More news from the official Pandora blog!

Here we go:

Hiya folks!

It’s been a bit calm around here in the blog, right?

Well, that’s for one good reason: Everything is going smoothly right now.

The first check of the case data is finished, the company started creating the moulds. As soon as the first rough mould is finished (which will surely take a while, the case is a pretty complicated mesh), they are gonna do a first rough case and check that everything fits (with a final board, so that nothing can go wrong here!)

In the meantime, the PCBs are still in production. It will take them a few days longer, as they optimized the machines a bit more in the beginning. This does mean, that the boards will probably ship 10 days later (beginning of August). But it does also mean, that the build quality will be better and the failure rate is way lower. No time lost, as the case company won’t need the board before August. And if the failure rate is lower in the beginning, mass production itself will be faster. So when the cases are ready, we can go full speed ahead!

So everything is going pretty well at the moment. Seems like Murphy is on holidays – which is something, we’re really glad of 🙂

Of course, we used the waiting time for other stuff.
The first prototype of the TV Out cable is working, we are now designing that thing and optimizing it (i.e. put IN and OUT on the connectors, decide for the colors, etc.)

Another thing we’re working at is CE / FCC. You might have seen the discussion on the gp32x.com boards. One guy said, that you need a final PROTOTYPE for FCC. The company I did ask said, the final UNIT is needed. I’m going to find out, if a prototype is enough – as that would mean, we can do FCC and CE at the same time and do have all the needed certificates when the Pandora is ready for shipping!

That should speed up everything 🙂

Michael also did some quick checks already, the Pandora doesn’t do any bad things, radiation seems to be within the allowed areas. It’s just a rough test, but if there was something really wrong, we could certainly find it out that way.

The only really critical part for radiation might be the WiFi antenna. But that is something that can be fixed within a few days, so we’re positive CE / FCC will go smoothly.

That’s it for todays posting. I’ll make sure to keep you informed!

http://www.openpandora.org/blog.php

Giana’s Return ( http://www.gianas-return.de ) also runs on Pandora now, thanks to Pickle.

There is no release yet!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yHpKHId4NTw

Some more Pandora news from it’s official blog.

Quote:

Hi there,

forgive me for not posting any updates for a loooong time – first I have been rather busy with shipping out 200 WIZ (and I’m just one single person doing all that), then there’s the typical daily work like managing the File Archives, checking the boards… well, and I have to do all this in my spare time since I (like anybody else in the project) still has to earn some money as we can’t live from the Pandora.

Anyways, I’ve just been able to check up everything that happened and where the status is, and during the last weeks A LOT of good stuff has happened.

Shall we start?

1. The boards

We had to fix one minor fault a few weeks ago and already received and tested five new ones – and the good news is: They’re ALL working fine (no soldering problems, all our hardware tests were sucessful). So we got a 100% rate from those.
We’ll do more testing, but the planned first mass production run (100 boards which will actually be used for final Pandoras) is on July 13th, though it might be a few days earlier or later. Of course we’ll try to get some pictures of the first 100 boards for you.

2. The analogue nubs
You might’ve read that there were some problems with the analogue nubs. Well, they had serious firmware problems and the company went bankrupt… so we had two problems: We need to pay TWICE (the new company we got has to be paid again) and the firmware had to be fixed. Both has happened already. The new firmware is already there (Pickle showed the new nubs in a video) and it is working without an problems. Another issue solved 🙂

3. The Keymat
It was pretty perfect already, however, the pressure and gaming controls could be enhanced. So we did that – and the new version is already at the moulding company, so the new mats shall also be finished very soon. As there were some keys misaligned, we used the time to fix that up, too.
If you want to know what exactly happened: wider holes around screw pegs, made game button cups wider to make them softer, slightly more travel to 1mm, keypad buttons raised 0.5mm, a couple of other little guide holes moved.

4. CE and FCC
CE tests will happen as soon as I get a finished board and prototype case, which should happen while the case moulds are being done, so there’s no time problem. I’ve got a few CE testing companies around the corner where I can just drop-by and test everything. We shouldn’t have a problem with FCC either – as we only need FCC if we sell WITHIN the US. We don’t do that yet, we sell from UK and Germany, so FCC is not necessary. It WILL have to be done once there’s a US based reseller, but that’s nothing to worry about for the first batch.

5. The case
That’s our only issue for now, we’re still working on fixing minor issues. It really does take a long time making something near perfect – and that’s what we plan to do. Another problem is that neither CNC nor SLA cases are good enough to check if everything fits perfectly. Don’t worry, there’s already a solution for that.
The only thing we had to fix is the height of the DPad (so it works better) and the hinge. The rest was already pretty good. So we most probably won’t need another CNC case, just another DPad which can be done within a few days. We hope Dave will be ready will all that fixes until next week. Yeah, we know that’s a long time… but because of the financial crisis (once agin…) a lot of guys at Daves work lost their job and he now basically has to do twice the work at his daytime job, leaving him less time to work on the Pandora case. We’re really really grateful he does work on it making it perfect.
Now, onto the solution I mentioned above: The moulding company offered their help. Together with the final model data, they will receive basically a complete Pandora (all parts, LCD, hinge, board, keymat, etc.) and will check before moulding that everything will fit. They are very experienced with stuff like that, so that does help a lot. The downside is that this adds a few more days (moulding now takes approx. 45 days instead of 35) but it will ensure that everything fits and we don’t have to start all over again.
That time frame also does allow us to do CE testing and change some stuff if need be without losing any time.

6. Software
Software and drivers are already VERY advanced. Mostly everything works fine, only WiFi is giving some issues. The hardware is fine, lowlevel tests with WiFi do work, but it doesn’t work yet within the Angström image. If we can’t fix it until the Pandora is ready, it will be fixed with an (automatic) firmware update, don’t worry.

So, I hope I could show you what did happen. Of course, there were a lot more boring things going on (organizing between all the companies, signing NDAs, talking about licenses, etc.) but I think I did post the most interesting parts here.

Basically, to put it in a nutshell:

Board: Finished and working
Keymat: Finished and in production
Analogue Nubs: Issue solved, nubs tested and working fine
CE Testing: Pending (will be done during case moulding)
Case: Last fixes being applied, should go to case mass production company by next week

That’s it for the status report, thanks for reading… and even more thanks for KEEPING with us 🙂
Comments like “We will rather wait a few days more but get a perfect device” has been what lead us to all those fixed – we could have gone into mass production with those minor flaws, but it should be a gaming console, so gaming controls shouldn’t only be working but working perfectly. Thanks again!

http://www.openpandora.org/blog.php

Here comes some more hot information about the Pandor directly from the official blog.

Quote:

Hiya, it’s EvilDragon again.

I got some more fresh news, and those are not about delaying or anything like that.

As you have all read, the only driver problem is WiFi. To put things short (and as they are pretty complicated), here is what was our problem:

There’s a closed-source driver available for the WiFi chip, but we didn’t at all want to use it (hey, we’re OPENPandora, not ClosedPandora). Then we found an OpenSource project for that WiFi chip – we used it and it worked well at the beginning (you might remember some WiFi testing videos).
But that driver was poorly coded – and it did have more and more problems. We can’t even get to work it anymore with the latest Angström image, only with our testing rootfs (which is good, as we do know that the hardware is fine.

Well, DJWillis wanted to take on the WiFi task – and it’s already looking really good. He found another driver which should work way better – and it already compiled with our latest kernel.

So basically, that WiFi issue MIGHT be solved faster than we thought. There’s still a lot of work needed, but this has been a HUGE progress.

I’ll keep you informed.

Thanks to http://www.dcemu.co.uk for the news head ups!

http://www.openpandora.org/blog.php

The Pandora seems to find friends all over the globe, so here comes the probably first Pandora only blog in russian language.

http://openpandora.icedice.org/

The Battle for Wesnoth is a turn-based strategy game with a fantasy theme.

Build up a great army, gradually turning raw recruits into hardened veterans. In later games, recall your toughest warriors and form a deadly host against whom none can stand! Choose units from a large pool of specialists, and hand-pick a force with the right strengths to fight well on different terrains against all manner of opposition.

Release notes:

There is a few weeks back, i compiled wesnoth for the pandora, but it was an old version ( 1.4.6 ).
I then hear around that latest wesnoth has a lot of great improvement, so i decided to give it a try.

So here it is, latest stable wesnoth version (1.6.2) built for the pandora, and working great, and it also work online 😀

http://www.gp32x.com/board/index.php?showtopic=47936

Rise of the Triad is a solid ego shooter. arrrgh improved his Pandora port. You’ll still require the original datafiles from the PC game.

Release notes:

A couple weeks ago on the other forums I posted a quick build of this port of ROTT. This new build has 16-bit colour support(thanks to Pickle!), 800×480 mode(and a resolution menu to switch between 640×480 and 800×480) and fixed the bug introduced by the 16-bit code that stopped cutscenes from coming up. However it will not recognise input from the ABXY and shoulder buttons due to a SDL bug. The attatched ZIP has a build for both registered and shareware versions. By the way Craig, if you’re going to make another video of the prototype can you pleeease do this? Pleeeeeaaasee?

Thanks to http://www.dcemu.co.uk for the news.

http://www.gp32x.com/board/index.php?showtopic=47931

Pretty late but better later than never. Here comes a picture of “The Evolution of the Pandora insides”.

http://openpandora.org/blog.php

Also in works by Pickle (and probably others) is Pandora Panic, a collection of few minigames. Linked below the video on YouTube!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4gNbclTVmZI

Pickle ( http://www.gp32x.com/board/index.php?showuser=8947 ) is heavily busy, porting a bunch of games to the Pandora.

OpenJazz is a free, open-source version of the classic Jazz Jackrabbit games.

Linked below is a work of progress video of Open Jazz.

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