What dit you use your Pandora/Pyra today/the last few days


matzesu

Forum Addict!
Staff member
Joined
Oct 24, 2008
Messages
13,210
Age
40
Location
Germany,, Saarland, at home
I know, that at the Time i post this Thread, not many will have a Pyra, but as some usecase of Pandora and Pyra will be just the Same, maybe its not the badest idea to make this Post now,
tell the comunity, what you make today (or the last few days) whit you tiny little Linux PC,

Last Sunday, i used my Pandora to write something for the next Meating of our Beeceeping Club whyle whe where at a Restaurant, worked like a charm, expect the nubs.. they dosnt work that good anymore..
I saved the Document on my USB 3 Stick, and printet it when whe where at home via the GPD Win and the Printer, but i want to use the Pyra for this Purposes also when i get the Pyra..

Thats it for today, now maybe somewhone whit a Pandora or a Pyra will tell ..
 
I'm using it to play games during my daily commute. I've recently started playing NDS games.
 
Currently as a weight to keep a curtain in place.
I would gladly trade you a set of small-ish cut geode bookends obtained from a forgettable gift shop tourist trap on a family vacation - which one I cannot recall - for your Pandora curtain weight. The geode pieces should do an even better job of holding that curtain in place!
 
Broke my right shoulder button last weekend, so it's on my electronic bench until my replacement comes in from Digikey.
[doublepost=1550692675,1550692288][/doublepost]Suppose I can still use my other two in meantime...
 
I listened to my music during work today on the Pandora, it's what I use it for most lately, listening to music.
Otherwise I play a game on it, but I didn't do that this week.
 
Let's see. My systeminfo gives 902 recharge cycles, and still a charge of 9 hours.
I use VLC a lot, download videos on a Linux Desktop, then watch/listen to them on the Pandora. Mostly interesting things.
Last month I updated my fonts on the Pandora (by downloading them and replacing the file) so that Zim Wiki had more unicode characters. And that worked nicely.
 
Still porting my game to it. Had to deal with complete SGX driver freezes, but managed to get rid of them thanks to the information floating around in this forum.
Will release soon, I suppose. Still have other platforms to take care of, but been through most a few times, so I don't expect any big issues to arise anymore.
Battery is still going well after almost 8 years (ship date for mine was 24th February 2011). Had the game run for about 10 hours with open lid from 90% to 30% charge.

Outside of that, I'll have to admit... not much. The last time that Pandora saw intense use was last Gamescom, as usual.
 
Replaced my right shoulder button, played a little Half-Life to check out my repairs
 
I used my Pandora every day. I create a new playlist each morning before work, choosing music that fits my mood and will get me through the workday. At work, I connect it to the speaker system i brought in and hooked up and play music from it. During breaks or periods of downtime at work, i tend to play FFVII on the awesome PSX emulator, or Wagic the Gathering. Over the weekend, I was trying to get my all-time favorite game Wurm Online working on it, when my cat decided to win the war for my attention by eliminating the competition, and broke my Pandora ;(

Other than that, I do basically everything on my Pandora. Web browsing, IRC, tons of games, simple programming, TO-DO lists, reminders, alarms, generate bitcoin vanity wallets (with vanitygen compiled using the Code::Blocks PND), check E-Mail, news, etc. Last thursday was very slow at work and I managed to watch three episodes of Stargate SG1 at 480p on it.

The Pyra will do most of that better. I suspect the Pandora might still be superior for purely music listening purposes (especially with high quality FLAC music and very nice 2.1 speaker system) but other than that the Pyra will win the day on everything else, plus replace the few things I still use my ancient iphone for (texts, calls, GPS, Siri, ordering delivery food, etc).


[doublepost=1551221887,1551218726][/doublepost]

I just had a thought. Kind of pie-in-the-sky but, one accessory I would love to have for the Pyra is a smart-watch. With a smart watch connected to the Pyra I could speakerphone calls on it secret agent style, read notifications and texts, maybe even respond with a little voice-recognition magic, check the battery life of the Pyra, keep up with IRC without popping the Pyra open every couple of minutes at work, pause/play/skip/rewind music, adjust Pyra volume, etc.

The more I think about it the more I think a well designed smartwatch would be the perfect Pyra accessory.
 
Unfortunately, I'm not sure the Pyra or the tiny cpu in a smartwatch is truly powerful enough for voice detection and decoding. If you want that, you pretty much have to accept your microphone data being sent over the internet 24x7.

But apart from that, a smart watch that could handle messaging and just general being a watch would be quite cool. I am more particular about the sort of thing I'll wear on my wrist compared to a handheld though, so whether they can hit my design criteria while doing everything else, I doubt. Still, we can dream, right?
 
@levi: One of the OMAP5 selling point was voice and face recognition, it is marketed for the automotive industry... likely requires closed source software, likely something with the DSP and the secondary smaller arm cores. It's sort of glossed over on this article, but that year model of ford does have offline voice recognition.

https://autotechreview.com/news/ti-partners-with-ford-in-developing-sync-3
 
Last edited:
I would be ok with microphone data being sent over the internet for voice recognition purposes if it was push-to-talk only and I could be reasonably certain only I can activate it.

Though I would happily buy a Pyra-connected smartwatch without even half of the features I listed.
 
@levi: One of the OMAP5 selling point was voice and face recognition, it is marketed for the automotive industry... likely requires closed source software, likely something with the DSP and the secondary smaller arm cores. It's sort of glossed over on this article, but that year model of ford does have offline voice recognition.

https://autotechreview.com/news/ti-partners-with-ford-in-developing-sync-3

Face recognition is relatively easy to do. For the former, find some way points like the eyes, mouth, ears and measure the distances. Command recognition is probably easier than the general speech to text that the likes of Alexa and Siri et al have to do, I'm guessing.

By the way, I'm just parroting stuff said in this talk:

Actually, if the consumer device is powerful enough to detect the spoken word 'alexa' then it's possible they're only sending the audio stream after it's been activated, but I don't think they are given they've been subpoenaed to release recordings of murders and things committed at echo-containing places. Unless the victim shouted 'alexa' in their dying breaths, I don't think it can work like I propose.
 
Voice recognition and dictionary commands is actually really easy to do, I was doing that at an old job on Cortex-M3. A trigger word and a list of 5-10 commands, trained to a single voice, is easily achievable on low powered hardware. The natural language processing that Siri, Alexa, and Google are doing these days are the hard part.
I can probably say this now, it's gotta be, what, 4 or 5 years ago now, Sony produced a prototype speaker that was supposed to be their competition to Alexa and it was running my software(*). It was doing exactly what you mention: using a low powered chip to listen for a trigger word, and only after that trigger was heard did it start streaming audio to their big servers for language processing.

(*) by "my software" I mean the library I wrote, like, 80% of while working for a startup that folded 4 years ago.
 
Back
Top