Pandora hinge abused for science
January 4, 2010
You could webcast this and sell subscriptions. Craig has thrown himself a cruel and unusual Quality Control party, which essentially involves sitting in a chair for many hours doing horrible things to the articulation mechanism of an innocent Pandora. Who will unhinge first… tormentor, or victim?
I’m currently holding a Pandora at a silly angle and ramming the lid open and closed over and over beyond the final click to see how much force and brutality is needed to break the hinge.
My disposable Pandora test pilot has just survived 1000 vicious openings and closings. Hinge still works. How many until it breaks I wonder?
I expect the plastic to break first, but it actually seems to be more stretching on the Pandora when forced, I can see stress marks starting to appear if I force the screen past the final click now. I’m just sitting here flipping the Pandora open and closed (holding the base and violently flicking the top part up and down) as it’s the easiest way to force it back past the final click. I occasionally force the top part back hard and hold it there too as far as I can push it.
It still works perfectly. The stretching has not got any worse in the last 500 or so slams.
Done another 150.
I think the stretching might have just been the nature of the material. It seems pretty solid now, no change in ages, but I’ll keep going until it breaks or I decide it never will.
The ribbon cable is [still] working fine, and the MP Pandoras have a stronger one again.
atomicthumbs
BackAssward
Butterman
gruso
tom
What's this?
lol. Keep on going!
Strange, if I had a pre-release Pandora I imagine I would be doing something gentler with it, like programming it…
nice to know it’s sturdy though.
I had an idea, it might be nice to support rescaling the whole screen with anti-aliasing, like this projector I have is only 854×480 resolution, but it happily accepts signals up to at least 1600×1200 and rescales everything. 1024×768 at least is still quite readable. This might be nice for running programs and games that expect a large display, I’m thinking of a free train game “ri-li” for example which normally wants to have 800×600, and might not work on 80×480. I’m sure some fancy apps, maybe openoffice, inkscape, might be happier with a larger display too.
I know that this can be done with various vnc servers, not sure if there is a way to do it with normal x.org servers.
Also, I saw this page about free fast-booting linux distros, there might be some interesting inspiration for (future?) Pandora user interface or systems stuff there.
http://google-chrome-browser.com/10-free-fast-booting-linux-distros-arent-chrome-os
I’m very happy that my $100 2nd hand nice projector fits the Pandora resolution pretty-well exactly
Unfortunately TV-Out can’t deliver the actual Pandora’s native resolution though, so it won’t be a 1:1 pixel match for what’s on the Pandora’s screen. It should appear on your projector much as any other device attached by S-Video (or composite) does. Try the TV-Out from a PC or console and it should be comparable.
I’m reporting Craig to his local council for cruelty to an innocent handheld
Glad to know it’s sturdy though
By the way, I saw Avatar the other day, the awesome 3d movie set on the moon… Pandora! Of course, we must port/hack the game to run on our Pandora
or write our own. I’ve been seeing the word “Pandora” a lot in different places lately…
How much will a 3d touchscreen upgrade kit cost?
I hear 2010 will be the year of 3d television. With a handheld, it should be practical to do 3d without glasses, just targetting where the two eyes should be separately.
Does anyone know what the dsp chip on the Pandora is capable of? I looked around a bit but didn’t find much info on this. How does it compare to intel SIMD extensions? I heard it can help with mp3 encoding / decoding, can it also accelerate image / video processing etc? How, basically does it work? I guess I should head off to the forums to ask questions like these…
I noticed pandorapress.net will work okay at 800×480 but http://openpandora.org/ will not look so flash at that resolution. Maybe someone should fix that? or else we can look into my screen scaling idea
That’s an old image of the test facility at the top.
Latest shot of ongoing testing:
http://img121.imageshack.us/img121/8397/testlabs.jpg
Love the shop!
haha, so which one is craig ??
nice very nice… Who ever knew that a bunch of muppets would be running this operation?
(Left to Right) AnimalDragon, Frogih, MBunsen, Craig.
Pure awesomeness, Asmo
epic win!
Keep on working it in!
Good to hear that the product is sturdy.
I read this in Craig’s voice.
It totally fit.
Keep doing wrist-training Craig!
Should’ve known somebody’d go there.
Oh and I’ll make an appoinment at the doctor in advance ^^
Send me my Pandora and I will help you test. You surely have better things to do with your time…
Oh man. I love that picture. Combined with the headline this is priceless.
Welcome back Gruso. Butterman tries his best but he’s no Gruso.
Why is Craigix wearing his hat indoors?
On the other hand, Butterman can write code. The best I can do is frantically sticky-tape words together to describe it.
Both you are great
I like that the name of the image is “science.”
Please do something real not perfect
as I never seen anything perfect and in two years we all buy Pandora IV and not get PERFECT Pandora 1
BTW if AFTER all of that “two more m…™” exercise it will not be perfect I sending it back
(not really but the point is send it as it is now)
Why would you not want a perfect one? I know we’re all waiting for it to be finished but asking for a not quite perfect case etc sounds a little silly. After all this time I wouldn’t except anything else.
There will be no perfect Pandora.
The software will not be finished ever (it will be beta – forever). And it might not work as well as you would imagine the perfect hand-held device should.
I would love to have something perfect – but there is no such thing. As the perfect would last forever.
TBH – we all have a different opinion about what the perfect is – say Mona Lisa is perfect for some, just good for some other, and maybe a kitsch for someone else.
But hey they will do all the cases in one day, (at least they used to say this before those Chinese Holidays), iff they actually decide to make them.
There’s a woodpecker in my garden if you need something for a keyboard tapping stress test.
Ultimate stress test = 2 days with my nephews! If it survives you can put “virtually unbreakable” on it! Lets just say they destoryed my sisters DS in a matter of a day.