The time has come. The flight to Greece has been booked. I'll leave on Tuesday morning, January 19th and will come back Friday noon, January 22nd. That's two full days to test out and tweak the cases!

Exciting times, isn't it?

Oh - you're also asking what Nikolaus has been doing during the last week? Okay, here's your answer: Fixing some small hardware bugs while working on the boards.

The Display Board -----------------

None of the display boards was working when we got them - something that cries out for some hardware bug. Nikolaus debugged it for a day and luckily it was a simple fix: To save some costs, we replaced a power supply part for the display board with a different ones but that one did provide a bit lower voltage. Easy fix: Change the resistor. Now everything is working fine here, including the rotator chip using our own display cable.

Oh, and as Nikolaus was working on the board anyways, he checked the sync output generated by the SSD and could confirm it sends sync signal each frame which we can use for tear free rotation with some software tweak.

The mainboard and CPU board ---------------------------

There was another slight issue with the mainboard power circuit which also could be fixed by simply choosing a different resistor. What happened: Booting the system only worked using a battery or through the Console / Charger port. When trying to power it through the USB OTG port, it didn't get enough power. Why's that? Well, usually, there's 1,8V set on the USB OTG port, so that a computer connected to it recognizes it as a high-power device. That works fine with a battery. However, without a battery, the Pyra doesn't work and doesn't provide 1,8V there - so the Pyra thinks it's a low power device and limits it to 100mA, which is not enough to boot the system.

There is a way to tell the Palmas (power management chip) using some software and a resistor to also accept more than 100mA.

And yes, that worked, and the system boots up to U-Boot now. It doesn't start the kernel, which is something Nikolaus is looking into right now. That's some software tweak that needs to be implemented.

This would've only been an issue if you're using the Pyra without a battery, but as some probably want to do that, we wanted to fix that.

With a battery, it boots into the Linux kernel already, so don't worry about that.

So we're moving ahead slowly, but we're pretty close to having a fully bootable system - though it's hard to tell how fast that will go, as some software changes require reading hundreds of pages in a datasheet and take days to solve whereas others are found within minutes.

Still, it could very well be we've got a fully booting system when I leave for Greece - which would be a milestone, together with the case :)

I'll keep you updated, as usual :)

Want to leave feedback? Visit: https://pyra-handheld.com/boards/threads/the-flight-has-been-booked.76833/