Even more news!

Quote:

Well, we also didn’t. But that was what happened.

The cases did arrive on Friday, not as expected today. While this usually is a good thing, we were shocked by the quality – just look at the pictures which float around at the boards and you’ll agree with us. The bad thing about timezones is: When Michael did get those cases, it was too late to call up the chinese factory to find out what went wrong.

So a lot of turbulences did happen at the boards – which was perfectly understandable. As said, we also were shocked.

However, it looks like this is another thing did learn: Injection mould samples will always look that bad if it’s just a bunch of them.

After recovering from the shock, we started to investigate and think about what just happened. To be honest I didn’t think this could possibly look like the final product. Come on, what kind of company would survive for 12 years if they produce cracked and cheap looking products to their customers. No, there HAD to be something we didn’t know.

Then some guys at the board who do work in injection moulding business did tell us a bit more. I also talked to some other guys via ICQ – and got the same replies from all of them: Doing a proper injection moulding run needs a lot of time. The machine has to heaten up completely (which usually needs a few hours) and the mould has to be aligned properly, which also does take some time. As this would mean the machine couldn’t be used for mass production at that time (which is a loss of money) they usually don’t let it heaten up completely.

As the plastic tends to keep sticking inside of the mould if not fully heated, they add a bit more grease. Otherwise, they’d have to manually remove the plastic which could damage the mould – and that’s definately not good.

Another thing was that they might’ve used recycled plastic for the samples. Why use the expensive plastic when it’s just samples that won’t be used at all anyways? That’s why there were discolorations and the case was looking greasy. As the finishing usually also isn’t applied, it looks scratched.

So as that did calm us down a bit, we had to wait until Fatihs friend could call up the factory today.

And guess what: I looks like this was EXACTLY the case. The samples were just meant to check if everything fits. The final mass production cases will be properly heated and cooled down and will get a nice finishing. This is what they did tell us.

As chinese holidays are nearing, you can surely think that a lot of their customers are currently trying to rush things, so they didn’t have much time at all to properly align the case.

So what should we say? We decided to GO for it! Let them do those cases – until we really do the mass production, we will never see a final case with proper finishing anyways!

Let’s hope they can produce as many cases as possible before their new year start!

http://www.open-pandora.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=156

More progress on the OpenPandora project!

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Wow. Actually, there’s something that happened earlier than expected: The cases did arrive, including the final keymats.

Here’s a picture of the final keymat. Now please give Michael some time to thoroughly test everything out.

http://www.open-pandora.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=155

Pandora news, straight from the source!

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All good things come to an end
And I’m really sure the Pandora is a good thing.

Here are some updates for you. The guys following the boards or my twitter account will most probably know all of this already.

The Cases
The case moulds have been finished and samples were shipped. They will arrive on Monday and if all is okay, themass production of the cases can start immediately.
They can do about 1000 a day and chinese holidays do start on February 14th. Therefore, to be on the safe side, they will probably do 1000 cases and ship them to the assembly factory. Assembling and testing will take a while anyways, there will not be much time between the time when the first 1000 are finished and the next cases will be ready to ship.

The Boards
Another 1000 boards have been populated and are ready to be put into a case. Therefore, as soon as those 1000 cases do arrive, there’s no reason to wait for mass production already!

Let’s keep hoping all goes well!

http://www.open-pandora.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=154

Some more Pandora news, dated 27th January 2010.

Quote from EvilDragon:

We’ve learnt something. Chinese English and English is definately not the same.

Good thing a friend of Fatih does speak Chinese. For the company, he’s now our official represantative. As he could speak with them in their native language, a lot of things cleared up.

When they were talking about “soon”, it didn’t mean what we did understand as “soon”. “Soon” did mean “as soon as we’re finished.”. Regardless, how long that will take. So each time they said us “We’ll soon have pictures”, we assumed they will follow the next few days – which didn’t happen.

Another thing we found out is when they said “We’re finished and will do some testing injections”, they didn’t mean they were finished with ALL our changes, but they finished ONE thing on the to-do-list and did a test injection to see if that was fine. That’s why we got some shipping dates which never happened – and with us wondering why they didn’t tell us. They sent us emails with stuff like “We fixed it all and will do the next samples on Friday”. We then thought, okay, the next samples will ship on Friday. However, as we now do know, it meant they finished another step on those days and made an internal testing injection to find out if everything is okay. It wouldn’t have made sense to ship us those half-finished cases (it would just have cost a lot of money). And that’s the reason why they didn’t tell us that they didn’t ship… they never planned to ship it 😉

It’s really interesting what can happen if business partners do speak completely different languages as native language.

So much for the background “What happened”. Now onto the more interesting stuff: What WILL happen?

One thing we did understand correctly was that their goal is to have the mass-produced cased finished and shipped until the chinese new year!

We now do know that they did finish the last tweaks on the case mould, the silkscreen and the keyboard mould (which still had one mis-aligned letter). And with finished, I do mean REALLY finished. Not just another step, but all steps. This does mean they’ll ship the final samples within the next days. They are VERY positive they are perfect, so as soon as they shipped out everything, they prepare the mass production. So as soon as we get the samples and approve it, mass production will start. As they can produce 1000 cases a day and we need 4000 for the first batch, this can happen within four days. That should work out just before the chinese new year!

I know it does sound a lot like stuff you already heard before – but this time, we were talking with them in their native language, so I assume it will be much more accurate than anything before!

http://www.open-pandora.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=153

Pandora News, dated 25th January 2010.

Quote from EvilDragon:

Nope, we’re not playing Lemmings, but I guess a lot of you wanted to know what happened to those cases.

Well, we too wanted to know – the last status update we had was that they were shipping on January 15th and therefore we assumed the cases should have arrived last week.
Unfortunately, Fatih had business to do in Dubai… and he is the only one the Chinese actually do talk to (except for if they encounter any problems, then they also send a mail to Michael. But they didn’t do that).

So we didn’t know until he returned a few days ago that the cases hadn’t been shipped yet, they were still working and tweaking as they really wanted to make sure this will be the last case they need to send to us before we start the mass production.

We’re still trying to find out the complete story of what happened and why there was another delay. A friend of Fatih (who can speak chinese) will help us here, as communication with them isn’t easy, and there might even have been some misunderstandings, etc.

Whoever does think that that company is a small, cheap company that only tries to rip us off:

Nope, that’s definately not true. Fatih has been working with them since years. Also, they created some other parts for the Pandora which have been finished long ago and didn’t make any problems. It just seems the case was much more complex than they had thought.

Some of their other customers are Sanyo and Toyota and they have been established 1998, so one thing we know: They are reliable… but (as it is the case with many chinese companies): They do need some time to finish it off.

So, rest assured, the cases aren’t screwed, we just don’t know yet when exactly they will arrive. We have been promised they will ship enough mass produced cases before the chinese new year. I leave it to you whether you want to believe it or not – I just will pray it will be true.

So much for the cae situation. I hope you can now understand why we chose that company. Believe us, it’s a pretty annoying feeling having everything setup for mass assembly and then wait in anticipation for the cases.

Oh, I have one more information that will probably make second batchers happy: We already ordered the parts for the second batch to decrease the waiting time.

Finally, some small OS informations:
* We got a new WiFi driver, thanks to Palm 🙂 We’ll need to test it out more, but it should work better than the one we have.
* pmenu is finally working fine in the image, so we have an almost completely working image (for a first release) ready.
* We also did a quick try with the Ubuntu netbook-launcher-efl.
It compiled and worked nicely. Only the icons were missing, but that’s because it uses the Human icons from Ubuntu which we haven’t installed yet. The nice thing about it is that it does support finger scrolling. It might not make it into the first release, but I doubt it will take long until it will be included into an update. I personally prefer XFCE4 and pmenu though 🙂

http://www.open-pandora.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=152

The “Donaukurier” published an interview with EvilDragon, one of the main guys behind the Pandora. The interview is in german language.

News Source: http://forum.gp2x.de/viewtopic.php?f=24&p=107614

http://www.donaukurier.de/lokales/ingolstadt/Ingolstadt-Pandora-fuer-Liebhaber;art599,2231101

EvilDragon has a few kind and nice words for all Pandora supporters out there and presents a buch of C64 classics, running flawless on the Pandora.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mLYBDoNhfqc

Master Pickle is working on a port of Aleph One for the Pandora.

Aleph One is a game engine currently in development by the Open Source community. It is based on the source code of Marathon 2: Durandal, a game created by Bungie Software in 1995. Since Bungie released the source code, Aleph One has matured to include a variety of new features and improvements.

Go and check the video, thanks to Pickle himself for the very fresh news 🙂

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1zQ7Fbwhb5I

Here it is, the first fully assembled Pandora!

http://www.gp32x.com/board/index.php?showtopic=50799

PXML File Validator is a tool that validates PXML files. You will need Java to run the application.

It can run in 3 modes:

– “syntax”: checks the XML syntax of the file
– “permissive”: checks the most important aspects of the PXML format
– “strict”: goes through the PXML file, highlighting every little issue it can find.

http://dl.openhandhelds.org/cgi-bin/pandora.cgi?0,0,0,0,14,36