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