Well, there weren't posts for a while, since we've been busy preparing flyers, etc. for the GamesCom.
And that took a lot of our time.
The shoulderbuttons -------------------
In the meantime, a green case arrived - the latest revision with the new shoulderbuttons. Do they work?
Well... yes, basically, they do.
However, there's one thing I can tell you after having assembled the case: While we've got four shoulder buttons and all of them can be pressed, it won't be comfortable to use the upper ones when gaming. It's not possible with the extremely small and cramped space we got up there.
The lower ones need a bit of tweaking but will work comfortably then, but for the upper ones, you will have to bend your fingers a bit, which is not nice to do for extended periods of time.
They will be fine for functions you don't need that often in games and they will work fine as modifier keys when typing (as your thumbs are lower when you're typing than when you're playing).
If you're coming to the GamesCom, you can test them yourself and let us know if you got anymore good ideas, but we already discussed that with multiple users here, and no one got an idea how to solve that in a comfortable way.
The Heating -----------
There's been a lot of discussion about heatsinks, special materials and even tiny fans on the other thread, since it seem the OMAP5 will get a lot hotter than the OMAP3.
Well, I finally found the time to properly measure it with a professional IR thermometer (without heatsink).
The result: The OMAP5 internal measurement seems to be off quite a bit. When it shows 80°C, it's actually 55°C on the surface of the SoC itself. With 112°C (the maximum I could reach with maximum stress on both CPUs yet), it's 84°C.
The OMAP3 in the Pandora has a maximum of about 70°C, so it seems the OMAP5 (under full load) is about 15°C higher. That's not that much. The Pandora doesn't use any heatsink, so a few copper layers as heatsink should be enough.
aTc also did some tests with his devboard. The heatsink on the OMAP5 doesn't do much cooling actually - unless you use a fan. So the only real way to lower the temperature a lot would be using a fan.
We probably don't want that, so the best thing we can do is distribute the heat inside of the case to prevent hot spots. Shouldn't be much of an issue though.
The GamesCom ------------
We're leaving for GamesCom tomorrow morning and hope to meet some of you there. We'll have a Pyra devboard there as well as the prototype case and some nice PCBs to look at (and see how the CPU board will work and look like).
We'll take pictures as well, and I'll try to write small reports for you.
Discuss about that post on the webboards: http://boards.openpandora.org/topic/16809-gamescom-shoulderbuttons-and-heati...