Official Blog: How to (not) fry a Pandora
December 28, 2009
The seasonal treats keep flowing, with an announcement from ED that Pandora has passed the final CE test. Warning: The following story may be distressing to former electroshock therapy patients and the Amish.
First of all, since this is what most of would want to know: The Pandora did pass the CE testing! Yeah!
Now, for those interested in some more details on the test… here you go.
The quick test we did last time was just one of seven tests. The one that you can easily fail: The radiation testing.
This was the one we failed last time – but using tons of copper tape (well, not exactly tons… but quite a few stripes), we shielded it good enough to pass it.
The other tests are more or less brutal: They all do test how sturdy the Pandora is.
Some are harmless, like shooting frequency waves from 80Hz to 1GHz onto the running Pandora to see if it will somehow flicker, crash or fail.
Well, it didn’t. Linux doesn’t crash, so the Pandora didn’t even think of crashing just because of a few frequency waves.The same thing has been repeated – this time with transmitting those frequencies into the power line, not directly onto the device.
Nothing. Angström was still standing there and smiling at us.Of course, another similar test which had those frequencies directly from the power mains also didn’t disturb our little friend.
The next test was easy: What happens when there’s a power failure? Well, nothing of course, as the Pandora will simply run from battery then. Easy. Still, some devices do crash if the power failure is only for a few milliseconds. Well, some do. But not the Pandora.
Nothing to worry about here, now onto the more brutal tests.
(Note: If you are in risk of suffering a heart attack or something like that, you’d better not read on)Next we have the ESD testing. Yep, electrostatical discharging. We did use a small device to fire statical electricity all over the Pandora. You could hear the LCD suffer, but it did survive without any damage. Of course, the OS was still running fine.
The next test is the most brutal one: What happens to the device, if there is a thunder struck near your house and the Pandora is connected to the mains via the AC Adaptor?
About 20% of the devices fail that test… they go down with a lot of sparkles and are dead. Yep. Dead, Jim.
So… we did try to fry the Pandora with peaks of 500V and 1000V. Nothing. Not even a blink. The OS was still working.So, what did we learn here?
CE testing is brutal. And Linux is stable.Nuff said. I will get the PDFs with the detailed testing reports tomorrow
*clap clap clap* wow. I never knew these tests were that interesting.
Tesla would’ve been proud.
lol! Loft your magic Pandora and say:
By the power of Pandoria!! I have the POWER!!!
;-D
This makes me remember when devices like the Wii first came out, and people would wait in lines for hours just to demolish them and test their durability.
I think I might have a heart attack if someone does this with a Pandora.
Well, we surely stood in line much longer than people did for most consoles, so…
Awesome. I enjoyed reading that! CE Testing is more brutal than I thought.
well, if they charge so high fees Im expecting CE to test unnormal
Sounds like the Pandora is near indestructible! It’s hard to believe anything could survive the final lightning discharge test. I wonder if the lil’ guy could stop a bullet?
lil’ gal*
Now, if it was actual lightning strenght, the thign would’ve melted or burnt, so thats perhaps over dramatic wording; don’t hold your panda above you for protection in the rain!
(my old house got glances from nearby lightning strikes twice .. wiped out a lot of my electronics and cost me quite a bit
You’d be surprised what things can be reached and damaged, from cables in your walls (sigh), phone lines in your walls scorched out (sigh), garage opener, VCRs, computer gear (routers, PCs, you name it), etc and so on. Zot!
jeff
“don’t hold your panda above you for protection in the rain!”
Actually, I think that that would help. The Pandora *does* have a small EMF which makes it deflect electric charge (enough to make a difference; you’d be surprised if you knew how little is needed to protect something from lightning. The greater a current something has, the easier it is for it to be influenced by EMFs)
I think the additional height and conductivity would make you a little more attractive to the lightning. I don’t think the Pandora’s electronics will deflect lightning which is coming at you because it wants to earth itself through you, it’s not a light-sabre. Anyway, this is a fairly unlikely usage scenario, and running the Pandora in the rain as an unlikely lightning deflector will almost certainly ruin it , it will stop working before the lightning comes!
So the cases used in the CE testing were final or did the CE testing not have to involve the final cases ?
The case used was one of the first “final” cases from earlier this month (http://pandorapress.net/2009/12/09/the-faces-of-the-five/)
For the purposes of CE testing they’re as good as final, because they’re the same injection moulded cases that we’ll all be getting (minus those final tweaks).
Thanks Boss !!! ‘Twill save a lot of people asking.
I wouldn’t chalk up the success to Linux per se, but to all the design behind the power management of TI’s OMAP and the support chips.
yeah, otherwise Windows vista would’ve been killed years ago. But I suppose the fact that it was running the OS without difficulty was more what he was trying to say.
yeah, it sounds a bit crazy to credit the OS for the stability, I hope you aren’t relying on software to survive electrical upsets, this is strictly a hardware issue. “oops looks like the data in the registers is wrong better fix it up”… I don’t think Linux does that. When windows or firefox or whatever program crashes, it’s not due to electrical upsets but to bugs in the software. so this post did distress me but not for the reasons suggested, it seems like whoever wrote that report needs to get a clue about how computers work :/ or maybe I’m missing something? People are still under the influence of xmas vodka??
I well educated friend of mine is convinced that computer bugs are caused by… ‘missing electrons’. Yeah, well he was a bit drunk at the time. Also, he understands classical electronics fairly well but not computers (I tried to explain digital electronics to him but he was too drunk).
I agree, this shows how the coordination between the Pandora team, TI and cooperating parts vendors have came up with a very nice product.
Great news indeed! Well done ED and team. Think MW’s superb design may have something to do with this result too.
Wow, I thought the Pandora would have failed at least on the last test. Now, I’ll just have to wonder if I’ll be able to pass the lightning test if lightning ever struck me while holding the pandora.
500-1000V really isn’t all that strong. Lightning is in the millions of volts, and there are simulators to make that sort of electrical oomph which are pretty fun.
I was in a lightning sim lab for a while when working on aerospace sensors.
The 500-1000v test is to make sure that the unit can handle the aftermath should the surge suppressor kick in.
The highest clamping voltage that the UL allows is 500v and as such it would be bad if the device couldn’t handle more than that. Basically that’s the amount of voltage that the surge suppressor allows through.
If you follow this link there’s a good explanation as to why the nominal voltage is somewhat misleading in general. http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,2845,1155235,00.asp
Tesla would have loved the Pandora.
Tesla would have disliked the pandora because it displays no measurable reaction to electrical stimuli. (at least not measurable by the tech that Tesla had at the time.)
plus it uses dc.
Edison would have loved it though.
plus it uses DC
Edison would have loved it though
I used to like Edison but then I learned that he was an idea-stealing backstabbing cocaine smoker.
Edison was all about the Benjamins
Plus he electrocuted elephants when he needed to get his point across
Well he got it wrong then! It is much more efficient to freebase or make crack vs smoke cocaine.
Great news guys!
Now on to the FCC tests!
There won’t be any.
CE testing is more exhaustive than FCC testing, so the requirements are covered.
oh… Well in that case SHIP THE LITTLE SUCKERS!… uh, you know after you build them and stuff. It finally sounds like we can finally bury the “2 more months” meme.
(suddenly an asteroid destroys china and we have to wait til march for them to rebuild the plant. *figures*)
I really think that to build several thousand computers is going to take a fair amount of time also. The previous talk about shipping in december seemed to allow only 5 days or so to build the machines. What, do you have an army of santa’s elves chained up there to build them for you? How many people are going to be working to build these computers? To build 2000 in a month we would need 65 computers to be built each day. How long does it take to put one together? They have to be boxed and shipped too. There was talk of a manual that needs to be written before the CE/FCC testing, has that been done? I’ll be happy if I see my Pandora before the end of February, I highly doubt they can all be assembled and shipped in January! please prove me wrong.
I think they should offer a “pandora kit” – build it yourself for a slight discount and shipping a little earlier.
I think this was brought up once and they siad they could be built pretty quickly onces the parts all arrive. But even if it does take a while to produce them they were going to send them out in groups. I also think people asked about the Kits and that while the first batch wouldnt be like this they’d look into it later… I wouldnt bet on kits having much of a warantee though.
They had problems with Warranty issues. If somebody fucks something up or it doesnt work after assembling, who is to blame?
I though there would be more exhaustive tests with CE. FCC tests must be really dumb then.
*queue terminator theme song*
quote “Nice night for a walk”
And what about the ‘dropping in the bath’ test?
I think the saying now is “1 more month…JUST ONE MORE MONTH”.
Careful now! One Month(tm)is half as long as two months(tm) and we know how long that has taken.
LOL ^^
So, it’s survived ESD and lightning boosted mains power, but…. Will it blend?
(Sorry had to do it)
WUT!!!?? http://www.open-pandora.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=98&Itemid=13&lang=en
MP STARTED?!?!??!
Just the boards, thats ongoing for quite some time already, so nothing exciting here.
mweston has not finished reviewing the case yet.