Tests, tests, and more tests.

[Jumpman]

 

[rSl]

finally!!!

 

[fusion_power]

Ah, life signs, nice!

As the keymats have a leadtime of 12 weeks, I'm trying to get everything else done within these 12 weeks as well!

12 weeks for some rubber keymats? I mean, long lead times for electronics, ok. But for some rubber matts? You really are unlucky with the choice of companies I guess. I hoped for something more like 12 days. IT's JUST RUBBER! (and some plastic caps, I know)

Both CEOs from Uniqueplast will be there - and I'll go there as well, so we can look together for different plastic materials and hopefully find the perfect one for the Pyra.

Is the old Polycarbonate-Idea still valid? Pyra deserves something nice and durable. And don't make it look cheap, or green or animated...

 

[Silent-Hunter]

I was under the impression they were considering some things that are way more durable than polycarbonate.

 

[second exodous]

I was under the impression they were considering some things that are way more durable than polycarbonate.

Yeah, like Mithril or Unobtainium.

 

[oskda]

I think it just looks so bright because of the transparent case.
If there is no light bleeding, the light will only emit from the signs of the keys so it will be much less disturbing for the eyes.
But we will have to wait and see (no pun intended).

And I think most people with transparent case will use it to paint interior so have a case with personalized color instead of normal produced colors. That is the good point of transparent cases: you can paint interior and have color you like, really any color or mixed colors, patterns/etc, what you want or you can do with painting and imagination.

I think using a transparent case without painting it, is nice a time, but a nightmare, really disturbing, after that because of light bleeding from keyboard LEDs and other LEDs inside case.
[doublepost=1537071768,1537070395][/doublepost]

3,5 Watts sounds pretty good, and compare to the Standbye Current of the XBOX OneX dos its sound much much better, as this needs 30 - 40 Watt in "Fast Boot" Mode,
And 9 Hour Batterielifetime at the Start of the Firmwaredevelopment sound also great, my GPD Win got much less Batterie Time..
The Rest of the News also sound pretty good..

My friend, your Xbox is always connected to mains electricity plug, while Pyra will be a lot of time on battery.

On other side, running real soft (emulators, linux soft, etc) will determinate energy consumption in a more dramatic way than standby

Of course, I hope a good battery autonomy with that big battery, and even better when we can change the CPU board with a much more modern an efficient SOC.

 

[Mese96]

In other good news, uniqueplast seem to at least have a web presence. I've never been able to find anything about form action via a web search. Now we know where to chase them up if they double cross us!

http://www.formaction.gr/index_en.html

 

[levi]

@Mese96 Ah, thanks for that. No idea why I couldn't find that even searching for 'form action greece plastic injection'. It probably doesn't help that the HTML 'form' element has an 'action' attribute.

On other side, running real soft (emulators, linux soft, etc) will determinate energy consumption in a more dramatic way than standby

Of course, I hope a good battery autonomy with that big battery, and even better when we can change the CPU board with a much more modern an efficient SOC.

I tend to think the standby rate is more representative of real world use, because most of the time you spend away from a charger will be not running any apps. That 350 odd mA is quite impressive when there's still stuff running you probably wouldn't be running all of the time, and as I recall the lowest I've been able to get my Pandora to run at is about 250mA with the CPU turned on.

I'm not sure how low that could go if you started turning things off. There are a lot more peripherals in a Pyra than there were in my Pandora, but those parts are newer and all use less power than their equivalent in the older device.

Seems the charge pump providing 5V for USB host can be expected to leak a few dozen mA maybe. Maybe that's a reasonable estimate for all of the other major peripherals in there; while wifi is a simpler technology than LTE/HSPA+/GSM fallback, the broadcast power is higher.

But anyway, I think the bigger concern when the CPU cores are maxed out is heat production and throttling, so I'll be interested to see those thermal camera images and stats in the next news post hopefully. It's worth knowing how long you can push it before the battery will conk out of you, but with such a big battery I'm predicting the overall runtime will be much more down to its standby current.

 

[oskda]

@Mese96But anyway, I think the bigger concern when the CPU cores are maxed out is heat production and throttling, so I'll be interested to see those thermal camera images and stats in the next news post hopefully. It's worth knowing how long you can push it before the battery will conk out of you, but with such a big battery I'm predicting the overall runtime will be much more down to its standby current.

The good point on Pyra is a Linux SO where you have more control than on a Android smartphone, a BIG battery and finally a REMOVABLE battery, so if one battery isn't enough (we don't know if it doesn't) you can have a second battery to exchange with internal empty one.

My actual smartphone has removable battery, and I have a second battery and an external charger for battery (to charge internal battery outside of phone). We don't know if we will need a 2nd battery for Pyra, but if we need, it would be interesting to have an external charger (I know there are standard external chargers although I prefer specific chargers for our battery).

 

[Eight Bit]

to have an external charger

Solar- as well as USB powered. Yes please.

 

[EvilDragon]

12 weeks for some rubber keymats? I mean, long lead times for electronics, ok. But for some rubber matts? You really are unlucky with the choice of companies I guess. I hoped for something more like 12 days. IT's JUST RUBBER! (and some plastic caps, I know)

Rubber mats with multiple layers of paint, plastic key caps hand-glued on top and some special coating so that the glue holds without having visible bubbles.

There's a reason the Pandora keymat was 0,80 EUR each and the Pyra keymat is 12,34 EUR each in production costs...
It's not just a simple rubber mat. Probably one of the most complex ones you can find out there

BTW: That long leadtime is normal these times, sadly.
There are capacitors which have a lead time of over 30 weeks out there.

Have you by any chance followed the development on Indiegogo for the Moto Z keyboard addon?
They had the same issues. Horribly long leadtimes during development and now for production, and now they can't even get some parts anymore, as they're out of production (thanks to the long leadtime of others).
In the end, they gave up...

You can follow that on Indiegogo. And one of their backers even said that he's working in electronic development / production business as well and confirmed that the leadtimes get worse and worse and the out-of-production-time gets shorter and shorter...

Additionally, chinese companies support chinese companies - so they give them priority in production and delivery.
And as more and more chinese companies develop modern products (years ago, they mostly only produced them for companies outside of China), you have longer and longer waiting times if you're from outside of China.

We gave them the production facitlities - and now they're far better than us...

 

[levi]

It's odd; even the liberal pro-globalisation EU taxes finished chocolate from the african countries where it grows much higher than they do the raw ingredients, encouraging them to send the raw or paritially processed beans to Europe where it can be finished into bars for big mark ups, and discouraging them from building their own factories to access that mark up as it would be diluted by the export taxes they would need to pay. Why they didn't do the same for finished PCBs from China I don't know. Probably it stated slowly and they were asleep to the risks until it was too late, and to make a move like that now would be something of a publicity risk, if they were seen to be making our phones more expensive.

That said, I wonder if the opening up of chinese supply of components happened around the same time as we all started to get dodgy electrolytic capacitors which rotted after a few years. I've not looked into it, but my recollection is that the time spans are around the same time. If that were the case, it might suggest we shouldn't even trust them with that.

Edit: Apparently the list I was looking at only applies to African states with no free trade deal with the EU, which is a minority of them.

 

[fusion_power]

Rubber mats with multiple layers of paint, plastic key caps hand-glued on top and some special coating so that the glue holds without having visible bubbles.

Geez, you forgot to add gold dust, a cocktail cherry and the tears of an rainbow unicorn.

It's not just a simple rubber mat. Probably one of the most complex ones you can find out there

You really don't like it simple, right?

BTW: That long leadtime is normal these times, sadly.
There are capacitors which have a lead time of over 30 weeks out there.

Yeah, it seems almost an miracle that big electronic companies dont went bancrupt one after another. They must have the ballsiest businessmen that make the tightest contracts in the universe to get their stuff quick, jelaous.

Additionally, chinese companies support chinese companies - so they give them priority in production and delivery.

You could pretend to be chinese, maybe?

We gave them the production facitlities - and now they're far better than us...

What a surprise... ^^" When they can make fake clones of complex products that fast, you indeed need at least a good production facility. Imagine what they can do when beginning to make original and legal products now. We're screwed.

 

[ible]

You could pretend to be chinese, maybe?

if only i had photoshop skills, i'd put ED's face on that missing chinese actress...

 

[Coupo]

Well, that sounds realy great. So maybe the "prototypers" will get their stuff in the end of the year.
So perhaps I will get my Pyra for my birthday in may. Yay.

 

[Yuji Sakai]

well it's ALMOST ideal for us.
I think I will buy it despite the high EUR course.
but I wish to have new CPU boards soon...

PS: is it possible that one of new CPU boards would be ARM-64-bit or non-ARM (i.e. some future extra low voltage AMD64)?
PPS: is 4G hardware on the CPU-Board or the main-board?

 

[Puppetmaster]

The 4G Module is on the Mainboard, not on the CPU-Board.

 

[levi]

Any new cpu board is likely to support A64 I'd have thought - the A15's in the OMAP 5 were pretty much the last hurrah for 32-bit only application CPUs. A non ARM core would probably split the dev community so I'm not sure how good an idea of that would be.

 

[Silent-Hunter]

I think a non-ARM core is a bad idea. They're more suited to mobile devices I think.

 

[Yuji Sakai]

okay so let hope for arm-64bit with more cores an more quickness per core