So, what's the current status of everything?

[EvilDragon]

OR you are one of these many chinese startups that can throw out such devices like crazy. I doubt they all are multi billion dollar companies. But they often sit right at the source of all needed parts.

Oh, well, they're not often producing anything but just reselling stuff they find there.

Want an example?
Take the PeakAGo, for example:

Peakago 7 inch laptop - Work & Fun on the Go

The world’s first 4G network integrated 7 inch laptop| IPS 1920*1200 screen|539 gram| up to 60% OFF | Check out 'Peakago 7 inch laptop - Work & Fun on the Go' on Indiegogo.

www.indiegogo.com

That one is available on Alibaba from a Shenzen company for 118 USD.

They sell it on Indiegogo for 269 USD...

I won't post a link here, as I don't want to hurt their Indiegogo, but if someone is interested, send me a PM and I'll send it.

 

[PowerGod]

Am I the only one that can't see the picture ?

 

[EvilDragon]

Am I the only one that can't see the picture ?

Naah, seems the Media Plugin didn't work... I disabled it now, but that means I need to fix all links it has created so far as well.

 

[ashcloud]

I wanted something opossum

There you go

 

[fusion_power]

Oh, well, they're not often producing anything but just reselling stuff they find there.

Want an example?
Take the PeakAGo, for example:

Yupp, that's also a well known tactic. ^^ Many western companies do this since ages too. I guess our german "Pearl" shop would not even exist if they didn't buy cheap chinese products and resell it as super fancy gimmicks in germany.
Well, in the recent years there were some good handheld devices that came out of (not only) asia. Besides GPD there are many other of these various retro-handhelds. "Pocket Go", "GKD350H", various Rhaspberry Pi Kits and so on. Nice to have a choice.

 

[PCXT]

Just a quick question about this coating: Is it applied during extrusion or is it applied after?
If after, how penetrating is it (is it?)?
This will shed some light into wear predictions I roughly made.

 

[levi]

It's after; it's done in a different european state even (the raw cases are shipped from greece to germany before being finished by being coated with pigment). I'm not sure it I remember ED promising to do some wear testing of the case, or if that was just something someone asked of him.

 

[PCXT]

About the wear, generally my knowledge is more in steel than polymers, but, well, this is still a friction. This is really simplified.
1. Most important factors we deal with it are: Normal stress, distance when in friction and, negatively for wear, hardness. These 3 factors make something called "Archard formula" first published in modern form by Khruschev. There is of course a proportionality factor. Generally even if the distance is small, but the stress is large, there will be a problem (see notebooks in tight bags with polished almost non-moving areas of high stress). So don't put your PDA into pocket, better choose well-absorbing protective casing with elastic "suspension" parts.
2. Existing degradations changes surface properties and distance while in contact.
3. The proportional factor is not constant. Yes, in most models in simulation software it is, but if we speak about lots and lots of smaller friction cycles, we cannot just add up distance and pretend it's everything (we'll undershoot) or multiply by number of cycles (we'll overshoot in some places).
The trick to get the vulnerability after many cycles is, in simplified form, to compute "raw" value (sometimes it's work of tangent stresses, sometimes per existing hardness but then making the function per material is a bit more difficult) and pass it to a function to determine the coefficient. What is more important, this function in simplified form looks like two linear functions with different slopes sticked together at some point, the latter goes up faster (surface becomes also degraded by non-frictional factors). It means that it starts slowly, and then degrades more and more violently. This may be partially compensated with material structure versus wear depth and that's why I asked about coating penetration as it may work for good or for bad when the coating wears off.

 

[levi]

I don't think ED or whoever is was is concerned with the plastic wearing away, he's only really concerned how easy it is to scratch off this layer, and then to see what it looks like having done that.

With your experience is this area, do you have any advice on how he would have to carry out such an investigation that isn't obvious?

 

[PCXT]

In my field (steel), unfortunately these are usually practical measurements. We just measure things after x contact cycles (x like 5000, 1000, 2000, 4000, 8000 etc.) and with this + stresses and distances from simulation of the same process that was measured we find material parameters for function. The measurements of such small values are usually horribly noisy (and many times it's needed to e.g. look under microscope what really happens there) so this "two linear functions" simplification becomes simplified even more to "value-threshold-value" function. And... it works too .
The polymers are quite problematic with wear cycles predictions in "synthetic tests" (like devices applying friction periodically) as it is really easy during cycle to make it thermally soften and flow. Such results would crank the coefficients up without a reason.

 

[ashcloud]

Nuice! Nuice!

 

[Grench]

@PCXT
Let me get this straight. You would like us to hold off about six months so a statistically representative sample, liIely 60+, cases can be sacrificed in wear jigs costing tens of thousands of Euros to establish the wear characteristics of a <20 Euro easily swapped case?

Folks, just think of cases a bit like tires on a car. Plan to replace them every few tens of thousands of pocket insertion cycles. If they last forever in your use case great! If they do not, you are getting a whole lot of use out of your Pyra under severe conditions and a fresh case every few years should not be a big deal.

 

[Phlyra]

@PCXT
Let me get this straight. You would like us to hold off about six months so a statistically representative sample, liIely 60+, cases can be sacrificed in wear jigs costing tens of thousands of Euros to establish the wear characteristics of a <20 Euro easily swapped case?

Folks, just think of cases a bit like tires on a car. Plan to replace them every few tens of thousands of pocket insertion cycles. If they last forever in your use case great! If they do not, you are getting a whole lot of use out of your Pyra under severe conditions and a fresh case every few years should not be a big deal.

From what I’ve read - and correct me if I’m wrong, PCXT - I don’t think PCXT is actually suggesting that we do that, just trying to extrapolate from what we already know to apply their engineering experience and calculate estimates.

 

[levi]

So, what's the current status of everything?

This plus 12 days. There's no patches currently recorded on the git instances that are linked, although it's always possible with git that people haven't pushed recently, and once they do it'll go back and fill in the history. And I've not heard whether ED's received the painted samples yet, or whether he's been able to build and send out any more prototypes; he's been silent on his personal twitter for the past few weeks, and only made a few shop twitter posts about mobile phones and things as far as I can see.

But in any case, it's traditionally early to demand new news, so for now we'll just have to keep tracking the links to see any updates in the meantime that might allow us to get ahead of the normal news frequency.

 

[Confuzzled]

I just want to know about the PyraPhone.

You'll hear more within Two Months™.

 

[PCXT]

No way these tests would even work for plastics! Too much time, too complicated tests not to go into thermal-based deformation.
I was thinking that material/tribological parameters are accessible somewhere. Is the coating penetrating or not, is also characteristics of coating. Penetration of coating would most likely increase durability in terms of friction in this layer.

 

[ToastBucket]

Nice update! If anyone is interested in working on the kernel or building an image themselves out of curiosity, check out the repositories in the imagebuild and kernel groups of the gitlab. A good starting point is to read the README and wiki of the docker repository, as this wraps the build environment.

imagebuild / pyra-docker · GitLab

DragonBox Pyra - GIT Repositories

dev.pyra-handheld.com

It would be really helpful if people interested started using this and reporting to me any issues they come across so that I can make it easier to use.

There are also currently posted issues in the issue tracking of the kernel and uboot repositories. When you get your units, feel free to post issues to the backlog, or just start working on them yourself, or both!

 

[matzesu]

So 2020 will be the Year of the Pyra, may be End January to Mid February for the first few hundred Pyrae ??
Its pretty close, and yes i will post some issues, if i find them whit my poor Linux Experience..
(Even this Long time as a Pandora Owner isnt that much, as the Pandora is pretty easy to use, its GUI is mostly Point and Click like Windows..)

Whe should make a Pyra Issues Threadth as far as the first Users get theyre Handhelds

 

[Hellfleck]

So 2020 will be the Year of the Pyra, may be End January to Mid February for the first few hundred Pyrae ??

so thats like 2 months now ?

 

[gpsqueeek]

so thats like 2 months now ?

I'd rather estimate it to two months, your estimate of two monts seems a bit short to me