I know you've been waiting for news - and finally, you shall receive
them!
GamesCom was a LOT more work than I thought - I didn't have a single
free day for five weeks now, and still haven't been able to catch up
with everything.
But - as usual: That doesn't mean there hasn't been any progress!
So here you go!
1. The cases
------------
Ah well, the cases.
Work in Greece has just resumed (as mentioned, there were holidays in
August) and I just had a phonecall with my contact today.
FormAction is currently in the process of updating the 3D data to
represent the current mould.
Which means I can check everything upfront, without having to wait for
samples.
Also, the special material for mobile devices is on the way and should
arrive end of this week (let's hope they're right).
But you might remember that I considered a second company as another
option, one with which I have already worked together and produced
SNES, MegaDrive, NES and N64-shells:
Yes, we are keeping this open as an option. They've got a very
interesting material as well: A mixture of plastic and carbon, which
increases the durability of the plastic a lot (on their own tests, the
normal plastic broke with 400kg force whereas the plastic/carbon-mix
hold up to 1,5t!)
And someone from the community has contacted me: He's working for a
plastic production company in Germany. I'll send them a Pyra case as
well and will ask for a quotation.
So we have multiple options left.
Of course, I'll let you know which path we'll choose.
This mainly depends on the material arriving and the case quality of
the next (and hopefully final) sample we'll receive from FormAction.
2. The cooling
--------------
While I was at the GamesCom, I found the time to modify ptitSeb's unit
with the planned cooling (fully passive).
And I've got good news here: It actually worked out as I had planned!
With the cooling, the Pyra doesn't get warm at all with normal usage
and stays a lot colder than the GPD Win even when running with full
power for about 30 minutes at 1GHz.
It works as intended.
You can see some heat-pictures of that on the boards.
The cooling consists of an off-the-shelf heatsink hidden below the USB
port and some special 0.2mm thin heatpipe-material from 3M to transport
the heat from the CPU to the heatsink.
The only thing we can improve here is to use two heatsinks (another one
hidden below the second USB port) to keep it cool for an even longer
period of time.
So all good?
Ah well - almost. But there's not much about that:
When running the unit at full load with 1.5GHz, it heats up A LOT more.
The CPU reaches over 90°C within a few seconds - and then immediately
throttles.
As expected (like with any mobile processor out there): Fullspeed is
not meant to be used for a longer period of time, just for a few
seconds.
For normal usage, the device feels more fluid and snappier with 1.5GHz
enabled, and won't heat up, as you usually only have short peaks of
high CPU time.
The maximum speed you can run it with full CPU load for longer periods
of time is therefore something between 1 and 1.5GHz.
Note: All the tests are for BOTH cores running with full CPU load, not
just one.
And don't forget the A15 is two generations newer than the A8 being
used in the Pandora, so you can't compare the raw GHz values.
The Pyra with 500MHz Single Core should be approximately as fast as a
1GHz Pandora. So with 1GHz Dual-Core, that's about four times the speed
already.
So while it won't be as fast as current smartphones (surprise ;)), it
will still be quite a huge upgrade compared to the Pandora.
And I'll work on a CPU Upgrade board as soon as we are finished here.
3. The keymat
-------------
'What? I thought it's finished!' - I hear some of you say.
Yes, indeed it is, and there is nothing to report here.
However, as we had many many users at the GamesCom try out the final
keymat, I wanted to let you know that everyone liked how it feels.
Many praised the tactile feedback - especially when comparing them to
the GPD Win (which we also had with us).
I was pretty happy about that - as you all know how many versions of
the keymat we had :)
So yes, it seems I'm not the only one who likes the keymat :)
4. The whirring noise issue
---------------------------
And once again: Community to the rescue!
I'm not sure who suggested it, but the Q-Tip solution to find out the
exact component seems to have worked for Nikolaus!
He has now identified the culprits: Three capacitors are the reason for
the noise.
And he's already working on a way to fix that.
There are multiple ways: We could replace those with Tantalum
capacitors - but we're not really fans of that (because of ethical
reasons).
Another solution would be to use multiple smaller ones instead of one
bigger one.
I'll let you know how we proceed here. The important thing was that we
finally were able to find out the culprits.
The fix should only take a couple of days.
5. The 4GB RAM issue
--------------------
Ah, well, yes... basically the only real remaining issue for the
moment.
As soon as we fix this one, I guess we're ready for production!
So, what's the status?
Well, we're heavily working on that!
Tony got it to work stable on his unit by running it with 1.42V or
higher or with 1.35V and improper timing settings.
Whether his patches work well with ther CPU boards is something we're
testing right now.
Surely we won't use improper timing settings, as it would most likely
NOT work with all CPU boards (chips aren't always the same).
Juliano also has done more simulations and the signal integrity is
almost perfect. So that should be fine.
So with all the tests, the following scenarios are possible:
1. There's too much noise on the power traces or the power traces
aren't wide enough which would cause a power loss.
2. The EMIF (Memory timing) settings aren't setup properly yet. We're
still working on those (it's pretty complex!)
3. The memory chip itself is bad (which is unlikely, as it is being
used in other devices as well).
What's our plan to figure that out?
We already ordered samples of a different RAM Chip (also 4GB in total
size) by a different manufacturer.
We'll populate one PCB with those. If that chip works, we can pretty
much rule out 1.
If the new RAM also doesn't work, the next step would be to populate
some of the new optimized CPU boards with the 4GB RAM chips.
While the power supply for the RAM hasn't changed here, the noise of
the OMAP5/PALMAS is reduced - and it could be that noise is too much
for the RAM Chips right now.
So it might simply work with the optimized CPU boards.
We're also still working on the EMIF settings for the current RAM chip.
There are not that many parameters left to try, but it could simply be
ONE that causes the freezes.
Remember how long 1.5GHz didn't work? Now they work stable on the
unoptimized boards as well - that also was just one parameter wrongly
setup.
For mass production, I have already various solutions in mind...
1. If it turns out the CPU board layout needs to be fixed to get the
4GB running, we would have the problem that we already have 500 CPU
boards lying at GC. Throwing them away would be a waste of 8000 EUR, so
I would ask all everyone who preordered if he would be fine with a 2GB
unit. If we get enough who would be fine with that, we could order the
2GB RAM chips and populate right away.
2. If the new RAM Chips work (but the old won't), we'd need to check
the price difference and whether we could sell or give back the already
delivered 4GB RAM chips. This could cause quite a loss (10k - 20k EUR),
but thanks to my shop running well, we would be able to afford that (it
would still hurt a lot).
It could also be a mixture of both.
But let's first try to get the RAM to work before we're doing more
speculations!
After all, it runs stable on ONE existing CPU board, so whatever is
keeping it to run stable on all of them can't be much.
Maybe it's really just the higher amount of noise coming from the older
CPU Board revision...
We keep working on that - and you can be sure I'll shout it out loud
once the RAM is working!
This is currently my main concern - as everything else is working
already.
As usual, feel free to ask questions and discuss at the boards here:
https://pyra-handheld.com/boards/threads/im-out-of-ideas-for-news-title
s.81391/
--
Greetings,
Michael Mrozek
-----------------------
OpenPandora GmbH
CEO: Michael Mrozek
Schäffbräustr. 11
85049 Ingolstadt
Germany
Tel.: +49 841 990 5548
http://www.openpandora.de/
HRB 4879, Amtsgericht Ingolstadt
-----------------------
eMail: mrozek(a)openpandora.org
