sure about. We won't give up!

ED you driving or flying? Just curious.

Flying. Driving would take 15 - 16 hours, and I need to go back to work in Germany for at least one or two days in the week, so it looks like I'll be constantly flying back and forth.

or will let them apply a fix if he finds out it's hardware and it can be fixed easily.

If it's hardware and can't be fixed easily, will you ship the first 1000 with a view to replacing them later, or are we dead in the water until the hw issue is fixed?

Depends If we know it before we ship, we're gonna let you decide.
You could probably get it right away and pay a bit less for a non-WiFi unit, get it right away with the option to exchange it later (second batch maybe) or wait for a fixed unit and let someone else get it.
If it's fixable and we know the fix before we ship, we're going to do it right away.
If we know a fix AFTER we ship, you can send it back whenever you want and let us fix it.

We want YOU to decide, after all, it's your Pandora

More Speculaas... but i'd guess once there is a confirmed hardware fault, those boards might be viewed as "non-wifi" and be sold at a lower price as ED mentioned.

Yes, either for the guys who already ordered or in the future.

We are still working to improve the quality of the parts. We still have room for improvement. Even after the first batch completed, we'll keep working on it. As mentioned before, we are planning to sell keymats, cases, etc. in different colors for modders and collectors.

 

[Mithrildor]

So why arent TI's drivers used? Or even given a quick try for testing if it can get higher speeds.

They have been tested, results are very similar. Nokia driver is a rewrite or TI one.

Ontopic now guys, we dont need pictures of fish and Grusos trying to be funny

 

[Mithrildor]

Deswegen ja auch nur temporär
Wir arbeiten da grad fieberhaft dran.

Mir persönlich wäre das egal, ich nutze die Pandora hauptsächlich für Amiga-Spiele
WiFi hab ich nur daheim, in Hotels oder an Hotspots muss man meistens zahlen, da hab ich ohnehin meinen 3G-Stick dabei

Aber wir wollen Euch trotzdem das bieten, was wir verkauft haben.

Ein paar neue Infos von unserem IRC-Treff gestern Nacht:
notaz testet nochmals SDIO, und zwar im Empfangsbereich. SENDEN kann das Modul nämlich mit 300KB/s, aber der Empfang stolpert.
Vielleicht verhaspelt sich da irgendwas?
Michael lötet derweil den Debug-Output des Moduls an eines der Boards. Das teilt uns dann hardwareseitig mit, ob alles passt oder ob was faul ist. Das dürfte einen schnellen Hinweis geben, ob die Hard- oder Software für verantwortlich ist.

Sobald Michael das überprüft hat, gehen die soweit produzierten Boards nach England. Oder - wenn Michael einen schnellen Hardwarefix hat - sie werden modifiziert und dann versendet.

Ich halte Euch auf dem Laufenden!

From the german boards. Bold line translated:
The module can send a signal at 300 KB/s, but recieving is the problem.