A new hope
Our story starts in February
Back in February I quit my job as a programmer. Since I had nothing better to do and because I had some random spark of enthusiasm, I decided to go back to the roots. Some might say I am a person who must obviously hate himself a lot, judging how I voluntarily chose to torture myself by taking on the Pyra mess production.
For the first two months, I traveled to Ingolstadt once every week and stayed one night at ED's house, since I do not live near Ingolstadt any longer. During that time we did the first batch of new orders and progressed the preorders by about 100. That does not mean that we shipped 100 Pyras because not everyone on the list actually responds to the new E-Mail anymore.
We could slowly but continuously start shipping Pyras. It was not much because I still had to get into it once again and unfortunately the housing requires quite a lot of reworking.
Nevertheless, we continued that way until we ran out of black cases. That was in April.
The purification
Get baptized so that your sins will be washed away. That's right, as a Christian I did not allow any further Pyras to be delivered, if not each part of the case was baptized by my own hands.
Actually, this was some big mess. The new unpainted housings we got were not cleaned properly by the manufacturer. On the housings, there was some oil or whatever film applied, so that the housings will eject more easily from the mold. However that makes the paint not stick properly on some areas, which will lead to some ugly results.
This is the point now where we shifted the production to mostly my house. I took all the housings with me and started the big cleaning. Every piece of housing was put into a pool of soap water for about 2 hours. When taking it out, I quickly brushed each one, just to make sure it was properly cleaned. Luckily it turned out that soap water was enough, and we did not have to clean them with Isopropanol, which would have taken forever.
It might not seem obvious but drying the whole pile of casings efficiently was also a bit of a challenge. I went quite creative at first
This was not super efficient and I was afraid that the housings might scratch. I ended up with the following: First I put the wet housings onto some grid, so that the water could drop off. I helped a little with a battery powered leaf blower.
Before the next batch of housings was ready to be taken out of the water, the ones on the grid were put on a rope and put on the ground in a certain angle, so that the remaining water could flow off and not leave some traces;
This procedure took several weeks. I could only do 3 boxes of housings per day because this was quite taxing on my back (doing this all on the ground is not an ergonomic workflow) and very time consuming. Further, my official contract is only for about one and a half days per week and at that time I was not motivated to do more than that. Not the least because I needed to rest my back after 2 days of cleaning.
Don't worry, my back is healthy and I recover from such work loads quickly. It's not like I do this all the time
Check out the huge chunk of boxed I had in front of me.
Heavy metal, baby
It's copper time.
Cleaning the housings finished in May. It made no sense to send out new E-Mails because the majority of people ordered black housings. So we decided to wait until we got the painted ones. It turned out that this until the mid of July.
This however did not mean that we were on idle. We still needed to take care of all the Vodka we had stocked up for exactly such times, and since Germany now allows Marijuana, the waiting time could be used to progress into other directions.
I made the decision that going on like we did in February and March is way to inefficient and that we should transition to mass/batch production. It's up to you to decide if this was the result of rational thinking or by the scenario described above.
So I took all the copper housings and other parts with me and started to experiment on how to increase efficiency.
Most steps were straight forward. Two however where a huge pain.
Believe it or not, but the copper paint broke the battery lid. The new housings have a re-designed battery lid. It's now a sliding mechanism, which works much better than the old one. However adding the copper paint to it added 0.X millimeters of thickness to both the battery lid and the housing. Further it turned out that the copper paint had much higher friction than the unpainted plastics. This combined resulted in a battery lid that was pretty much impossible to open once it was closed. Not good. In April we already figured out how to make them function in an acceptable way. Luckily I had a drill head that could widen the gaps in a semi-efficient and not too ugly way. This widens the gaps where the notches of the battery lid slide in and thus reduce friction.
Here is how it looks now:
Spoiler alert: It turned out that the new black coating has a totally different feel than the copper one. It has way less friction and I did not have to do that ugly modification on the black cases
Nubs
It's not the nubs themself that are problematic. Somehow more often than not there is not enough room inside the housing for the plastic head to move 100% freely. This results in some friction and causes some nubs not to return to center position properly once they are released.
The solution to this is to remove like 0.1mm of materil from the housing in the area where the nubs are located. What might sound easy is like the biggest and most time consuming step in the whole process. Those housings are quite sturdy and there is not efficient way to remove that plastic in a wide are simultaneously. At first I tried a forstner drill, however even a new and sharp drill head could did not work. The housing was not only hard but also very sleek.
In the end my father suggested to cut a piece of sand paper at the desired size and tape it onto a washer of the desired size. That way we made our own drill which turned out to be quite a functional solution.
Even though we have a drill stand that allows to move the drill head down, I still could not go that route and needed to manually press each piece against the self made drill head. That is because of heat. Even with a slowly rotating head, the housing starts to become warm quite fast and if too much pressure was applied or the procedure went on for too long, the housing melted. So I needed to manually tilt the housing below the rotating drill head and keep my fingers on the other side to apply counter pressure and to be able to react immediately, once the heat emerges.
Further I did two runs for each housing, at first with a rough sand paper (right one) to remove the material and make the surface rough. After that I used a fine one (left one) to polish the surface and make sure that the nubs will have nice conditions for free flow movement.
Here is the result
The rest of the copper production went quite smooth. There are quite a few (extra) steps involved while preparing the housings. However those are just small cuts or other quick actions that do not take too much time if it's all done in a batch production.
I have a really big desk here for work and once I clean it all up, I can fit a bit over 50 housings on it at the same time. This is a nice batch size to work with.
Here I'm having some fun with key mats for example
Some true slacking off
The copper cases were prepared by the end of June. During the first weekend of June we visited the Level Up in Salzburg, Austria. It is a gaming event with not only video games but also a huge table top area, sword fighting and board games. We spent one week to prepare the event and also to keep things ready for the Gamescom in August.
During the first three weeks of July we had to wait for the cases and I visited the shop the help cleaning up a bit and to dig through ancient GPD devices. I even got some (semi) broken souvenirs including an old GPD XD, which visited quite a few Gamescom events with us.
After that I had the honor to build a couple of Retrodes.
Ambition in black
Two weeks ago, the black housings finally arrived. I was still pissed that EvilDragon decided to paint the bottom part at all because it was the copper paint that made the battery lid quite impossible to open.
However there was a huge surprise inside those boxes: The paint was different. It's not just that the black paint was way easier on the battery lid mechanism.
It was also different than the old black paint.
Oh my god this thing looks and feels so premium. It's a bit rough and matte. The old black is a bit glossy and sleek. The new one is not reflective at all and has a nice rough texture.
Here are some pictures. The right one is the new one.
So in the end, painting the whole case was the right thing to do. This is a pleasant surprise.
However there is one downside. It seems like the new paint is way more vulnerable to scratches. Once or twice I slipped off during production and my finger nail left some trace. The old one was quite more sturdy.
I snatched off a housing for myself but still did not apply it to my Pyra. I have no idea how the new paint behaves in the long term and if it will degrade over time.
At the current moment however, it looks great.
Anyways, back to production.
Since I will not be available indefinitely and I had an other spark of enthusiasm, I went all in and spent 1 1/2 weeks doing non-stop Pyra work. (To put things in perspective, just doing the nub rework took a whole day. It's crazy how much time this takes).
Here is the result: 137 black shells, awaiting their PCB
The next 2 month™
I will visit EvilDragon later this week. We need to do an inspection on how many of each PCBs we still have in stock. Also EvilDragon did not see the new paint yet. Both of us did not expect such a nice upgrade, so he just handed over the boxes to me and I took them with me.
At the 19th we prepare and take off for the Gamescom and we will probably take this week and/or next week to prepare for the exhibition. So the chances that Pyras will be shipped during August are quite low.
Maybe we'll send out some more E-mails to notify remaining customers.
In sum, we have about 190 housings prepared. 137 of those are black ones. I am not sure about the count of the copper ones. There should be a bit over 50 of those.
More pain
Just don't you think all we need to do is to put in the PCB and close the housings now. The shoulder buttons are a MAJOR pain to tweak. Much more annoying to me than the Pandora shoulder buttons were.
Further, we have a pile of CPU-PCBs that are not working because of RAM timing issues. The most annoying ones are those that aork at first but fail during flashing. Luckily we notice those and from the ones I build all Pyras that were sent out were stable.
Doing that last step, tweaking the shoulder buttons and dealing with failing Pyras is the most frustrating and demotivating part of all.
Remaining issues, here you can help us
What we need the most is some help to fix the boot issues. What we need is a way so that EvilDragon or I (= the noobs) can easily experiment with RAM timings. We have high hopes that many of the dead PCBs can be revived if we experiment with the timings and tweak them to make them work with more CPU-boards.
The issue is, that EvilDragon lacks the time to get into it, so he would need someone to provide an easy solution that allows him to tweak the parameters and test them.
I myself have some moments of ambition to get into the whole OS stuff, however there is a reason why I quit as a programmer. If someone would be willing to contact me, I'd gladly help or collaborate. However the both of us need someone to take us by the hand a bit.
There is a lot more work that needs to be done. This post however shall be about the good news and is already long enough.
Maybe some day I will be stupid enough to publicly promise and other news post regarding open issues and I must commit to it (like I did with this one here).
Final surprise
(No, not painted baguettes for everyone)
If you have made it this far, congratulations, you have no life, just like me.
I decided to record the mass production of the black housings.
If I can push myself enough, I'll make a video with explanations for you
In that video you will see what a brilliant worker I am and why the Pyra production requires to make a knife out of an old credit card.
Something that surprised me
It surprised me how one man can make such a difference. To me it seems like this all is not some kind of wizardry. Apparently it is. If it is not, shut up and let me believe that I am a wizard
I always thought that if I leave, just someone else picks it up and that's it. I never expected that it makes such a huge difference if I come back and support the project for a few hours a week. It almost makes me feel bad for leaving. At least it makes it hard for me to ever quit fully before not all orders are completed.
It's not like I gain anything except for some very temporary recognition by some random people on the Internet. At least they are real people and not bots, that's more than you can ask for today
My only wish is that the project will not die completely and that we maybe some day will get a SoC and case refresh and that at least part of the community and enthusiasm that once brought the Pandora to life might come back
Our story starts in February
Back in February I quit my job as a programmer. Since I had nothing better to do and because I had some random spark of enthusiasm, I decided to go back to the roots. Some might say I am a person who must obviously hate himself a lot, judging how I voluntarily chose to torture myself by taking on the Pyra mess production.
For the first two months, I traveled to Ingolstadt once every week and stayed one night at ED's house, since I do not live near Ingolstadt any longer. During that time we did the first batch of new orders and progressed the preorders by about 100. That does not mean that we shipped 100 Pyras because not everyone on the list actually responds to the new E-Mail anymore.
We could slowly but continuously start shipping Pyras. It was not much because I still had to get into it once again and unfortunately the housing requires quite a lot of reworking.
Nevertheless, we continued that way until we ran out of black cases. That was in April.
The purification
Get baptized so that your sins will be washed away. That's right, as a Christian I did not allow any further Pyras to be delivered, if not each part of the case was baptized by my own hands.
Actually, this was some big mess. The new unpainted housings we got were not cleaned properly by the manufacturer. On the housings, there was some oil or whatever film applied, so that the housings will eject more easily from the mold. However that makes the paint not stick properly on some areas, which will lead to some ugly results.
This is the point now where we shifted the production to mostly my house. I took all the housings with me and started the big cleaning. Every piece of housing was put into a pool of soap water for about 2 hours. When taking it out, I quickly brushed each one, just to make sure it was properly cleaned. Luckily it turned out that soap water was enough, and we did not have to clean them with Isopropanol, which would have taken forever.
It might not seem obvious but drying the whole pile of casings efficiently was also a bit of a challenge. I went quite creative at first
This was not super efficient and I was afraid that the housings might scratch. I ended up with the following: First I put the wet housings onto some grid, so that the water could drop off. I helped a little with a battery powered leaf blower.
Before the next batch of housings was ready to be taken out of the water, the ones on the grid were put on a rope and put on the ground in a certain angle, so that the remaining water could flow off and not leave some traces;
This procedure took several weeks. I could only do 3 boxes of housings per day because this was quite taxing on my back (doing this all on the ground is not an ergonomic workflow) and very time consuming. Further, my official contract is only for about one and a half days per week and at that time I was not motivated to do more than that. Not the least because I needed to rest my back after 2 days of cleaning.
Don't worry, my back is healthy and I recover from such work loads quickly. It's not like I do this all the time
Check out the huge chunk of boxed I had in front of me.
Heavy metal, baby
It's copper time.
Cleaning the housings finished in May. It made no sense to send out new E-Mails because the majority of people ordered black housings. So we decided to wait until we got the painted ones. It turned out that this until the mid of July.
This however did not mean that we were on idle. We still needed to take care of all the Vodka we had stocked up for exactly such times, and since Germany now allows Marijuana, the waiting time could be used to progress into other directions.
I made the decision that going on like we did in February and March is way to inefficient and that we should transition to mass/batch production. It's up to you to decide if this was the result of rational thinking or by the scenario described above.
So I took all the copper housings and other parts with me and started to experiment on how to increase efficiency.
Most steps were straight forward. Two however where a huge pain.
- Paint
- Nubs
Believe it or not, but the copper paint broke the battery lid. The new housings have a re-designed battery lid. It's now a sliding mechanism, which works much better than the old one. However adding the copper paint to it added 0.X millimeters of thickness to both the battery lid and the housing. Further it turned out that the copper paint had much higher friction than the unpainted plastics. This combined resulted in a battery lid that was pretty much impossible to open once it was closed. Not good. In April we already figured out how to make them function in an acceptable way. Luckily I had a drill head that could widen the gaps in a semi-efficient and not too ugly way. This widens the gaps where the notches of the battery lid slide in and thus reduce friction.
Here is how it looks now:
Spoiler alert: It turned out that the new black coating has a totally different feel than the copper one. It has way less friction and I did not have to do that ugly modification on the black cases
Nubs
It's not the nubs themself that are problematic. Somehow more often than not there is not enough room inside the housing for the plastic head to move 100% freely. This results in some friction and causes some nubs not to return to center position properly once they are released.
The solution to this is to remove like 0.1mm of materil from the housing in the area where the nubs are located. What might sound easy is like the biggest and most time consuming step in the whole process. Those housings are quite sturdy and there is not efficient way to remove that plastic in a wide are simultaneously. At first I tried a forstner drill, however even a new and sharp drill head could did not work. The housing was not only hard but also very sleek.
In the end my father suggested to cut a piece of sand paper at the desired size and tape it onto a washer of the desired size. That way we made our own drill which turned out to be quite a functional solution.
Even though we have a drill stand that allows to move the drill head down, I still could not go that route and needed to manually press each piece against the self made drill head. That is because of heat. Even with a slowly rotating head, the housing starts to become warm quite fast and if too much pressure was applied or the procedure went on for too long, the housing melted. So I needed to manually tilt the housing below the rotating drill head and keep my fingers on the other side to apply counter pressure and to be able to react immediately, once the heat emerges.
Further I did two runs for each housing, at first with a rough sand paper (right one) to remove the material and make the surface rough. After that I used a fine one (left one) to polish the surface and make sure that the nubs will have nice conditions for free flow movement.
Here is the result
The rest of the copper production went quite smooth. There are quite a few (extra) steps involved while preparing the housings. However those are just small cuts or other quick actions that do not take too much time if it's all done in a batch production.
I have a really big desk here for work and once I clean it all up, I can fit a bit over 50 housings on it at the same time. This is a nice batch size to work with.
Here I'm having some fun with key mats for example
Some true slacking off
The copper cases were prepared by the end of June. During the first weekend of June we visited the Level Up in Salzburg, Austria. It is a gaming event with not only video games but also a huge table top area, sword fighting and board games. We spent one week to prepare the event and also to keep things ready for the Gamescom in August.
During the first three weeks of July we had to wait for the cases and I visited the shop the help cleaning up a bit and to dig through ancient GPD devices. I even got some (semi) broken souvenirs including an old GPD XD, which visited quite a few Gamescom events with us.
After that I had the honor to build a couple of Retrodes.
Ambition in black
Two weeks ago, the black housings finally arrived. I was still pissed that EvilDragon decided to paint the bottom part at all because it was the copper paint that made the battery lid quite impossible to open.
However there was a huge surprise inside those boxes: The paint was different. It's not just that the black paint was way easier on the battery lid mechanism.
It was also different than the old black paint.
Oh my god this thing looks and feels so premium. It's a bit rough and matte. The old black is a bit glossy and sleek. The new one is not reflective at all and has a nice rough texture.
Here are some pictures. The right one is the new one.
So in the end, painting the whole case was the right thing to do. This is a pleasant surprise.
However there is one downside. It seems like the new paint is way more vulnerable to scratches. Once or twice I slipped off during production and my finger nail left some trace. The old one was quite more sturdy.
I snatched off a housing for myself but still did not apply it to my Pyra. I have no idea how the new paint behaves in the long term and if it will degrade over time.
At the current moment however, it looks great.
Anyways, back to production.
Since I will not be available indefinitely and I had an other spark of enthusiasm, I went all in and spent 1 1/2 weeks doing non-stop Pyra work. (To put things in perspective, just doing the nub rework took a whole day. It's crazy how much time this takes).
Here is the result: 137 black shells, awaiting their PCB
The next 2 month™
I will visit EvilDragon later this week. We need to do an inspection on how many of each PCBs we still have in stock. Also EvilDragon did not see the new paint yet. Both of us did not expect such a nice upgrade, so he just handed over the boxes to me and I took them with me.
At the 19th we prepare and take off for the Gamescom and we will probably take this week and/or next week to prepare for the exhibition. So the chances that Pyras will be shipped during August are quite low.
Maybe we'll send out some more E-mails to notify remaining customers.
In sum, we have about 190 housings prepared. 137 of those are black ones. I am not sure about the count of the copper ones. There should be a bit over 50 of those.
More pain
Just don't you think all we need to do is to put in the PCB and close the housings now. The shoulder buttons are a MAJOR pain to tweak. Much more annoying to me than the Pandora shoulder buttons were.
Further, we have a pile of CPU-PCBs that are not working because of RAM timing issues. The most annoying ones are those that aork at first but fail during flashing. Luckily we notice those and from the ones I build all Pyras that were sent out were stable.
Doing that last step, tweaking the shoulder buttons and dealing with failing Pyras is the most frustrating and demotivating part of all.
Remaining issues, here you can help us
What we need the most is some help to fix the boot issues. What we need is a way so that EvilDragon or I (= the noobs) can easily experiment with RAM timings. We have high hopes that many of the dead PCBs can be revived if we experiment with the timings and tweak them to make them work with more CPU-boards.
The issue is, that EvilDragon lacks the time to get into it, so he would need someone to provide an easy solution that allows him to tweak the parameters and test them.
I myself have some moments of ambition to get into the whole OS stuff, however there is a reason why I quit as a programmer. If someone would be willing to contact me, I'd gladly help or collaborate. However the both of us need someone to take us by the hand a bit.
There is a lot more work that needs to be done. This post however shall be about the good news and is already long enough.
Maybe some day I will be stupid enough to publicly promise and other news post regarding open issues and I must commit to it (like I did with this one here).
Final surprise
(No, not painted baguettes for everyone)
If you have made it this far, congratulations, you have no life, just like me.
I decided to record the mass production of the black housings.
If I can push myself enough, I'll make a video with explanations for you
In that video you will see what a brilliant worker I am and why the Pyra production requires to make a knife out of an old credit card.
Something that surprised me
It surprised me how one man can make such a difference. To me it seems like this all is not some kind of wizardry. Apparently it is. If it is not, shut up and let me believe that I am a wizard
I always thought that if I leave, just someone else picks it up and that's it. I never expected that it makes such a huge difference if I come back and support the project for a few hours a week. It almost makes me feel bad for leaving. At least it makes it hard for me to ever quit fully before not all orders are completed.
It's not like I gain anything except for some very temporary recognition by some random people on the Internet. At least they are real people and not bots, that's more than you can ask for today
My only wish is that the project will not die completely and that we maybe some day will get a SoC and case refresh and that at least part of the community and enthusiasm that once brought the Pandora to life might come back
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