Well, while we didn't have as many updates as the PGS team had on Kickstarter, I guess our updates make a lot more sense :) So here's what's been happening lately.

1. The case -----------

The team is fully working on finishing the molds. Most of the fixes I discussed with them when I visited them have already been fixed and only a few remain. The first molds are already being hardened (which you do after they are finished, so that they're more robust and the plastics doesn't have these ugly discolorations anymore). A lot of companies in Greece have a one month holiday in August, and FormAction is no exception here. They're doing their best to send us final cases BEFORE August. We can then test those at the Gamescom (that's a hardcore test...) and shortly after that we can prepare the mass production of the cases.

We told them I'll have a GPD Win prototype with me at the GamesCom, and that their case is finished already... which certainly boosted their working speed, so I'm positive that it'll work out.

2. Keymat ---------

Nothing breathtaking to report here. The new samples are being produced and should be finished early August (so also in time for the GamesCom).

3. New touchscreens -------------------

BOE will have the new touchscreens finished around July 21st. Then they'll be shipped to Germany and my BOE contact here will visit me so we check the new screens together. One will be matte (as this is my preferation) but shouldn't have the rainbow-grain effect. And to be on the safe side, the other one will be non-matte with an anti-glare filter.

If the matte works without a quality decrease in the picture, we'll probably use that one. But I will let you know once we got it and will take pictures of it.

4. The PCBs -----------

The layout for the CPU PCBs has been submitted to Global Components, so that production of those can now start. We plan to produce 20 more prototypes, as we were really unlucky quality-wise with the first 18 we produced. It seems that some of the PCBs weren't the best quality, so we'll also tell GC to keep an eye on that and maybe use a different PCB manufacturer. It's not our problem for the mass production (as we have a maximum failure rate in our contract, the rest would be covered by GC), but I guess we all want to prevent production issues, right? That's why you do prototype runs. Having quality issues with a mass production run would be horrible.

The production of the CPU boards will take approximately 6 weeks. The other PCBs can be done a lot faster, so we haven't ordered those yet. Especially as we want to test different SD Card slots (as the SD Cards right now are being inserted upside down) and optimized the position of the LEDs for the keyboard backlight using a dummy PCB Nikolaus is designing right now.

As mentioned, ALL parts with a long leadtime that we know we need for sure have been ordered already for the mass production already. So these won't delay the mass production :)

5. The rotator chip -------------------

Well, zmatt here from the boards has worked hard with the OMAP5 devboard I sent him to find out while TILER (part of the OMAP5 hardware that can be used to rotate a picture) is so damn slow. And - what should I say? He's very close to have fixed it. It looks like the driver had workarounds for bugs instead of fixes which worked but slowed them down a lot.

So yes, as it looks like right now, we can probably get rid of the rotator chip and use the internal OMAP5 hardware to achieve the same!

He already made a few patches and benchmarks show that it's fast enough to rotate without any speed loss. The next step is to test that with actual programs and implement that into the kernel, so that our screen is always rotated.

What would that mean? Well, the Displayboard would be 2-layer instead of 4-layer, power usage would go down, we wouldn't have to fix the SSD driver and implement VSync, etc.

It would be a huge relieve - and you can be sure I'll tell you once it's working!

So, thanks a lot to zmatt for that help!

6. Preparing for Gamescom -------------------------

As the Gamescom is approaching fast (only 4 weeks to go!), Nikolaus is working hard to fix as many Prototype PCBs as possible. Quite a few have shortcircuits somewhere, and repairing them is not trivial. Unfortunately, the next prototype run is AFTER the Gamescom, so we don't have any other choice.

Everyone is very welcome to visit us at the Gamescom, test the Pyra and have a chat or coffee with me.

Thanks a lot to Nikolaus for the hard work here!

7. Investments --------------

Just a pre-information: My biggest investor (with 100K EUR) is bailing out at the end of the year, so in case your interested in investing into the Pyra, you can do that at the end of the year.

Just contact me for more information in case you're interested (EvilDragon@openpandora.org).

That's it for now, back to work!

You can discuss about that and watch the pictures here: https://pyra-handheld.com/boards/threads/parts-boards-and-the-rotator.77687/