Chinese New Year holidays are over - work has begun at the factory!

We are in daily contact with them, so here is a brief roadmap of what should happen when:

At the moment, the machines are maintained, cleaned and prepared to go into normal production run again. Production will start during the next days, probably on Monday. Then lots of Pandora cases should be spit out each day :)

While they do this, we try to make them another Silkscreen sample and send us a picture of it (not the whole sample) within this week. If it's fine, we'll use the silkscreen - if not, we'll just go with plain cases, to not waste anymore time.

As for the OS, the devs are really working hard on it right now (despite not having time, as they have so much things to do in real life).

It will surely not be the most polished OS ever released yet, but if you want a polished OS, go get an Apple (and miss all the fun we'll all have by enhancing the Pandora OS together!)

So, what can you expect, what will not work, where are tweaks needed?

What does work:

The desktop fully works. It's like a normal PC desktop. You have your file manager, your windows, your apps, etc.
PND system is working. You can simply copy games onto your SD Card, put it into your Pandora - and PLAY!
Apps: Installed apps do work fine so far. That includes Midori, Abiword, Orage, Pidgin, XChat, etc.
Audio Playing: XMMS working fine.
Movie Playing: Working... but has some issues (see below)
USB Devices: You can connect USB Sticks, harddisks, mice, keyboard, etc. Normal things run out of the box.
TV Out: The TV Out cable works fine, SVHS only for the moment though (see below)
Power Saving Mode: Yep, it's included and does work. At the moment, it should last for about 50 hours, not too long, but there might be a lot more components which could be switched off to save more power. Good enough to leave your Pandora lying around for a few hours without having to reboot it.
LED Warning (Blinking) on low battery with automatic shutdown when the battery status becomes critical.
Keyboard, us nub as mouse, touchscreen, everything working.

What issues are there?

The biggest issue: WiFi is still work in progress. The driver works, without using SDIO it was slow, DJWillis is working on it, but it's time consuming. It MIGHT be ready when the Pandora ships, but it might be WiFi will still take a bit longer. Maybe some devs want to help out here once they get a Pandora in their hands :)
There's no software audio mixer yet. This means you can only use the volume wheel. No big deal if you're just listening to music or playing games, but multiple sounds at once will not work yet. Also, the equalizer isn't yet working.
Some apps have to be optimized for the small screen: Fullscreen apps like Midori, Abiword, etc. do look fine. Some stuff however (XFCE4 Settings, etc.) are using windows bigger than 800x480. They are completely usable, but you have to move the windows around to access all buttons.
Movieplayer: While basic movie playing works, it does not use any hardware accelerations yet. DVD Quality xvid videos do play fine, but H264 is too much without hardware acceleration. Also, in windowed mode the videos are playing before the menus. Watching movies in fullscreen mode works nicely. Things should be way better when hardware support is included :)
There is a lot to tweak and optimize here and there. Bootup speed can be increased, more themes (fingerfriendly ones?) could be created, some minor issues like the normal logout of Ubuntu-Netbook-Launcher doesn't work (you need to use a menu entry), etc. Nothing serious that makes the unit not usable, but there are a lot of things that can be improved within the next months!

So, except for WiFi, all things do work well so far but can be optimized a lot.

Please don't expect to have perfectly working games and emulators on day 1 - adopting to a new system will take some time and except for some core OS developers, nobody has a Pandora yet. Once delivered, games should start to pop up and become optimized pretty fast!

Some of that stuff might be fixed until first release - let's hope for WiFi! :)

Another quick note on updating the system:

When things work fine, we're going to setup our own repository server for firmware updates. You can then easily do a system update with the Pandora. The packages we use will be tested so that they shouldn't break anything :)
In the beginning, the updates will be full flash updates, until the basic system will be completely stable. Then we'll setup the repository server (which basically means: when WiFi is working).

Everyone who wants to help us can do so. There will be a bugtracker for reporting any issues. The complete system is already available via GIT to all devs, so patches and bugfixes can basically be sent to us by everyone :)

The first few months with the new OS will be pretty exciting! I've seen how well our handful of devs have been able to get the system working so well, it will fly away when a lot more devs are helping out!

Well, it has been a wild rollercoaster ride. It was fun. It was annoying. It was amazing. It was frightening. It was unique.

I think most of you experienced the same during the loooong waiting period we had up until now.

There were times when I asked myself 'What the heck have I gotten myself into?'.
There were tons of rocks blocking our road - and each time I feared "Okay. This is it. Now everyone is gonna cancel and I have to pay debts for the next 20 years!"

I think I'm not the only one in the project who experienced the same.

On the other side, there were many things that kept us going. The progress the project made. How much you anticipated the videos. The reactions on the board when you saw the first prototype. And when you saw the first prototype case.

It was a long and bumpy ride. But now we we're there. Many many boards are finished already and are just waiting for the cases. The cases that took so long. But finally, we were content with them. We gave the green light. All that's left now is the production.
During the last days, activity on the boards has raised. And what I did read there made me happy.

Some devs I know and respect since the good old GP32 days received their Pandora - and they all do call it a beauty.

The whole community seems so happy that we finally finished it. The ranting has stopped.

Now I'm really sure what we did was the right thing. And that's why I want to say THANK YOU! Thank you all!

Thanks to...

... Michael, who really did a fantastic job designing the system and organizing so many things around the production.
... Craig, who was the guy that started all of it and kept us going. He was the one taking most the risk. And he was the one who convinced us to do it!
... Fatih, who did source a lot of the parts and companies we're working with.
... DaveC who decsigned the complete case all alone! A great achievement!
... notaz, who did work on a lot of lowlevel stuff and is now fixing various bugs that are still left. A very nice and talented chap!
... DJWillis for working on the OS image and getting WiFi to work!
... skeezix for developing the PND system and contributing various other stuff to the OS
... cpasjuste for working on various ports and pmenu.
....vimacs, for supplying quite a few scripts and helping skeezix with the libraries and PND system.
... Pickle for porting many many games.
... Squidge for testing the SoCs.
... all other devs that did help us in some way
... and of course all of you! The community! The ones that kept us going! The ones that laid their money into our hands to produce this great little machine! Thanks!

So, what will happen next?

We don't even know yet how many cases the chinese factory is able to produce until the new year or IF they are even able to produce them, however, the most important thing is that nothing needs to be changed anymore. So in worst case, they start the mass production after their new years break which is February 22nd. Not a big deal after waiting for such a long time.

Of course, once this starts, we'll try to finish your Pandoras as fast as possible. Will be a few weeks, I guess, as we shouldn't forget about shipping. The cases need to be shipped from China to America (takes a few days). After the Mass production, they need to be shipped to us (takes a few days as well) and from there they need to be shipped to you.

We'll keep you informed about what happens as usual.
As most work is going on with the OS right now, I'll set up a status page with what has to be done and what has been done for the OS soon.



Want to shake hands or talk with me?

You all do know me from the boards, I guess. However, if you want to meet me in real life: I'll be at the CeBIT in Hannover, Germany on March 6th. From 12pm - 1pm I'll be doing a presentation about OpenSource gaming handhelds. Of course, I'll have the Pandora with me. So if you happen to be there, why not join us there? I'll be posting more information about this soon.

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!

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.

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!

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!

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 :)

- "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.

What? Another blog post? And still no pictures of the finished case?

Well... yes. but I thought you might be interested in the (good this time!) news we have.
ALL the moulds are finished now! They are currently doing a test injection (we should be getting the results tonight or tomorrow).

If the injection is fine, they'll ship the sample case via express to Michael. And if he says "Yep, that's what we want!" they'll immediately start producing.

And now here's our special deal: After talking with them, threatening their life and bribing them with more money the Gizmondo guys ever spent... ahem. Well, anyway, they agreed to start immediately and finish 1000 cases until December 1st!

The rest will follow shortly after, but this would mean we can start mass production as planned early december.

Okay, cross your fingers, pray to the mould injection gods and wait for some new pictures!

We've got some good news! 103 out of the 105 boards did pass the test, this is slightly more than 98% success rate!

TI set up a unique testing environment, especially for the Pandora boards. With a special firmware, every hardware piece of the Pandora can be checked with as little human interaction as possible.

We also got some news from the moulds company. It looks they're finally nearing completion of the last mould which means we should see the final case moulds soon. There's not much time left until christmas - but you can be sure we'll do everything possible to assemble and ship it out just in time!

The latest OS image is also running pretty stable. I've been playing around with XFCE myself for the last hours and didn't encounter any crashes.

The OS is also coming along quite nicely. Automatic PND-Discovery and PXML support is working perfectly, as can be seen in this little video done by skeezix (sorry for the low quality, devs usually don't have professional video cameras. As soon as cpasjuste's GUI is included, I'll make a hires video showing a nearly completed stage of the OS).

The video shows how the icons of the apps appear on the Desktop when you insert an SD Card and how they disappear as soon as you remove them.

The only thing that needs to be done to make the OS ready for a first release is to include cpasjustes GUI and add a First Boot Wizard which helps you to easily setup your Pandora.
And that's what we're currently working on.

Hiya folks!

I guess you've been waiting for me to post, eh? Looks like it, browsing the boards ;)

We just did some CE (EMV) measurements today. First, we have some pics for you which show some of the testing setup and site.

Now, onto some test results, shall we?

Well, the tests went good so far, we have peaks that shouldn't be there. BUT the guy who did the test was really nice and helped me to find out what caused those peaks. And it's a pretty simple thing: The LCD Ribbon cable needs to be shielded. So the BOARDS are fine, we can start mass production :) The only thing we need to do is shielding the ribbon cable, and that's it. Since the cable is not part of the boards, it doesn't affect the board production. Craig was basically right when he said our friend metal tape would help here. ;) (okay, it's not THAT easy, but there are various shields for ribbon cables out there ;))

Another interesting thing is what he did tell me about FCC.
According to him, we don't even need FCC. FCC is only for radio devices (like wireless microphones, etc.), but not stuff like computers or gaming devices like ours here. They're running an FCC certified testing site, so they should know.
I'm gonna find out more about it, but it seems to be true - I did check my mobile phone, some gaming devices, etc. They don't have any FCC sign on there. And the REAL certified devices have the certificate number beneath the FCC symbol. Everything else isn't really certified... so check out your devices. If there's just something like "FCC Approved", it's no certification...

Good thing, eh? :)

Anyways, I'm getting the exact testing results tomorrow as PDF (I got them as printed copy, but I don't want to scan all in), so I'll post more details about that in the next days.