News from EvilDragon!

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Long time no blog post – and a lot has happened, really!

First, let’s start with some OS development. The OS is getting better and better. We will probably add another minimal menu, similar to gmenu2x with no fancy effects and graphics but PND-Support. This is for all the purists of you.

Also, notaz and DJWillis are slowly stepping forward in getting WiFi working. While it’s not perfect, the packet loss is decreasing and things are getting better. It might still be a long way (or it might be finished soon, you never know with such things), but it’s improving.

I also successfully managed to setup a Bluetooth PAN connection to my mobile phone. I got an IP address via DHCP, I got DNS resolving and I could ping the phone. Pinging websites outside of the phone didn’t work yet, but that might be my mobile phone (custom cooked ROM, never tried Bluetooth PAN before). As I did use the terminal to set that up (it only takes a few lines to do so), the next step is including this into the Network Manager.

Next let’s go on to the Mass Production:
As most of you already know, we moved the assembly from US to UK – we’ll do it ourselves! This is because the company in US finally gave us a price for doing this – a ridiculous high price.
The boards will still be populated there, but we will assemble the units ourselves. Craig is currently setting up the village hall to turn into a proper place to do this, including buying everything needed (ESD stuff, etc.)

Our current roadmap is like this:
(note: It still depends on the case production and on the board production. This is based on the dates they did tell us – but as we already experienced a few times, we are a small client for them and therefore have low priority… let’s hope they keep their dates this time!)

March 18th: Production of 1000 cases is finished and will be shipped to UK.
March 22nd: 1000 cases will arrive in UK and will be inspected. If all is well, the next 3000 will go into production.
March 22th – March 26th: 500 populated and tested boards and all parts will be shipped to UK.
Approx. April 1st: Assembly will start.

Yep, another promise broken – whereas the company in Texas told us they can test 1000 boards a week before, it’s now down to 500 boards a week. At least they kept their shipping dates for all the prototypes and testing boards so far, so March 22th – March 26th should hopefully be fine.

Some parts already started to arrive in UK, e.g. the PSUs are there.

We decided to start on April 1st to have a small bufferzone for the stuff to arrive. It doesn’t make much sense if we all sit around in the village hall without having any parts to build together 🙂

The complete assembly process will be broadcasted live via Webcam. That will be fun!

BTW:
The Pandora stirred up a lot of interest in Germany currently.
I’ve been at the CeBIT in Germany doing a presentation about the OpenSource gaming handhelds and of course the Pandora.
It was crowded. Thanks to Radio Tux, you can listen to the presentation. You can also download the PDF I used for it here.

They also did another interview here.

And if anybody wants to watch it, we’ve got the full thing available as video on Youtube here.

Beware, it’s all in German!

After the presentation, a lot of guys (some from the community as well) could get their hands on the Pandora and play with it. They all loved how well the controls and the keyboard work. Looks like our design is working well 🙂

That’s it for today – hopefully we have good news within the next two weeks

http://www.open-pandora.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=159