The power of the Pandora?

[Askarus]

So...are there any other bits of information I should know about the Pandora that would be good to know? I don't want to get burned by a common beginner mistake or anything like that.

There are no hardware parts left for repairs.
Nubs are rare and LCD cables are gone AFAIK.

 

[ElPoco]

• One of the nubs of my Pandora suddenly started drifting one day and is now unusable. From what I've read it looks like it's not that uncommon. The other nub works fine, though. If one of the nub fails, you can use the "AB Mouse" app to use the buttons as mouse button (and use your working nub as mouse)
• The case is less sturdy than the case of a 3DS or other handhelds devices. It's not fragile, but you don't want to drop it.
• TV-out cables can easily break because of their weight.
• You'll want to update the OS to the last version, it has seen many improvements.
• There are different video driver versions, there's a handy app to choose which one to install. Some apps/game will require a specific version but generally speaking there's one that should be optimal for most cases.
• You can configure what your Pandora does when you close the lid and when you use the physical switch. I have it just turn off the screen when the lid is closed so that I can close it when it's doing long operations/downloads without stopping it. I use the physical switch to suspend, the Pandora has a very very very low power consumption in that mode, I only shut it down completely when I know I won't be using it for at least two days.
• The Wi-Fi is not very good. It does the job, but it's clearly not as good as what you get with other devices or what you can get with an external Wi-Fi dongle.
• Always use SD Cards for everything, writing to the NAND should be limited to very specific cases where you can't use the SD Card. The size of the NAND is limited, and you don't want to wear it down.
• For memory hungry apps you can use a swap file, though swapping on SD Card tends to wear them out, so it's better to go swapless unless you need it.
• By default, you have XFCE and Mini-Menu, there's an OpenBox PND to install the OpenBox Window Manager. I like it.
• Generally speaking you'll find many useful PNDs or resources on the forums for many different things, like using a BT headset to having a scrollable display (when you want to display content that doesn't fit on the screen)

I'm probably forgetting a few things, I'll post if I think of something else.

 

[canseco]

The only problem with Kdenlive is having to ship the entirety of KDE with the package, but I guess with fat internet connections and big sd cards these days that's less of an issue that it used to be. The latest Avidemux is KDE only also.

KDE libs are modular, so no need to put all KDE libs, just the ones needed.
Latest Avidemux is QT5, only QT5-base is needed as QT libs are modular too.

 

[Binky]

• The Wi-Fi is not very good. It does the job, but it's clearly not as good as what you get with other devices or what you can get with an external Wi-Fi dongle.

• Always use SD Cards for everything, writing to the NAND should be limited to very specific cases where you can't use the SD Card. The size of the NAND is limited, and you don't want to wear it down.

To add to those, the Wifi varies widely between units (especially in power-saving mode), largely due to sloppy factory calibration by upstream suppliers. I was lucky enough to get a unit that works well in all the environments I need it to work in. You might be too. If not, you can get tiny USB dongles that will the job.

I keep all my meaningful data on one SD card, and all my PNDs on another. Some applications like to write logs, caches, etc to 'disk', which can wear it out over a few years of continuous use. That three-way isolation means that I can reimage the internal memory, or replace my applications card, without affecting any 'real' data, or resorting to backups.

 

[matzesu]

- The Headphone Jack of the Pandora is not the "New Standart", this means if you use a newer Headphone you will have some Sound Issues,
some yeahrs ago (but after the Pandora headphone Jack was used) Apple made a new Standart, so the old Headphones ditnt work that good..
This means: You need at least a Adapter or (like i do) a Extend Caple from a old Headphone..

- Some of the older Pandorae got foam pads in the shoulderbuttons, some times they may cause some trouble so you have to open the bottompart of the Pandora and put the Foam Pad back on its position to fix the shoulderbuttons..

And there isnt any minimal Charging OS: The Pandora Boots up when you put the Charging Caple in..

- If you dotnt have a Original Pandora Charger: The Charger from the PSP also works perfektly..

 

[Grench]

Always use SD Cards for everything, writing to the NAND should be limited to very specific cases where you can't use the SD Card. The size of the NAND is limited, and you don't want to wear it down.

I have never heard of anyone actually 'wearing down' their internal eMMC on a Pandora by installing and booting their OS from it. Sure, NAND can 'wear down' eventually, but we're talking about tens of thousands of write cycles. Has anyone actually ever 'worn out' the NAND on a Pandora while using it for OS? I'm just questioning if this is myth or fiction.

- The Headphone Jack of the Pandora is not the "New Standart", this means if you use a newer Headphone you will have some Sound Issues,
some yeahrs ago (but after the Pandora headphone Jack was used) Apple made a new Standart, so the old Headphones ditnt work that good..

There WAS a standard. If you look at -any- other plug or cable standard, it is handled this way - with the ground being the outermost connector. On high quality connectors of this time period, the entire outer casing of the plug would be metal and linked into this sleeve ground. Any electrical charge on the operator (person) would then be dumped to ground when using the plug. Fantastic. Makes sense. Follows the configuration standard started in phone companies clear back in the early 1900s. The sleeve is always the ground. It makes great sense. The Pandora followed this standard - as did EVERY stereo microphone headset made - including Apple units of the time.
T= Tip = left audio
R = Ring = right audio
R = Ring = mic
S = Sleeve = ground

Then, 2010-2012 or so, Apple decided to take a pre-existing wiring standard that was in use for all 4 wire TRRS plugs and change it. The Apple proprietary standard included re-wiring the 4 connector TRRS and patenting sending ohm-resistance signals over the wires. This ensured that no non-Apple headsets would work on Apple devices AND that Apple headsets would no longer work on other devices.
T = Tip = left audio
R = Ring = right audio
R = Ring = ground
S = Sleeve = mic
*Suddenly people with Apple devices were returning 3rd party headsets. So, headset manufacturers flipped 2 wires so the Apple crowd would buy them - they could then charge more. Beats and many other manufacturers of high priced headsets were born.
*Suddenly people with non-Apple devices were returning 3rd party headsets - they were all wired the Apple way. So, cell phone manufacturers (Samsung included) flipped the 2 connectors to conform to the Apple ground/mic connection methodology - and then added their own ohm-resistance signal interpretations.

Fast forward to today. The above history isn't glamorous for Apple or Samsung or the headphone manufacturers or consumers. So now we have revisionist historians claiming that the Apple 2012 way was the original configuration.
https://www.cablechick.com.au/blog/understanding-trrs-and-audio-jacks/
There are several websites making a similar claim. Even Wikipedia now states the 'first' TRRS standard as being Apple's - even though they acknowledge that Nokia was doing it back in 2006.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phone_connector_(audio)

3.5 mm TRRS (stereo-plus-mic) sockets became particularly common on smartphones, and have been used e.g. by Nokia since 2006; they are often compatible with standard 3.5 mm stereo headphones. Two different forms are frequently found, both of which place left audio on the tip and right audio on the first ring (mirroring the configuration found on stereo connectors). Where they differ is in the placement of the microphone and return contacts. The first, which places the ground return on the second ring and the microphone on the sleeve, is used by Apple's iPhone line (through the iPhone 6), HTC devices, recent Samsung, Nokia, and Sony phones, among others. The second, which reverses these contacts, is used by older Nokia mobiles, older Samsung smartphones, and some Sony Ericsson phones.[41] Some adapters switch the last two conductors to allow a device made to one standard to be used with a headset made to the other.[42]

In reality, there WAS already a 'first' standard, (left/right/mic/ground) and the second 'standard' was created by Apple.

All of this is supposed to be solved by the Pyra though. It has a circuit that detects which pin the ground is on then switches the jack configuration to match the headset plugged into it.

So, back when the Pandora was designed, it followed the primary standard for headset stereo audio jacks with the ground where it always should have been - on the outer sleeve, just like in every other wiring system on planet earth did at the time.

 

[NovemberJoy]

Thanks for the advice. One more question, although it might sound weird - is the Pyra compatible with Pandora software? If it is, then I might wait and watch the Pyra's progress instead. Once again, thanks for all the help and advice for a newbie.

 

[levi]

At time of writing, there's no way to run pandora pnds on pyras. Hopefully the vast vast majority will simply be recompiled by the authors and porters who made them. But the time between the start of the Pandora's life and its end might mean some stuff that was released early for the Pandora gets missed off, so there might still be a need for a shim os package to bring a few things over, as ginge brought gp2x software to the Pandora, but I don't know of any published work in that direction yet. It's still very early days for Pyra software, with only a handful of packages released thus far, about half of which I automatically recognise as being previous released on the Pandora.

 

[NovemberJoy]

At time of writing, there's no way to run pandora pnds on pyras. Hopefully the vast vast majority will simply be recompiled by the authors and porters who made them. But the time between the start of the Pandora's life and its end might mean some stuff that was released early for the Pandora gets missed off, so there might still be a need for a shim os package to bring a few things over, as ginge brought gp2x software to the Pandora, but I don't know of any published work in that direction yet. It's still very early days for Pyra software, with only a handful of packages released thus far, about half of which I automatically recognise as being previous released on the Pandora.

Ah...I'd like to think that the open-source nature of most of the Pandora's applications and the similar hardware between the Pandora and Pyra should make porting a not-too-difficult task, but I don't know for sure because I'm not a developer. Considering that the Pyra runs a standard desktop variant of GNU/Linux, though, it should be a lot easier to just grab applications than with the Pandora and its obscure variant designed for embedded devices.

 

[levi]

True enough. There quite some developer smarts involved in tweaking compiler settings and other bits and pieces that don't end up written to a public git repository somewhere. Also, bear in mind that the Pandora start predated github, and there are a few apps (games mainly) that were specially written for the Pandora especially in the early days that the source to which coders just never got around to tidying up and publishing.

By example, the homepage link that @_wb_ gave for his apps on the repo seems to be his old university pages, which ends up in a 403 block these days. I can find him on github under his real name, but he hasn't published the code for nub nub or pandora system info there.

 

[matzesu]

My Posting was more to state, that the Threadstarter may have some issues whit the Headphone Jack,

Maybe the Pyra could be a good Alternative as its "a new device" where you get Spareparts pretty easy, and its also have the advantage of a newer CPU which means its need less power for Pandora tasks..