Pyra-news May 2015

pyra-news@pyra-handheld.com

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Feel the Power!
by Michael Mrozek 30 May '15

30 May '15

And here it is, as promised: The second part of my Pyra News post :) 1. The Hardware --------------- Well, we had quite a few issues to solve which slowed things down a bit, but it seems the solution has been found. I'll try to explain what happened and what took us four weeks to solve. As you know, we were trying to get the Solomon (Rotator) chip to work. This is not an easy task - there are quite a lot of timing settings between the OMAP5, the Solomon Chip and the Panel Driver which need to be properly setup and which even affect each others. Calculating proper, usable values alone is quite a time consuming task, but it's even harder when you have a hardware issue you didn't really know about.. as you first need to find that out... Well, without the rotator chip, the display works without any issues. With the rotator chip included in the setup, we didn't really get a picture anymore - sometimes a bit of flickering, but nothing really. Of course, we thought the timings were not properly done yet and tried to fix them... but without much success. Nikolaus checked the hardware and found out that the voltage for the solomon chip was too low. So he started looking for the issue, After some more tests, he found a quick workaround by adding some wires to the setup. Apparently the LCD cable and some traces were too thin for the power needed, which was a good guess. With that workaround, the timings could be tried. Nikolaus managed to get a picture... but slightly shifted (you can see that on the picture at the newspost linked below). However, Nikolaus needs to continue to work on the hardware, so I made a setup at home involving the OMAP5 devboard connected to the Pyra Mainboard and the LCD, a Pandora and a webcam. notaz can use that setup to fiddle around with the LCD and see the result - and he got it to work stable and properly, no shift anymore. That's for the unrotated image, but fully going through the Solomon chip, which is the most important step! Next step is to enable rotation and find the proper setup, but with the timings we already found out now, it should (hopefully) be not a too hard step. In the meantime, Nikolaus made a lot more tests found the weaknesses and improved the setup to be A LOT more stable. Since today he knows what needs to be changed to solve these power issues, and once that's done, he can finally finish the CPU Board. So it took quite a while, but the important thing is that there's a solution :) As we got all parts to populate the prototypes already, once the CPU Board layout has been finished, populating it should happen within short time frame. 2. Financing ------------ The closer we get to the production, the more detailled our cost calculation is. As promised, there's enough money to fund the full development - but we will not have the money to fund the full production. Which is nothing to be surprised with - as we need to buy a lot of parts upfront in high quantities, we need about 500,000 EUR (half a million EUR!) for the first batch. This is quite a bit of money (at least for us ;)) About half of that doesn't need to be paid before the production of the units is finished, which is great. And I'll also try raising as much money upfront so that preordering will cost you as little money as possible! There are multiple possibilities (looking for some more investors, getting a short-frame credit for the production run, the upcoming RetroPi2-project at Kickstarter, etc.) I don't want to scare you, as we know we can do it (I managed to survive the Pandora!), but as financing the production is also part of the whole process, I thought I'd let you know that. Well - and donations help as well, which I want to mention here. As you might've noticed, we got a whopping 9000 EUR donation yesterday - THANKS A LOT to the sponsor :) We'll have the next goal up within the next few days, as I'll get the accurate pricing for the case mold then. As usual, if you want to comment on the post or see the pictures, follow this link to the boards: http://boards.openpandora.org/topic/18147-feel-the-power/

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The case and the keymat
by Michael Mrozek 29 May '15

29 May '15

Once again, I'm really sorry for the long time before posting an upgrade again. I guess my days should be at least 50 hours long so I can keep up with everything I want to do... Well, besides a lot of organizational stuff I also enhanced the DragonBox Shop quite a bit to increase the amount of customers - the more money we got for the Pyra production, the better :) Anyways, here's an update about what's happened so far. As it turned out to be quite a lenghty post, I've split it and will post it during the next few days. 1. The Case ----------- The case designers have implemented all changes I still had (couple of small things), and what we got should be pretty much final now. A new 3D print is on the way and should arrive about June 5th. Some of the changes were: * Optimize the lid so that the LCD sits perfectly, no pressure is applied to the screen when someone pushes on the frame and the LCD cable is seated neatly. * Add the slits for the LCD cable * Change the battery compartment to make the battery fit perfectly * Change of how the logo in the lid is put together so that it doesn't break (now it consists of multiple parts that are invisibly glued together) The only thing that might still change is the battery lid and the battery compartment. Using screws instead of clips, we can probably decrease the thickness a bit (due to the battery, we had to increase the thickness about 1mm). As this change only affects the base part, battery cover and L1/R1-Button, we can already start to create the molds for the rest of the case. I'll proably make a new video once I receive the newly printed case. 2. The Keymat ------------- The design for the keymat has also been almost finished. If you take a look at the picture that can be found at the boards (link at the end of the mail), you can see the caps enclosed in the transparent keymat rubber. The key caps will be a tiny little bit higher than the rubber surrounding (0.1mm), which helps navigating blindly on the keyboard. I will ask to make the gaming buttons a bit convex so they feel better as well. The keys will be flat, the printing will be on the inside of the cap, so it can not rub off. The force needed to push a button will be slightly lower than Pandoras keymat, so it should be more comfortable to type on. About the keyboard layout: Well, I didn't really find the time to read all those posts and threads you made. It seems the most important thing on the device will be the keyboard :) As the layout doesn't need to be done before the mold is finished, there's no real need to hurry yet, but I feel I need to read a LOT to find out the best solution :) I'll keep you posted :) As usual, if you want to comment on the post or see the pictures, follow this link to the boards: http://boards.openpandora.org/topic/18141-the-case-and-the-keymat/

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Rotating random stuff
by Michael Mrozek 02 May '15

02 May '15

Yay, I finally found the time to post some news! Upgrading my shop (www.dragonbox.de) and visiting the "Lange Nacht der Computerspiele" ("Long night of computer games") in Leipzig, presenting the Pyra besides organizing various sides of Pyra development surely took quite a bit of time. Let's start with... 1. The Rotator chip ------------------- We've come a long way here, Nikolaus, notaz and the Solomon Tech team were working together and we're not too far away from having it working properly! There are a lot of parameters that have to be set to make it work, but most of them are now set up properly. The only thing we're still working on are the timing settings for the video stream. Setting up the chip and rotation are already working properly! You can see that on the pictures in the blog. As mentioned, the video stream is not yet setup, so the display simply displays whatever random stuff is in the RAM of the rotator chip, but it's stable and the rotation is working properly as well. Once the timing settings are correctly calculated and applied to the video stream, that chapter can be closed as well. 2. The LCD Cable ---------------- The LCD cable as well as the battery samples have arrived - unfortunately, we need to rework the cable a bit. Connecting the panel leads to some video, but it's not stable and the display is flickering. This is because it seems the traces are currently too weak for the power we need to send through them. Nikolaus is currently measuring which traces need more width or thickness so everything gets through properly. Apart from that, the cable looks and feels fantastic :) 3. The Battery -------------- The battery fits nicely and doesn't wiggle around as the Pandora battery (so no padding needed anymore). We've not yet run extensive tests, but it provides power ;) As it's from the same manufacturer as the Pandora battery, we don't expect any issues here, as the Pandora battery has proved to be quite awesome :) 4. Some Power issues -------------------- Not all is well in Pyra-Land, but that's normal when doing some development. Besides the LCD Cable, it seems some traces on the mainboard also are too thin for the power system. The voltage that arrives at the LCD Panel is too little, and Nikolaus traced that down to be some traces. He's now checking which ones exactly need to be a bit wider / thicker. It's no huge issue, but needs a bit of time to measure everything out. So we're still moving forward. Some small issues like these were to be expected (we would be gods if everything worked fine from the beginning with such a complex system), but thankfully nothing major yet :) I'll keep you posted :) As usual, if you want to comment on the post or see the pictures, follow this link to the boards: http://boards.openpandora.org/topic/18055-rotating-random-stuff/

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