Quotes Thread For The Blog

[Lafazar]

[...]
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!

http://forum.gp2x.de/viewtopic.php?p=118247#p118247

A little more info from our IRC-meeting last night:
notaz is testing SDIO again, namely receiving mode. That is to say the module can actually SEND with 300 KB/s, but struggles receiving.
Perhaps something splutters?
Michael is meanwhile soldering the debug-output of the module to one of the boards. This will tell us hardware-wise wheteher everything fits or something is fishy. This should give us a quick hint whether hardware or software is responsible.

As soon as Michael has tested this, the already produced boards will go to England. Or - if Michael has a quick hardware fix - they will be modified and sent after.

I will keep you current!

Der Stick kostet uns ca. 7 Euro pro Stück. Also nicht die Welt (Masseneinkauf ist immer günstiger).

Michael arbeitet gerade am Design eines Testboards, mit dem er fast jede Leitung modifizieren kann.
Spätestens dann erfahren wir mehr.

Allerdings hat uns das ganze auch noch auf eine Idee gebracht:
Vielleicht wäre für die Zukunft ja eine Pandora ohne WiFi/BT für einige interessant? Diese könnte man günstiger abgeben.
Für Leute, die WLAN nur ab und an nutzen wollen und schon einen Stick daheim haben, mit der Pandora eher hauptsächlich zocken wollen, wäre das ganz interessant.
Da bräuchte man nämlich kein Board-Redesign sondern müsste einfach nur die entsprechenden Teile nicht bestücken.

Aber das war nur eine Idee am Rande. Michael schaut noch den Debug Output an, danach wird alles gleich nach England geschickt (oder modifiziert, wenn er was findet) und nach den ersten 700 können wir deutlich besser testen und wissen, was Sache ist.

http://forum.gp2x.de/viewtopic.php?p=118251#p118251

The stick is costing us 7€ per piece. So it's not the world (bulk purchase is always cheaper).

Michael is currently working on the Design of a testboard with which he can modify almost any line.
Then at the latest we will know more.

However, this has given us an idea:
Perhaps in the future a Pandora without WiFi/BT would be interesting for some? We could offer these cheaper.
For people who only use WLAN occasionally and have a stick at home, who want to mainly play on Pandora this might be interesting. It would not require a board redesign, we could simply not populate these pieces.

But that's only an side idea. Michael is looking at the debug output, right afterward everything will be sent to England (or modified, if he finds anything) and after the first 700 we will be in a much better position to test and know what's going on.

[...]
Sie sollten am 26. verschickt werden (Freitag), aber da WiFi nicht lief, hat Michael (er ist sehr vorsichtig) das nochmal zurückgehalten, damit er nochmals alles überprüfen kann.
Die Gehäuse waren ja auch noch nicht da, also ginge das.
So wie's aussieht wird diese "Halde" diese Woche aufgehoben und alles geht raus.
[...]

http://forum.gp2x.de/viewtopic.php?p=118258#p118258

They [boards] were to be shipped on the 26. (Friday), but since WiFi didn't work Michael (he is very careful) has held it back, so he can test everything again.
The cases weren't there yet, so that would work.
As it looks like at the moment this "heap" will be cancelled this week and everything goes out.

I think everything else EvilDragon said on the German forums was said by him on these forums as well. But if any German readers spot an information missing from this thread please inform me, and I will add it (or you can add it yourself).

 

[Vlynndar]

Ich hab den kleinen Stick schon, den wir verwenden wollen und notaz kompiliert gerade den Treiber.
Damit ist WLAN zumindest schonmal gesichert

I've already got the small wifistick we'll use, and Notaz is now compiling the driver. So WLAN atleast works.So WLAN is at least ensured.(Better translation for that last part? Thanks, Bosbeetle.)

Link.

 

[Bosbeetle]

I've already got the small wifistick we'll use, and Notaz is now compiling the driver. So WLAN atleast works.(Better translation for that last part?)

So WLAN is at least ensured.

 

[Mithrildor]

There are about 10-20 free slots. It jumps about mainly because people place orders... then never pay.

So after 60 or so days we cancel those and release them. Sometimes even if there are not slots left but unpaid orders we will still send invoices because we know we are about to cancel x amount of unpaid orders.

We released 150 new slots a couple of months back (complex reasons) which have slowly filled up too.

 

[Mithrildor]

Richtig, dass WLAN zickt ist schon seine einem dreiviertel Jahr bekannt.
notaz hat sich vor kurzem richtig dem Thema angenommen und werkelt fleissig dran - und wir hatten gehofft, er hat bis Start der Produktion eine Lösung. Und es geht auch schon besser, aber noch nicht perfekt.

Da die Firmware ins Modul geladen wird und das Modul brav mit dem Prozessor kommuniziert, waren alle Devs und Experten, die wir befragt haben, der Meinung, es müsste Software sein. Aber wir wollen uns da eigentlich GANZ sicher sein.
Und bevor wir nun wirklich 4000 Boards mit fehlerhaftem WiFi haben, überprüfen wir das lieber nochmal
.
1000 Leute finden, die sagen, ein Mini-Stick reicht ihnen vollkommen, sie wollen ihre Pandora JETZT haben, ist deutlich leichter, als 4000.

Man darf nicht vergessen: Außer den Leuten, die das Gerät zum mobilen Surfen verwenden wollen, gibt es viele, die primär zocken wollen (zum Surfen gibts ja auch genug Geräte, zum Zocken nicht).
Und denen reicht aus, wenn sie WLAN mit Mini-Stick haben und sonst alles andere funktioniert (monatelang getestet).

Ja, wir hätten uns auch gewünscht, es würde inzwischen alles laufen. Ein Blick auf andere ähnliche Geräte zeigt, dass WLAN da nicht ganz so einfach ist. Siehe OpenMoko, als Beispiel.

Was wir nun suchen ist eine akzeptable Lösung für alle - Pandora mit Stick [*I AM STUPID SPAMMER*] oder lieber warten, bis WiFi intern auch läuft.
Das wollen wir jedem selber überlassen.

http://forum.gp2x.de/viewtopic.php?f=23&t=9318

ED says: All experts and developers agree that it is a software problem because the firmware communicates with the module correctly, but they just want to be sure

Ein Problem ist auch, dass wir momentan MAX 45KB/s erreichen. Das ist mit einem minimalen Test-Kernel, bei dem viele andere Funktionen deaktiviert sind.
Im normalen Image gehts auf 8KB/s.

http://forum.gp2x.de/viewtopic.php?f=23&t=9318&start=15

To bad it isnt all great new like that. Ed says in this post: They can reach 45 KB/s in the minimal test OS (for testing the wifi, not a minimal menu) but they can only reach 8 KB/s in the normale image.

[...] Bezüglich der Boards austauschen:
Ein Hardwarefehler muss nicht immer einen Austausch zur Folge haben. Der Freerunner konnte auch modifiziert werden.
Das ist dann kein Problem.
Regarding replacement of the boards:
A fault in the hardware doesn't necessarily require a board replacement. The Freerunner could be modified, for example.

Kommt es zu einem Austausch, ist das für uns natürlich erstmal kostspielig. Ich will in jedem Fall jedem das Board austauschen, wenn ich mir das leisten kann.
So wie ich das sehe, wird die Pandora-Nachfrage noch steigen, wenn sie erstmal draussen ist, und wir werden anfangs kaum nachkommen - es könnte also gut sein, dass man die Pandora ohne Stick teurer verkaufen kann, als man für eine neue mit Wartezeit zahlt.
If it requires a board replacement, it will be expensive for us. I definitely want to replace the board as soon as I can afford it. I think the demand of Pandoras will increase further when it's finally out and it won't be easy to meet the demand - so it might be that you can sell a Pandora without Wifi for more than a new one costs, because of the waiting time.

Oder wir verkaufen sie ohne WiFi als günstigeres Modell, dann hätten wir auch da nur geringe Kosten.
Or w-e s-e-l-l(spamword, remove '-') them without Wifi for less, thus we have a low loss.

Machen wollen wir das aber auf jeden Fall, sobald wir uns das leisten können!
Anyway, we'll replace the board if necessary, as soon as we can afford it.

Zudem werden wir wohl als kleinen Bonus die ersten Pandoras, bei denen wir noch nicht wissen, ob WiFi geht, alle im Batteriefach signieren. Aber NUR die. Und keine anderen.
Könnte zum Sammlerstück mutieren.
On top of that, we will autograph said Pandoras without working Wifi in the battery compartment. We will _only_ sign these Pandoras and no others.
It could become a collector's item. [...]

Ty mali for the translation

 

[Prometheus]

Okay, just some quick update: Got the tiny stick today and thanks to notaz hackng magic it's already running great!

Battery life running at 500 MHz is about 6h when constantly surfing, which is good.

Surfing is as fast as on my normal PC (also very quick screen rendering! )

The stick is barely noticeable, it's very small. So yeah, no internal WiFi yet, but we can assure you at least the provided stick is working, so you can use the Pandora for internet access as planned.

I'll probably do video tomorrow showing you the small stick and some internet browsing

This just in from ED.

 

[Lafazar]

Wie das mit der Datenübertragung geht, weiß ich nicht... wie macht man das am PC?
Akkulaufzeit verringert sich mit einer Festplatte sicher - denn der WLAN-Stick frisst gerade mal ein viertel der max. USB-Anschluß-Leistung...
Die würde aber auch fressen, wenn Du intern WiFi nutzen würdest

Gerade mal getestet:
Pandora mit internem WiFi läuft braucht ca. 1950mW. Pandora mit externem WiFi ca. 2100mW.
Macht nicht wirklich viel mehr aus.

http://forum.gp2x.de/viewtopic.php?p=118484#p118484

[someone asked if transfer speed would go down if an external hard drive was connected together with the WiFi dongle and if it was possible to prioritize WiFi dongle data transfer]
I don't how this data transfer [prioritization] would work... How do you do that on PC?
Battery run time will go down with an external hard drive for sure - since the WLAN-stick eats barely a quarter of the maximum USB power...
It would eat that, too, if you were to use internal WiFi.

I just tested this: Pandora with internal WiFi takes around 1950 mW. Pandora with external WiFi 2100 mW. It's not really much more.

 

[Mithrildor]

Yeah, actually the external dongle uses less power than the internal,it seems

http://www.gp32x.de/board/index.php?/topic/52711-is-everything-on-track-for-early-april-production/page__st__420__p__834959&#entry834959

Did you make a new test?
The latest numbers we have are 1950mW internal and 2100mW external.

Yes, Michael did those tests with lowest brightness settng and I did use highest brightness setting

http://www.gp32x.de/board/index.php?/topic/52711-is-everything-on-track-for-early-april-production/page__st__420__p__834965&#entry834965

 

[Qwertyuiop]

Internal vs External Wifi

So, at the moment, if you compare the internal WiFi module with the external stick:

Pros for the Stick:
* can do up to 150MBps (internal goes up to 54MBps)
* Does work already
* Can be used on other devices (netbook, PC, etc.)
* uses less power than the internal WiFi module.


Cons for the Stick:
* Does stick out
* Uses the USB HOST port. If you want to plug in more things, you need to use a HUB or the mini USB OTG with an adaptor

Not too bad.

 

[Mithrildor]

Pandora: Surfing the Web with a tiny WiFi stick

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lRL4zi35nVU

Ty kloplop for the link on the IRC

 

[mali]

Michael told the company to ship all the produced boards ASAP to UK.
I don't know if today and Monday are holidays in USA, here in Germany, they are, so shipping will probably happen on Tuesday.

Same goes for the Chinese: After we (and you) saw the last cases, Fatih told them to start to produce that 1000 and ship them as soon as possible.

So we want to start assembly as soon as possible and continue to find out what's wrong with WiFi.
In the meantime, you can get a stick (like I shown in the video) which does work fine and even seems to need less power than the internal module.

So you can do everything as planned, but for the moment you need to stick a small stick in.

http://forum.gp2x.de/viewtopic.php?p=118524#p118524

[...] Das Debug Board muss erst produziert werden, das dauert ein paar Wochen. Nicht verwechseln mit den Debug-Leitungen zum Modul, die er gestern drangelötet hat.
The debug board has to be produced first, that will take some weeks. Don't confuse it with the debug connections to the module, which he soldered yesterday.

1000 pro Tag sind möglich, aber wir wollen die Gehäuse erstmal sehen, bevor wir vielzuviele produzieren, die nicht so schön sind, also bleibt es bei 1000.
Michael hat in USA auch angewiesen, die fertigen Boards so schnell wie möglich nach UK zu verschicken.
1000 cases per day are possible, but we want to see them first instead of producing too many that may not be as good as we want, so it will be 1000 at first.

Er selber werkelt noch weiter am Board und probiert verschiedenes aus, bis er in den Flieger steigt. Findet er ein Hardwareproblem und es gibt eine Modifikation, macht er die in UK gleich vor Ort.
Sonst wird zusammengebastelt und mit Stick verschickt
MWeston will continue working on the board and testing things until he flies to the UK. If he finds a hardware fault and a modification is necessary, he'll do it on site in the UK. Otherwise Pandoras will be assembled as is and sent including Wifi stick.

Nachdem wir die ersten Pandoras fertig haben, ist das Debug Board da und wir wissen wohl genau, ob es Software oder Hardware ist.
Dann müssen wir für funktionierendes WiFi entweder Hardware Fixen (evtl. mit neuer Board Revision) oder können weiterproduzieren, falls es nur Software ist.
After we'll have assembled the first Pandoras, the debug board will be ready and we'll know for sure if the problem is hardware or software related. Then we'll either have to fix the hardware (eventually do a new board revision) or we can continue production if it's just a software problem.

Falls wir eine neue Revision brauchen, können wir aber anbieten, Boards ohne WiFi und mit Stick auszuliefern, wenn jemandem das WiFi egal ist und er doch seine Pandora gleich haben will.
If we need a new board revision, we'd offer to ship Pandoras without internal Wifi and include the stick, if someone doesn't care about Wifi and wants his Pandora immediately.

Wir berücksichtigen da einfach jeden Wunsch eines jeden Einzelnen.
We'll do it according to the liking of the individual.

http://forum.gp2x.de/viewtopic.php?p=118533#p118533

Der erste Versand sollten 500 getestete Boards zu uns sein.
Michael hat ja die Produktion gestoppt, wieviel Boards da fertig geworden sind, weiß ich nicht.
Mein letzter Stand waren ca. 700, ich weiß aber nicht genau, wieviele noch bis zum Stop dazugekommen sind.
The first shipment will include 500 tested boards. Michael stopped production and I don't know how many boards were ready until then. My latest info was about 700, but I don't know how many were added before the stop.

Fertige Boards gibt es also bisher zwischen 700 und 1000.
So we have between 700 and 1000 boards to date.

Wenn alles klar ist und es nur Software ist, wird weiterproduziert.
When the problem is found and it's software related, production will continue.

(tweet from Craig regarding Wifi)

Some good news, Pandora wifi now hitting 350KB/s.

That sounds really great!!

great news, what was the cause of the slow speeds in the end?

Michael might post a more accurate explanation, but in simple terms it was a lack of power.

It was a resistor.

It's such a simple issue Michael is just going to do them as we ship them.

The factory can do the rest.

 

[mali]

Well, Michael did test a download from a normal internet site, not internal network.
I don't know how fast his internet connection is, but most probably not 54Mbps.

If he got an internet connection of 6Mbps, he could get a max of 750KB/s theoretical speed.
As network connections do need a lot of overhead, 350KB/s sounds like a maximum internet download speed for 6Mbps.

However, that was the maximum speed he could get yet - normally it is about 66KB/s stable, downloading from the file archive (I usually get a max of 112KB/s on my 16Mbps connection downloading from there, so who knows how good the speed really is).

There are still things that might be tweakable with that resistor, it could be possible increasing the speed a lot.
However, for audio and video streaming as well as normal websurfing, that speed should be enough.

Let him do more tweaks and more speed tests first (though I don't know if he got a server at home to test the real connection).

Good news: The modification is minimal and can be done within a few minutes. We told the company to send the boards already produced and tested to UK ASAP and Michael will go there and start modding.
Then we need the cases - and assembly will finally start.

Sorry but I can't help wondering; after all the 'bitching' recently, why on earth test speed with something as unstable as an internet connection? While the new speed is good news, please please please do some SOLID STABLE PREDICTABLE TESTING!

Most probably because Michael doesn't have a local server at home and he is the one working on the hardware

You can't assume everybody got a local server at home.

And yes, this is just the beginning. Michael did discover that a few hours ago (he just did send the eMail to us before he went to sleep at 4am).
He will continue to work on it tomorrow and try to tweak it more.

Tom has a very good point in that it looks like it IS the hardware to fault and yet OP are doing a quick
dirty fix to at least the first 1000 units ,and that quick fix might also be bottlenecking other operations
that OP may or may not retest.

Definately not, as this one resistor is only there for the module (it only affects the curve of the 26MHz clock AFAIK).
It doesn't have anything to do with RAM, the OMAP, SDIO, etc.
And all those had already been tested since we got them working for a while.

The only bottleneck we seemed to have appeared after we got the WiFi driver to work, the rest was working on our boards since months.

Ed ,what i am talking about is retesting all parts after the removal of the resistor ,you really ,really
do not know for sure if it will cause a problem else where

We really really really do know for sure. Michael designed the whole board and does certainly know what part does what.
There's a crystal that gives the module a 26MHz clock, and the curve is optimized by some parts.
Those parts have ABSOLUTELY nothing to do with any other busses on the Pandora.
On the old boards without WiFi they didn't even exist.

It's a replacement of an resistor. For the mods, we stick another one on top since this is faster and easier for producing the rest the correct resistor can be populated so no prob.

However, that was the maximum speed he could get yet - normally it is about 66KB/s stable

Just quoting.
I'll mod my unit and do additional testing when I can get some soldering tools.

 

[mali]

"Back on Track!"

Finally - a new blog post. Did take a real long time, since there was so much we needed to figure out first.

Okay, here is what happened:

1. The WiFi issue - finally resolved

A lot of guys have probably already followed this on the boards: notaz was working on the WiFi driver and still couldn't get it to work reliable. As he didn't know what else to try, he thought it could also be a hardware issue - of course, that got us alarmed. Michael immediately stopped the board production (700 had been produced so far back then) to first do more tests with WiFi. We were totally in the dark. If you ever wanted to know how sudden death feels... well, we do know for sure yet.

Michael did begin investigating the hardware while notaz did more tests and tweaks with the software. A kernel which disabled everything except WiFi did get a bit more speed out of the WiFi, but it still was very slow. Was it the driver causing problems when other stuff was running? Or was it the hardware? We still didn't know for sure.

As we didn't know, we decided we will get some WiFi sticks for the beginning and ask every customer whether he wanted to get the Pandora with a stick and internal WiFi that might be fixable by software or maybe needs a hardware fix later.

Then, at one time, we found out that WiFi was faster on Rev2/3 boards then on the recent Rev4/5 boards - pretty weird, as nothing had been changed in these revisions that could affect WiFi. Except the board manufacturer. Using that clue, we figured out that the impedance of one trace had been changed. The impedance is important here, as a wrong impedance will distort the signal and then the module doesn't get a clean clock. Measuring the clock signal did prove that: Yep, the impedance had been changed.
Who's fault was it? Hard to tell. The company had changed that trace without asking, but we also didn't explicitely say it needs to have a correct back. So it's a hard thing, the trace is working, it was just not good enough for the signal.
Knowing that, Michael did work on it for a couple of days, doing some trial and error (not much you can't do unless you do know the exact new impedance).
He got it working better - but still not good enough to really be usable - was this due to software? Or still hardware?
So he started to work on a new testing board (Rev6) which could also be used as new board for the rest of the 3300 Pandoras if it fixes WiFi.
While doing that, he had another idea - modded another Rev5 board and got a HUGE speed increase! On minimal kernel, he can get 350KB/s, on normal image he gets 66KB/s stable speed (tested downloading from the internet. That fix is easy: Simply piggyback a resistor on top of an existing one. Takes about 1 - 2 minutes. And the rest of the 3300 boards can be populated with the new resistor immediately, so that fix won'tl be needed on them.
Speed can probably still be improved - Michael just found out about that yesterday, he will try to tweak more (or even combine the two mods) during the next days, until he leaves for UK to start assembling (he will do the modification of each board while assembling).
Finally! That news did make us more alive again, we were really suffering during the last days...


2. The cases

Since board production had been stopped for a while, we allowed the Chinese guys to tweak the case moulds a bit more. As you might have seen on the latest image, the bottom part (with the keyboard) looks spot-on right now - however, the top part still has some weird discoloration. No problem with stability here, just looks a bit weird if you look closely.


3. The OS - ready for first release

The latest image had been tested a lot by all of us already. It is pretty stable, has some minor issues (like you need to restart after calibrating the touchscreen at the moment... no biggie, I only needed to calibrate once in the last four months).
It has a working browser, eMail client, IRC, ICQ, MSN, etc. everything you need for normal life.
There is room for speed improvement in the future, SDL is not using hardware surfaces yet, but that will follow.
Also, boot process will be further optimized and will use Upstart to be a lot faster.
If you don't like a fancy desktop system, you can also use some minimal GUIs. We also designed that system to be configurable, so as soon as anyone codes a new GUI, it can easily be included by simply changing a config file.

The libpnd system is also working nicely: download a PND onto your SD Card and it will automatically appear in the menu (or on the desktop). Games will be sorted into categories, every dev can include a documentation in his PND so you can easily check the manual or installation settings, etc. Really convenient.
Of course, the categories, icons, etc. can be overriden, in case you want to have your own ones.
One thing you should not expect from the beginning is (as said before) accellerated movie playing (and therefore, also youtube movie playing).
This does need a new kernel and is on our TO-Do list for the next firmware release, which will be worked on as soon as the first one is ready to go on the NAND.
You can also help us testing then, as you can install the new beta image on an SD Card and try it out.

As the image is working well already, devs already concentrate to port more things. At the moment, we got fullspeed Amiga 500 emulation (without frameskip) at 500MHz, fullspeed Genesis and MegaCD, fullspeed C64 (Vice!) on 500 MHz without any frameskip, VCS2600, Colecovision, Atari ST, ... tons of stuff to play. Skeezix is also porting PocketSNES, so fullspeed SNES will also work when you get your unit.
PandoraPanic (minigames created by members of the gp32x.de community) is working nice, FreeDink, some PyGame-Games, etc. have also been ported already.

Overall, you will get a good working first release OS which still leaves a lot of room for improvements.



4. The current situation

We lost two weeks due to that WiFi issue, but now that this has been resolved being a fixable hardware issue, Michael told the company yesterday to ship out all the produced boards we have as soon as possible to UK. Additionally, Fatih told the Chinese to do the same: Produce the cases as they are now and ship them!
DJWillis is working on making the image NAND-installable, so yes, you might see us assembling them on webcam soon!

 

[Mithrildor]

Twitterix:

The Pandora wifi hit 606KB last night. Looks like it was just the resistor. Full speed ahead.

I'm sure you will be delighted to know Michael saw 606KB last night.

http://www.gp32x.de/board/index.php?/topic/52838-pandora-wi-fi-on-350kilobytess/page__st__210__p__836337&#entry836337

If WiFi can be fixed, there's no need for a new Rev

We will assemble ALL 4000 Pandoras ourselves, the remaining units will probably arrive in smaller batches while we're assembling

We just received the confirmation that the boards and LCDs will be shipped in Thursday or Friday.
Fatih is still waiting for a confirmation from the chinese factory that they can also ship Thursday / Friday (they did tell him they will do it yesterday, but didn't 100% confirm it yet)

Fatih is still waiting for a confirmation from the chinese factory that they can also ship Thursday / Friday (they did tell him they will do it yesterday, but didn't 100% confirm it yet)

They did also say they would ship March 18th. Then a few days later. Then a few days later.

In best case, yes. However, there was a stability issue that caused the cases to be delayed until 26th (I did post that somewhere in a thread).
And on that date, we already knew something was up with WiFi and gave them more time

You claim WiFi issues have been resolved.

Should I read this as that you believe 606 KB/s is a decent speed for 802.11g or that you're confident that the remaining speed improvements are all software related?

Don't get me wrong, I'm very glad that MWeston managed to achieve a usable WiFi speed. However, we ordered a device with an 802.11b/g chip, not just an 802.11b.

If you read the blog, you could see that MWeston only did tests with normal internet yet (5Mbps line, as I know now), so he as long as he doesn't setup a connection between his server and the Pandora, he probably can't squeeze out more of it.
He is also still working on tweaking and managed speed doubling in about four hours.

Until all tests have been finished, we can't say more about that.

If the speed is not sufficient enough for you, you probably need to wait for a later revision.

It's enough for normal internet surfing, video streaming, Audio streaming, Messenging, etc.

Sometimes I do wonder what you guys are planning to do with your Pandora...?

 

[mali]

[...] MichaelW made a video tutorial showing us how to assemble a Pandora. He does it really slow and repeats steps quite a few times to really show you how to do it.
That does take 17 minutes. [...]

Well, according to the companies, everything will ship at the end of this week. If this is true, assembly begins next week.

[...]Well, yeah, though the only one who mods those things is MichaelW, and currently he is trying to squeeze out more speed instead. His normal PC does still download a tad faster than the Pandora does, so there is room of improvement. notaz also wants to do the mod, and as soon as he did, he wants to do proper speed tests and maybe tweak the driver.[...]

(question about TV out quality being affected by board manufacturer change)

Since I measured the TV Out signal with our waveform already to tweak the TV Out scripts... I guess it's fine

 

[Prometheus]

Pickle posted this a short time ago;

First WIFI pandora post! woot!

And then ED just posted this a moment ago;

Current speed Michael gets while downloading off the net:
200 - 300 KB/s on NORMAL image!
Not the minimal WiFi image

That's 2.4MBps

EDIT: They're all coming along posting on Pandoras now! This just in from MWeston;

Posting from a Pandora over wifi as well. It's pretty quick to browse websites now. Firefox itself is a bit chuggy with the scrolling but ED has told me about a dozen others in the Angstrom repo to try.

I hit 315KB/s downloading a pnd from ED's site a few minutes ago. It was still climbing when the file finished (was only 5MB). I should try to make a video of this later.

P.S. Yes, transferring a file from my PC would be smarter but I have to figure out how to do that still. I normally turn anything like that off for security reasons. I don't I've done file sharing since the headache-y days of Win98!

 

[dflemstr]

In my scp tests ive avg between 400-500 KB/s
WPA2 works

 

[Prometheus]

im more worried about range (tx/rx) performance, i do really hate chips so low TX power that even sitting under the router still have some issues.

This interests me too. I live in a concrete apartment building. I could walk the floors and stairwells with no interruption to my internet radio. I went for a walk and got four houses down the block before it wasn't able to keep the buffer loaded enough to play the stream.

It also played fine whether the lid was open or completely closed and with the unit in my hand (although performance does degrade on high speed stuff if you cover the antenna with your hand).

Awesome! It still amazes me that one tiny resistor can make such a huge difference. Tells you a lot about how much clock speeds matter.

The resistor was the series resistance in the oscillator driver. I did change it once on a previous revision but since there were no complaints back in the day, I kept it larger for lower current consumption. The wifi clock requires a very strict clock profile so I had to decrease this resistance to drive the crystal harder (larger voltage swing), increase the bandwidth and put the crystal into a tighter range around resonance. It probably means an extra mA or two of constant current drain so not a big issue in that respect.

EDIT: This next one is on the matter of the keypad backlight solder pads;

I've pulled the LCD closer to the keyboard many times to see the keys when playing on the couch in the dark (a couple of late night N64 game sessions several months ago). It helps a lot.

Also, the KP_BL pads can sink 160mA and the source is the battery directly. The + side is the battery and the - side is the FET in the TPS65950 sinking the current with PWM control available. As you can tell, that means no current limiting so 160mA is the safe number but you have to use resistors to be sure you don't fry anything yourself.

EDIT 2: Regarding browsers;

I just installed Arora on the Pandora.
Pretty nice, fast browser, no rendering errors, no crashes

Maybe we should replace Midori with it, at least for first release, as Midori loves to crash (even on my desktop PC...)

EDIT 3: A short post from Fatih, quoted here because it's yet another posting made using the Pandora's built-in WiFi.

I'm posting this from a Pandora connected via built in wifi. Works quite good.

EDIT 4: I just fixed MWeston's quote at the top of this post. It was edited after I pasted it in here. Thanks for the tip, mali!

EDIT 5: About "First Batch" markings;

It was cool when the silk screening was going to say First Batch. But then...

Now the battery compartment sticker says it.

 

[mali]

(WIP "Pandaphone")

if any of you remember a year ago I started a project for the this called pandaphone, bought a cheap cell modem dongle and was experimenting with it. I think it came down to not working on the american frequencies for GSM voice here in america. I went back and forth trying to decide between voip and gsm voice. Well I did find a combo that worked well, android OS, sipdroid (SIP for VOIP) backend, and google voice and gizmo5 for the voip/carrier bridge. It works, and works relatively well with a decent internet connection. If you have bad 3g coverage it goes to a speech to text voicemail where you can either read or listen, or both. Only problem at the moment it is only for those who have a gizmo5, and google voice account, which I think is limited to the USA for the time being.

It all worked seemingly well together, I got it all hooked up on my Odroid running android, but nobody seemed to care much about either project I was trying to lead (or much of anything I bring up, but that doesn't matter or bother me much) but I didn't report the success due to lack of interest. I'll wait for an android port to the pandora to be readily distributed before I write a how-to (for anyone that actually cares to use it) But I can call and answer calls and sms/txt people with little to no delay and all for free. Everything is "pushed" to the phone so you don't have to actively check for phone calls, sms's or voicemails. It's still not as polished as I was hopeing, but the functionality is there. All you need is a 3g connection, may it be mobile wifi hotspot, tether to a phone, or hardline wifi hotspot. You can check your messages and return calls when you have a connection, when you don't have a connection it goes to voicemail, simple enough IMO.

(MythTVPlayer)

Im really glad to post that mythtvplayer with a couple of hacks from the linux version I helped port is now also working on the pandora.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/mythtvplayer/

Now the details...doesnt work so well with the current wifi speeds. But i was able to test on a usb adapter and SD recordings and live tv are playing. The recordings are mpeg2 and mythtvplayer reports streaming at 3.2 mbps. (note its reports >2 mbps through wifi)
So my hope is that if wifi improves (as i expect it will) the pandora should be able to stream content from a mythbackend.

For those that dont know, this is a frontend player for mythtv. It mainly meant for windows since at the time windows really didnt have a frontend. But the source is basically cross compatible with linux (I had to submit some patches to finish the job on the latest svn). Its ideal for the pandora cause its light weight, uses fltk2 for gui and ffmpeg for decode, sdl for playback presentation.

This is one the big dreams ive had for pandora since it was conceived. I do a video for this in the near future ;-)

Does anybody know how fast is Nokia N900 wifi working? It's the same chipset, right? I think it would be a good goal - to reach N900 speed. Then I'll be satisfied, I think.

I've read reports of N900 doing ~750KiB/s, that's 5-6 Mbit/s. I've been able to reach that speed on pandora too using certain kernel setups. It seems to be slightly affected by other peripherals being enabled, but I'm getting at least 500KiB/s most of the time now.

The speed looks reasonable to me now, this is not a laptop after all. How well are other similar sized gadgets performing?

 

[Prometheus]

About the 600MHz/720MHz CPU thing;

My answer from TI on this about the 600/720 chips was:

Wafers are probed for certain tests. Then they are packaged and fully tested. That is the point at which the binning is done. No SW is run on the devices. They are basically clocked and the timing is checked.

All this means is that these devices are the fastest possible and will work over the full temp range.

They test all the parts the same, it just means if the data is better in some areas, it goes into a different box.

So as I think myself or someone has mentioned in the past, overclocking a 720 (or even just running at 720) will run cooler than a chip sold as a 600 at the same speed. The speculation begins as to whether it means everyone can overclock the same as long as you stay in an temperature controlled environment like an office or house where 25C is attainable. Further speculation based on the Motorola Droid, Palm Pre and Nokia N900 overclock tests suggests that the silicon can gate the data at overclocked speeds but these devices run considerably warmer when pushed so it is unknown if the extra heat will eventually mean their death.

If they have 600MHz chips inside, then it is likely they are running hotter than if they are sold with 720 chips. I don't know how much hotter the difference is. It could be as insignificant as 1 degree celcius or it could be 20 degrees (that sounds a bit extreme!). There's probably more breathing room in the Pandora case than these phones so that might also benefit overclocking. Also, since the POP stack on the Pandora PCB is on the bottom side, during normal usage (not setting the unit upside down on your table) all 515 balls will pass the heat of the CPU up to the PCB and dissipate through the copper planes instead of getting trapped in the RAM chip and having to pass through it to the air. I have no data to suggest this will provide any significant benefit but it seems better than overheating the RAM chip!