The Pyra is crying!

[bzar]

KDE doesn't need that much RAM. I'm running it on my devboard and never had memory issues even when running GIMP, FireFox, LibreOffice, etc. at the same time with it.

Indeed. I've just started my computer and have 1.994 MiB in use with firefox taking 1067 MiB (at about 50 tabs in groups, with some big offenders taking most of the memory space), plasmashell 182 MiB, akonadi 139 MiB, krunner 124 MiB, kwin 117 MiB, kontact 112 MiB, and okular 102 MiB. Everything else is under 100 MiB.

Luke-Jr, you might want to clean your KDE .

 

[Caine]

Consider also, from those numbers, that just the basic KDE desktop playing music and checking email, needs >2 GB...

I don't think it needs so much memory, but it might very well be possible that when the memory is available that it makes use of it to speed things up.

I recall the pre-chrome version of Opera doing this very aggressively. It could run on a few megs of memory but would claim hundreds if it was otherwise unused.

 

[matzesu]

The joys of hardware design. ED pretty much jinxed this from the start with the overconfidence he showed about it, I was just waiting for a mistake in the layout to show its ugly face

I was expecting a mistake or more, but was hoping it was one that doesn't prevent testing the rest!

I actualy expected much more errors with that complex 10 layer board. Especialy when it was designed basicly by hand and by one person. So if there is only one mistake, it's already very impressive.
But to be realistic, there may be much more issues coming up that need some redesign. No hardware works perfect with it's first prototype.

Indeed. This is why prototypes (usually several generations) are needed. For the main board of the Pyra we currently have the fourth and the fifth is planned to go to mass production. So we would have been very lucky if the first CPU board would have been 100% perfect.

But PCB layout is almost always done by one person. It can rarely be split and parallelized (well, multiple PCBs can - if the positions of connectors and pin assignments are negotiated). The trick is to have EDA tools that do design rule checks (e.g. minimum distance between chips, wire traces etc.) while doing the hard manual work. This avoids most of the simple errors. The question is if this can be still recognized as being done "by hand"... In my experience auto-routers are not useable for such complex boards. They are good for very simple projects.


What no tool can avoid is a mistake introduced when translating printed data sheets into the EDA tool. This is very comparable to retyping a text from a printed textbook into a different word processor. Typos happen. And are unavoidable and pass unnoticed by the person who types, even if careful. They also become visible only if a first proof is printed and someone looks on it and sees the typo. And unfortunately predefined component libraries are not available for everything and in all data formats.


In fact we have another such translation bug - but it is not a visible problem since it does not affect the copper wires. The component placement printing for the DRAMs is shifted by 0.4mm. So the chips do look still misplaced, even if placed correctly. And because of the same problem they were misplaced initially and we have got them (almost) repaired now.


Another potential problem is that wrong settings of the design rules can make a layout unuseable. If rules are not correctly strict, the layout designer can do wrong things without notice. But for this, the PCB manufacturer does his own tests so that such errors don't pass the production entry guard. But the PCB manufacturer can not check for logical errors as described before.

By the way: how dos this "Blinkenled" thing works??
Dos the Omap Controll the LED, and you see on Blink Frequenzy what the Omap dos??


Or is it something like a bypass, which takes the part of the not working traces??


At your youtube video, its blinks, but i dotnt know why..

 

[WizardStan]

If I want to open more than 3 or 4 tabs in Firefox

Firefox and Chrome are notorious memory hogs, by design. If you have 2GB of RAM and you open a dozen tabs it will use up to 2GB. If you have 8GB of RAM and open the same dozen tabs it will use up to 8GB. I noticed this effect when I upgraded from 4 to 8 last year and I don't know why. I know it's a "performance" enhancement but I wish it wouldn't.Point being that web browsers are an incredibly poor benchmark of how much RAM you need.

 

[TrashyMG]

If I want to open more than 3 or 4 tabs in Firefox

Firefox and Chrome are notorious memory hogs, by design. If you have 2GB of RAM and you open a dozen tabs it will use up to 2GB. If you have 8GB of RAM and open the same dozen tabs it will use up to 8GB. I noticed this effect when I upgraded from 4 to 8 last year and I don't know why. I know it's a "performance" enhancement but I wish it wouldn't.
Point being that web browsers are an incredibly poor benchmark of how much RAM you need.

I'm not seeing this behavio(u)r  with iceweasel on the OMAP5 devboard... I can have more than a dozen tabs open and not even push over 600MBs total for the browser. 

 

[fusion_power]

More RAM also means more power consumption, especialy on mobile devices. So I prefer 2GB RAM on the Pyra over 4GB, which is also cheaper of course. My CC Pandora has 256MB RAM and I'm browsing fine with the bloated Firefox and Pale Moon, both are plain Desktop ports by the way.

My PC has 4GB RAM (old DDR2) and it's not that bad. I'm sure the Pyra will do fine with 2GB.

 

[WizardStan]

I can have more than a dozen tabs open and not even push over 600MBs total for the browser.

I wonder if there's a difference between Iceweasel and Firefox beyond a few security fixes and the removal of trademarks. Alternatively it may have been true a year ago but has gotten better, or my perceptions are messed up. I'll experiment tonight.

 

[CFWhitman]

I can have more than a dozen tabs open and not even push over 600MBs total for the browser.

I wonder if there's a difference between Iceweasel and Firefox beyond a few security fixes and the removal of trademarks. Alternatively it may have been true a year ago but has gotten better, or my perceptions are messed up. I'll experiment tonight.

Iceweasel is based on the ESR (Extended Support Release) builds of Firefox. It has the trademarks removed and any patches the Debian team deems necessary. It may not always be based on the most recent ESR build, especially in stable. It is done the way it is so that the Debian team can patch it themselves. Once they do, they can't call it Firefox.

 

[Grench]

So - more ram costs more, takes more juice and produces more heat.

Explaining this out based on my gut feeling from the above reports from people with dev boards and my experiences with a CC and 1Ghz Pandora:

256MB is probably enough for 60% of use cases

512MB is probably enough for 75% of use cases

1GB is probably enough for 90% of use cases

2GB is probably enough for 98% of use cases

3GB is probably enough for 99% of use cases

4GB is probably enough for 99.99% of use cases

 

[EvilDragon]

Dos the Omap Controll the LED, and you see on Blink Frequenzy what the Omap dos??

Or is it something like a bypass, which takes the part of the not working traces??

At your youtube video, its blinks, but i dotnt know why..

It's the Heartbeat from Linux, which means that the kernel is alive.

You can also let any Pandora LED do that with a simple command

 

[matzesu]

So ok whe know it works, but it will at least 5 Weeks cost to get a new CPU Board Prototyphe..


Or are whe now apple to test the other Things on CPU Board in this Time??


Are these CPU Board from the 5 Days Company??


If these Thread would be about the CPU Board, and not about the RAM, i think it would be much more evicience ..


Thanks for the Answer EvilDragon


And back to OFFTOPIC: My Notebook have something around 2 gb of Ram ( if i remember correkly) and it even runs GTA 4 EFLC so i think the Pyra will the most powerfull Device at home, even if i can put it in my Poket

 

[Silent-Hunter]

​What is the command? Can my laptop do that too?

 

[EvilDragon]

On the Pandora?


Easy.


First, become root (sudo su) in a shell.


Then:


echo heartbeat > /sys/class/leds/pandora\:\:wifi/trigger


Replace wifi in that command with any other led to let a different led blink (bluetooth, sd1, sd2, charger, power)


Instead of heartbeat you can also use other stuff like nand-disk (to see accesses to the NAND) or timer for a secondly blinking LED.

 

[Hồng Thất Công]

OK tried that command and it works.  Now how to stop it from blinking and back to normal without rebooting? 

 

[f9kjvppq]

OK tried that command and it works.  Now how to stop it from blinking and back to normal without rebooting? 

Do "cat /sys/class/leds/whatever/trigger" to see the list of possibilities. "echo none > /sys/class/leds/whatever/trigger" to disable it.

 

[rygD]

I have an acer C720 chromebook running Ubuntu with 2gb ram and it gets bogged down fairly easy doing more than one thing at a time. If I want to open more than 3 or 4 tabs in Firefox, I need to make sure nothing else is running. It's sufficient for what I use it for, but I certainly wouldn't want to use it as a primary device.

Doesn't seem to be much of a problem on the Devboard... I still can't easily push it over 1GB with just web browsing and even a few other things going on, IRC, LibreOffice and a game running.

Thanks for trying this out (if it isn't stuff you usually do with it) and sharing the results.

 

[Grench]

On the Pandora?


Easy.


First, become root (sudo su) in a shell.


Then:


echo heartbeat > /sys/class/leds/pandora\:\:wifi/trigger


Replace wifi in that command with any other led to let a different led blink (bluetooth, sd1, sd2, charger, power)


Instead of heartbeat you can also use other stuff like nand-disk (to see accesses to the NAND) or timer for a secondly blinking LED.

OK tried that command and it works.  Now how to stop it from blinking and back to normal without rebooting? 

Do "cat /sys/class/leds/whatever/trigger" to see the list of possibilities. "echo none > /sys/class/leds/whatever/trigger" to disable it.

This strikes me as something that someone who wants to make their first .pnd could wrap a GUI around.  Blinkenlights.pnd?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blinkenlights

 

[f9kjvppq]

On the Pandora?


Easy.


First, become root (sudo su) in a shell.


Then:


echo heartbeat > /sys/class/leds/pandora\:\:wifi/trigger


Replace wifi in that command with any other led to let a different led blink (bluetooth, sd1, sd2, charger, power)


Instead of heartbeat you can also use other stuff like nand-disk (to see accesses to the NAND) or timer for a secondly blinking LED.

OK tried that command and it works.  Now how to stop it from blinking and back to normal without rebooting? 

Do "cat /sys/class/leds/whatever/trigger" to see the list of possibilities. "echo none > /sys/class/leds/whatever/trigger" to disable it.

This strikes me as something that someone who wants to make their first .pnd could wrap a GUI around.  Blinkenlights.pnd?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blinkenlights

Would do it, but sadly I don't own a pandora. Always wanted one, but didn't have the money. About a week ago decided that the time has come to purchase one,

and that's when I learned about Pyra. I'm so glad I've waited.

 

[f9kjvppq]

So is it final that we will have only two leds, not counting keyboard backlight and the logo? What is their designation?

 

[Grench]

So is it final that we will have only two leds, not counting keyboard backlight and the logo? What is their designation?

Each of those 4 individually addressable LEDs (2 in keyboard/base area, 2 in lid) are RGB LEDs meaning that they are color controllable too.  In my book that makes each one far more capable than all of the single color LEDs as we had in the Pandora combined.

So, the "only two leds," statement is a bit of a misnomer.  Two LEDs capable of dozens of distinguishable colors each - capable of working in concert with each other, and alternating 'messages' 10 times per second or more, means that they could communicate hundreds of 'things' through those two little LEDs.

How?  Just using the 6 truncated easy to distinguish (by most - sorry colorblind) colors Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue and Indigo/Violet = purple, we can monitor 36 different 'things'.

Which combination represents what hardware or function could be decided by whomever writes the control software.  This is just an example of how it could work.

The pulses could be queued and prioritized so that only the 10 'most important' ones make it through each second.  Alternatively the end user should be able to customize or even turn off any of it.

Left LED Red + Right LED Green 0.1 second pulse = read from NAND or microSD during the second

Left LED Red + Right LED Red 0.1 second pulse = write to NAND or microSD during the second

Left LED Orange + Right LED Green 0.1 second = read from left SD card during the second

Left LED Orange + Right LED Red 0.1 second = write to left SD card during the second

Left LED Yellow + Right LED Green 0.1 second = read from right SD card during the second

Left LED Yellow + Right LED Red 0.1 second = write to right SD card during the second


Left LED Green + Right LED Green 0.1 second = inbound from WiFi during the second

Left LED Green + Right LED Red 0.1 second = outbound to WiFi during the second

Left LED Blue + Right LED Green 0.1 second = inbound from Bluetooth during the second

Left LED Blue + Right LED Red 0.1 second = outbound to Bluetooth during the second


Left LED Purple + Right LED Green 0.1 second = inbound from 4G during the second

Left LED Purple + Right LED Red 0.1 second = outbound to 4G during the second

Left off + Right Red 0.1 second = low battery

Left off + Right Orange  0.1 second = charging

Left off + Right Green 0.1 second = battery full/charged

Left off + Right Yellow 0.1 second = USB ports active/powered

Left off + Right Blue 0.1 second = HDMI port active/powered

Left off + Right Purple 0.1 second = ????

The list could go on and on...  then you could get into 'priority codes' that would 'push to the front' of the event queue and last longer than the flickers above (alarms, game FX, etc...) as well as additional states (standby/sleep/lid events/etc...), create a 'fire' fx by flickering red/yellow with occasional blue/green and more.

Those four individually addressable RGB LEDs have a lot of potential to be very cool.  Don't sell them short.