Still no time to slow down - so here's a summary of what happened
lately :)
The PCBs
--------
Finally, the full schematics for the Pyra have been finished by
Nikolaus early last week! Which means, that the hardware is basically
done - the only thing left to do is to translate the schematics into
the layout of the PCB.
It's very time consuming work, but Nikolaus will try to finish that in
December, so that we can produce the first prototypes before the end of
the year! December 23rd would be a cool date for the prototype
production run - as December 23rd, 2011 was the day we made the test
production run of the Pandora at Global Components in Germany.
The OMAPs have already been ordered, we plan to produce 15 prototpe
PCBs. Will we be able to keep that schedule? It's a short timeframe for
the remaining work to be done (we know that), but we'll try our best.
These prototypes need to be thoroughly tested then. Quite a few won't
work at all (as such a test run is used to setup the machine properly).
Some of the working ones will go to devs like notaz and maybe one or
two will be auctioned off.
And after that? Well, all bugs we still find need to be eliminated, a
new test run needs to be done. And once the hardware fully works, it's
time to setup the mass production and the preordering. Hopefully, we
won't need to many revisions before we have all bugs fixed.
The cases
---------
Of course, a fully working PCB is nothing without a finished case!
Now that all specifications are fixed, the designer has resumed work on
the case to do the final tweaks (and offer me two different solutions
for the shoulder buttons). I hope the final case will be ready for a 3D
print in December as well.
The nubs
--------
We took the chance to meet the designer and engineer of our current
nubs at the Electronica exhibition in Munich. Basically, the part is
end of life (EOL), because there weren't enough orders to keep the
production alive. All other nubs we tried won't fit, sadly (the 3DS one
is twice as thick, so that won't work). The only EOL part of the nub is
the mechanical one which is basically a disc with springs that move a
magnet. The electrical part (which is simply a hall sensor) is
available without any issues.
Our current solution is this one:
The deadline for placing the order is the current nub is end of
December. We'll order 10,000 of those, which will be enough for 5,000
Pyras. If these Pyras sell really fast, we can probably resume the
production with a high enough order. If these Pyras sell slow, we have
enough time (and money) to find a solution, i.e. a company that can
create a compatible mechanical frame.
I sure hope though we can get enough orders to make them resume the
production though! The first order of 10,000 will be a first step to
that!
3G / 4G
-------
More good news from the Electronica:
We found a Tetra-Band Antenna that fits onto the reserved space of our
PCB, which means that the Pyra will be able to do 3G/4G.
AMD
---
I've also paid AMD a visit to ask them about their upcoming ARM SoC for
tablets. Nothing to get excited yet, but I've got some contacts now to
discuss with. We know they'll release a 64bit ARM SoC which uses the
Radeon GPU (which has working open source drivers), so that surely
would be an interesting chip for a first Pyra upgrade.
IF (in capitals) we will be able to use it, it will still be a long
time away. And if not enough people buy the Pyra or we we can't get it
from AMD, it won't even be made.
The first release will be the OMAP5 Pyra - and the more people buy it,
the more likely a future CPU Board upgrade will be :)
Videos
------
You probably know about the 'What would you like to see?'-thread
(http://boards.openpandora.org/topic/17295-what-would-you-like-to-see/)
Well, I got the devboard prepared at work and will hopefully be able to
produce regular videos of those requests from this week on - this just
depends on the amount of spare time I have.
These will only be very short videos, just showing one thing at a time.
And we won't be able to show all of those requests yet, as our current
OS still has some things like the 3D driver missing. But those videos
will follow once we have it working as well.
Keyboard
--------
Well.... as the design is basically finished, it's time to soon start
for me to work on the keyboard layout. I know we've got hundreds of
posts about that already, which I all need to browse and check and find
the best suitable keyboard layout. I'll probably make a few different
layouts and put them up to discussions, so we can tweak them. I plan to
do this end of November / early December.
Phew, that was quite a lenghty post - but we certainly had (and have) a
lot going on :) See you at the boards!
Discuss about that post on the webboards:
http://boards.openpandora.org/topic/17337-finished-well-the-schematics-that…
Follow me on twitter for short news inbetween:
https://twitter.com/EvilDragon1717
--
Greetings,
Michael Mrozek
-----------------------
OpenPandora GmbH
Geschäftsführer: Michael Mrozek
Schäffbräustr. 11
85049 Ingolstadt
Deutschland
Tel.: 0841 / 13 177 33
http://www.openpandora.de/
HRB 4879, Amtsgericht Ingolstadt
-----------------------
eMail: mrozek(a)openpandora.org
What have you been doing lately?
1. Schematics: 40 Pages
-----------------------
Well - Nikolaus surely won't forget... he created page after page of
Pyra schematics. A long and exhausting work, as it needs very high
concentration.
But now it's almost finished! He already sent me a preview version
which consists of 40 (!) pages just for the schematics!
Next step will be to move those schematics into the PCB layout. This is
partly assisted, but still some work to do. Well, most of that work
will be the CPU PCB, as the main PCB was pretty much finished for quite
a while already.
Some OMAP5 CPUs (and other parts) have already been ordered, so we
should be able to create (hopefully :)) working prototypes soon
(whatever soon means :))
What's neat: The Pyra will be compatible with the devboard. That means:
We can use the SD Card from our devboard and put it into the Pyra
SD-Card slot - it should boot up and work. Really helpful with
development :)
However, it also means that in theory you should be able to use TIs
Android Demo images and run them on the Pyra. Or run the polished
PyraOS on a devboard at home.
Speaking of the OS...:
2. First Debian rootfs created on our build server!
---------------------------------------------------
With a lot of help from aTc, I finished setting up the build server for
the OS. We can now automatically build images with preconfigured
configs and packages - a quick test today was successful.
The image already includes our own repository and our own packages.
So far, fbturbo (for a blazing fast X.Org) has been included as well as
meta-packages (which we can use to decide what stuff we want to have
preinstalled on the Pyra).
As Debian has almost anything we need in their repository, we can now
easily create a fully fledged desktop OS. We still need to create our
own packages and include them, for example: our kernel, glshim, First
Boot Wizard, SGX driver, Config files, etc. We already created a
package for fbturbo, so we know how to do it, it's just a bit of work :)
3. Electronica2014
------------------
Next week we're visiting the Electronica2014 in Munich, which is a huge
electronics exhibition. We'll visit our partners there and will discuss
problems we still need to solve (i.e. getting the LCD with the rotator
chip to work), visit the nubs manufacturer and talk about solutions,
etc.
While they all help us via eMails as well, it's always different
meeting them, being able to show what we already have and speaking with
some of their experts.
We're getting there :)
Discuss about that post on the webboards:
http://boards.openpandora.org/topic/17294-an-image-an-exhibition-and-40-pag…
Follow me on twitter for short news inbetween:
https://twitter.com/EvilDragon1717
--
Greetings,
Michael Mrozek
-----------------------
OpenPandora GmbH
Geschäftsführer: Michael Mrozek
Schäffbräustr. 11
85049 Ingolstadt
Deutschland
Tel.: 0841 / 13 177 33
http://www.openpandora.de/
HRB 4879, Amtsgericht Ingolstadt
-----------------------
eMail: mrozek(a)openpandora.org
