Will the Pandora become Open?

[Austin25]

I'm wondering if and when the Pandora will become truly open-source hardware, like the Arduino. Maybe after OPT are done producing them, they could release the board designs on the website.

 

[moxie]

When this subject has come up before, the answer has been "No."

 

[Sugar_Kane]

They're trying to market and continue the Pandora so it wouldn't be wise to offer any budding rivals the opportunity to copy their plans and undercut them.

 

[craigix]

That would only ever happen if MW wants it to.

 

[mahousaru]

Open hardware systems and products that run open software solutions can be very grey especially due to people's belief in what open source means...


For example many laptops that are sold as open source with a FOSS OS could be said to be mis-sold due to their BIOS.


Same goes for the N900, from what I gather at least the telephoney and power stack are closed and need binary blobs.


Actually do TI and IT open source their products? Because that is what the Pandy is based on....

 

[Alec]

And even if the Pandora design were open-source, we still have the graphics chip with closed specifications and comes with a binary driver. (This, unfortunately, is true of pretty much all graphics on ARM)


So even if MWeston were to release everything he had, RMS wouldn't even touch a Pandora with a stick

 

[XxionxX]

I don't think the Panda should be open hardware, most of us are software devs anyway. The team has worked hard, and they deserve a profit if they can get it. Anyway what would you use an open hardware for? An Arduino is good because it is cheap and mass produced, if you want something bigger there are other alternatives available which are cheaper than the Panda. You would be ruining a perfectly good Pandora for a job that could be done by something much better at a comparative cost. I see no advantage for the Pandora if it became open hardware.

 

[Eridger]

We must be talking blueprints or something here instead of hardware drivers. I think it's sort of a bummer that the drivers for some (most?) hardware on the Pandora are proprietary.


At the very least there's some incentive to make a reverse-engineered driver for the GPU... Whether someone pursues that or not is a different question.

 

[chris_c]

I'd like to see all the hardware details from a programmers point of view all the pandora specific ioctl's how to access gpio etc etc


In an official none wiki document...

 

[Eridger]

I think the OMAP3530 handbook thing covers most of that.


I mean sure, it's around three thousand pages, but sure.

 

[XxionxX]

We must be talking blueprints or something here instead of hardware drivers. I think it's sort of a bummer that the drivers for some (most?) hardware on the Pandora are proprietary.


At the very least there's some incentive to make a reverse-engineered driver for the GPU... Whether someone pursues that or not is a different question.

I may be totally off base, but I think that all the drivers are open source:/

 

[Eridger]

Are they? I'm pretty sure the PowerSXG or whatever is closed. The device can support OpenGL hardware-wise, but the driver doesn't and no one can modify it. I could be wrong, though.

 

[mahousaru]

Are they? I'm pretty sure the PowerSXG or whatever is closed. The device can support OpenGL hardware-wise, but the driver doesn't and no one can modify it. I could be wrong, though.

I believe a good example is ATI making their GPU drivers open source a while back, whilst also releasing a closed source blob, but their hardware is still closed.

 

[Eridger]

Ugh, don't get me started on ATI...


So we're talking about hardware openness. Got it.

 

[Austin25]

Ugh, don't get me started on ATI...


So we're talking about hardware openness. Got it.

Yep. I'd like to know what their opinions and/or plans are at the moment. (Even a statement of unsureness)

 

[lulzfish]

Ugh, don't get me started on ATI...


So we're talking about hardware openness. Got it.

Yep. I'd like to know what their opinions and/or plans are at the moment. (Even a statement of unsureness)

We already gave several statements.


Again, last I heard there were no plans whatsoever, which means they aren't going to open it.


And they really can't, since the TI chips are closed-up anyway, and they're the most interesting part.

 

[Austin25]

Ugh, don't get me started on ATI...


So we're talking about hardware openness. Got it.

Yep. I'd like to know what their opinions and/or plans are at the moment. (Even a statement of unsureness)

We already gave several statements.


Again, last I heard there were no plans whatsoever, which means they aren't going to open it.


And they really can't, since the TI chips are closed-up anyway, and they're the most interesting part.

Darn.

 

[Gerix]

Have you tried here? It's not open-source hardware, but if you were interested in modding (and knew what you were doing) it could be interesting. I don't plan on doing anything hardware side. I can be less than dextrous at times.

 

[Eridger]

"Lemme just solder through this circuit board here! ...Done!"


No... I've never done that before... <.<

 

[Gerix]

Well, let me say that I never broke anything that didn't start out broken.