Battery covers with the final matte finish

Didn’t we all dream about that the case mass production should become reality?

Well, it has. We got some brand new pictures for you.
The mould has been successfully calibrated and mounted on the machine.
The pieces you see are the first that has been spit out by the machine, so those are testing ones which are being checked.
Not all have the finishing applied – one nice picture (above) that does show how it will look like with finishing applied is the one with the battery lids.

Those samples are being checked – and if they are okay (and they really do look fine), they will continue to spit out the cases and apply finishing.

Enjoy!

(EvilDragon)

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Oh, and a small addition from Fatih, the man with the translator:

The pictures are from China. We don’t need to confirm anything about the cases. Everything is on track right now.

The UK’s newest assembly line is showing the first signs of life, with the arrival of several boxes of PSUs and one very tired pigeon. (A few Twitterers mistook the boxes for something else from China until Craig cracked one open for a closeup. Arrgh!) Note that a UK mains plug is shown, but you’ll be getting something to suit your region.

Tweets: [1] [2]

Silkscreening looks to be off the table for the first batch. Over to MWeston, who doesn’t mince words:

These cases will not have a silkscreen as that would push delivery out into April and even then Craig worried they would screw it up and stiff us with the cases. The problem is the mold company outsources the work and so they all have to be packaged up carefully, sent to this other company, printed, repackaged carefully and sent back to the mold company to be shipped to Craig with everything else. It could cause as much as another month of delays with the way we should trust them.

I built a unit using a silk screened case and I really liked it but the truth is, 10 minutes after using it, the silkscreen is forgotten and you don’t even notice it anymore. The way you normally hold it in the 170 degree open position means you can’t see any of it anyway. The LEDs are also color coded so maybe that helps too. The sticker under the battery with serial number and model number also has all the voltage and current details for the unit so in a way, not having that on the back is covered. I don’t know if any of this is comforting but it’s an unfortunate result of a product that can’t afford more delays.

(MWeston)

Edit: If anyone is unclear about what all this silkscreening is, here is an example.

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Click here to view the embedded video.

A triple treat on Youtube today for those who ticked the UMPC box on their Pandoria visa application. First up is a solid ten minutes of OS bits and bobs, delving into office apps, audio & battery settings, and multitasking. Tacked on to that is a further two minutes devoted to themes and colour schemes. No matter what operating system you’re coming from, there’ll be something in here to make you feel at home. To cap it all off, ED toys around with some Pygame source code and launches it from the terminal – all on the Pandora. Hey, stop giggling up back. Barbie Seahorse Adventures is awesome.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Craig tweets:

Looks like everything will have arrived here by the 22nd. How exciting.

EvilDragon tweets:

Production, here we come! Just confirmed with Fatih, cases will arrive in UK March 22nd. We’ll have the assembly site ready by then! Go!

Craig elaborates:

(The 22nd) is when everything should be here, including the cases. To be on the safe side we probably won’t start until a few days after that.

I feel a lot more confident about this now we are back in control.

Our own assembly line, this will work far far better for batch 2 and so on. It should always have been like this.

Perhaps not quite the news you were waiting for today, but solid information beats cold silence in most cases. This gives Craig ample time to set up the new production line with things like ESD protection and business hammocks, and ED the opportunity to set up the best webcam feed this side of the Thames. Whatever that means.

Sources: [1] [2] [3]

It’s set to be Panarchy in the UK in the coming month, as team Pandora descends on a sleepy village in the north of England to finish what they started in Texas. This change of plan has come about following an exorbitant quote from the factory in Texas (think six figures) to case up the first batch of Pandoras. It seems that MWeston’s stringent assembly procedures were a little daunting for the Texans, who expressed their concern with zeroes. So MWeston sent the procedures to Craig instead, who just happens to own suitable premises for the job.

At this point a lot of readers will be asking questions and wanting answers fast, so let’s jump into some bullet points:

• The cases will now ship from China directly to Craig.
• The Texas factory will continue to populate the boards, this hasn’t changed. They will send completed boards to Craig.
• Finished Pandoras will ship directly to customers as they are assembled each day.
• Michael (MW), Michael (ED) and Fatih will all be jetting in to Craig’s home town to do the assembly work themselves (along with some extra help).

Craig is not at all distressed by this development, as it gives the team tighter control of the product they’ve sweated over, and could cut down the time it takes to get the first units out the door. If nothing else it’s a reminder that it really is just a handful of guys behind this project, and to have them taking these final steps in such a personal fashion adds that little bit of zing to the first batch adventure. EvilDragon even hinted at setting up a webcam in the workshop. Should we hold him to that?

Sources: [1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

We all want news, and many of us are waiting with baited breath. So, when we have a bunch of news at once, we can wonder. Is this really good news, or are we just hoping? Well, we have some news from the Official blog. I hope everyone is as excited as I am.

EvilDragon

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 (about 1200kbps), 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 800×480. 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!

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So, thanks to ED, we have some good news, but more to the point: some honest and fair news.

We still haven’t been let in the front door of the app store (name pending), but as of today we can follow progress from a slightly different angle. Craig was wedged a Twitter API into his store code, giving followers a live feed of new additions to the catalogue. You can follow the dedicated Twitter account, or if you think Twitter is dumb, just grab the RSS feed.

EvilDragon has also been turning over the tweets, with a string of OS updates over the past week:

Standby mode working, battery LED blinks on low power, shuts down on critical power and display goes off when closing lid. Thanks devs!

A quick way to run an app: Press Pandora-Button, type in part of the name and press Enter. Works nicely in latest OS with XFCE4

Wooot, fullspeed movieplaying (not yet hardware accelerated) with the current image for DVD Quality movies. Okay, 720p x264 doesn’t work

Just finished keymapping for X11. Now ALL keys do work fine. The buttons are mapped to Pg Up / Pg Dn, Home, End for easy text editing

Oh, and Shift + Upper Firebutton is mapped to Compose key, so people can now also type special characters (tested and working fine).

twitter.com/PandoraApps | twitter.com/Craigix | twitter.com/EvilDragon1717

When a photo of the latest board revision was posted a few days back, a handful of commenters pondered the possibility of a labelled version. The GP32X trainspotters had actually done this before, on a much older revision. So a new request went out on the forums, and the community got busy once again. And how! Click the image above and you won’t just get a high resolution version, you’ll get a space-age interactive experience with enough hotlinked reading material to sink a brick shiphouse. Thanks go out to all contributors, with special honours to wea0 for digging up the bulk of the part numbers, urjaman for putting together the clicky version, and LeChuck87 for re-hosting it.

Please note that this is 100% unofficial. It has not been endorsed or confirmed correct by OP Ltd. If you’re planning on building your own Pandora from this diagram, you’ll have to figure out what’s on the other seven PCB layers. Ha.

We expected the worst; Chinese New Year would be two weeks, but, a tweet from Craigix:

Chinese mould factory are back at work

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Could it be? We have production before we hoped? I can’t say for sure, but this is good news.

It’s the last nagging detail of the Pandora accessory suite. We’ve seen the AV cables, we’ve seen the power supplies, but where are the cases? No, not the ones in China. We know where they aren’t. The carry cases. Finally, Craig has posted a picture in the forums that believe it or not, introduces another question. Craig describes this as “the hardcase which will probably come with the carry case free.” This could mean that the case you ordered is larger, with this one thrown in for free. Or that the case you ordered is this one, and it comes with a limited edition Tote Bag (with Craig screenprinted on the front). Whatever the case, it does look pleasing. Better get one for Justin.

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MWeston’s Photobucket account has revealed a new picture: the Rev 5a Pandora board. This includes some new solder pads (serial pads near the EXT port, and I2C pads near the wireless chip), and various other thingies.

Update: Never content to leave a question unanswered, pandoratoday.de blogger Screeny dropped Michael Weston a line to ask what this 5th board revision is all about. The reply:

Hi,

There is not much to say. We made 105 rev4 boards. I tweaked a couple things and added a lot more test points, then called it rev5.

Rev5 is the paying customer’s board, rev4 [was] for testing and for devs to work with.

Michael

In other words, the thousand(s) we know to be in production already are the same revision that we see here.

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Thanks to notaz, we now got a working battery meter. You can also configure warnings and automatic shutdown

(EvilDragon)

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Let’s cut to the chase – there will be no mass production cases shipped before Chinese New Year. Despite the keen promises of the factory (4,000 before CNY) and the more realistic quantity requested by OP Ltd (500), employees giddy for the impending break did not meet the target.

They were unable to make all of the parts in time (in any numbers worth shipping). So they will finish the run on the 22nd+.

This just means that all the Pandoras will probably ship in a steady flow from then, rather than a small batch first.

(craigix)

If we learned anything from Rev3, it’s that rushing the injection moulding process can be a recipe for tears. So despite the collective sigh (all together on three… two…) this turn of events points to a more agreeable one-fell-swoop production run. Celebrations in China kick off tomorrow (Feb 14). Happy new year of the tiger, China.

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Just as a child can’t wait to open his presents on Christmas morning, so have most of us been sitting here, trembling with anticipation, waiting to open up our Pandora. Some people have claimed ‘Vapourware’, or that is an outright con. Well, some lucky children have received a late Christmas present, and their excitement is palpable!

For those who follow Craigix’s Twitter, you might has seen the following and wondered what he was talking about:

Craigix via Twitter – Some threads showing up on gp32x of people receiving their Pandora. I can’t stop smiling at them.

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It seems some of our our friendly neighborhood developers have received completed Pandoras with rev3 cases (pre-production run), the good Skeezix and Zodttd. They both have kindly provided photos of what Skeezix calls “…A SEXY BEAST!”.

Skeezix’s enthusiasm is so great, it looks like he forgot to turn off Caps-Lock:

You know, even in rev3 state which is not ‘finished’ in the factory, this is _gorgeous_.

Like Craig said .. soon as you turn it on, THIS IS THE SHIT YOU’VE BEEN WAITING FOR SINCE THE FIRST TIME YOU SAW STAR TREK AS A KID.

jeff

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More pics from skeezix here.

Zodttd sounds impressed too:

It’s really well built too. I took off the battery lid on the back and saw a Pandora logo and slogan right on the battery facing me. Really nice touches. Michael Weston and Craig have outdone themselves.

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Now, if that wasn’t news enough for a blog post… wait there’s more! After posting about his newly acquired Pandora, Zodttd goes on to talk about his PSX emulator:

I’m getting busy on psx4pandora today. Expect a more open project for psx4all now with the likes of public source with revisioning, bug/feedback reporting, and all in all a much more professional take on how I’ve handled things in the past with regards to the GP2X.

I have some big plans for psx4pandora, starting with an overhaul for the dynarec and reaching towards an OpenGL ES 2.0 accelerated GPU.

Thanks!
ZodTTD

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My plans for psx4pandora is for it to be completely 100% free and open source, just as it should be. I am not looking for donations, although truly appreciated. If I do get donations, I surely hope it would be after the release and use of psx4pandora. I have no intention of profiting off this work in any manner.

I want this to be a project out of love, and not feel like work.

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