Posts Tagged ‘Boards’
February 17, 2010
Posted by: atomicthumbs
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.
Source
Posted in Hardware, Official | Tagged Board, Boards, mweston, pcb | 54 Comments »
February 2, 2010
Posted by: gruso
If you needed a reminder that China isn’t the only player in this saga, this is a nice way to get one. MWeston has informed us that 1,000 boards are being populated with components this week in Texas. Also interesting is the impact certain software developers are having on the hardware production process. What, you thought they just sat around porting Quake? (No offence to those who sat around porting Quake. You’re all doing a bang up job.)
It’s worth saying again that Notaz’s work on the kernel is clearly the reason the device is as advanced as it is today. Sure the hardware may have come along fine with minimal testing as the assembler learned how to solder the boards better but Notaz has helped me develop a comprehensive suite of test software that has helped the assembler perfect their process. So good in fact that they have started building a batch of 1000 this week after tweaking their pilot runs.
(MWeston)
Source
Posted in Hardware, Official, Software | Tagged Boards, mweston, notaz | 22 Comments »
January 6, 2010
Posted by: gruso
Note: Not a new image
If you were on the ball a few days back, you might have seen an unofficial blog post go up announcing mass production had commenced – a post which disappeared just as quickly. If you didn’t catch the explanation, it was a false alarm. Someone had spotted “Mass Production of 3895 Pandoras / MP has started” on the official status page after one too many Shirley Temples, and took it as the news we’ve been waiting for. When in fact, it had been there for several months. Retractions and apologies were made, but the spotlight remained on that dusty old status page entry. What was going on with the boards? Enter MWeston, with a detailed account of where it’s all at and how the assembly process will roll. If your hat has a propeller on top, remove it now lest you launch into the ceiling.
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Posted in Hardware, Official | Tagged assembly, Boards, mweston | 69 Comments »
December 3, 2009
Posted by: gruso
This isn’t news yet, but we’re all starving for status updates so it’s worth sharing what we have. The current information from China (mined from the German boards by Mali) is that they’ve declared the moulds complete, and are shipping / have shipped the remaining test pieces out – complete with production matte finish. The final say lies with Mr Weston of course, who eagerly awaits their arrival. Craig expanded on this via some forum Q&A (questions are from various GP32Xers and may be paraphrased, but you’ll hardly notice).
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Posted in Hardware, Official, Software | Tagged appstore, Boards, craigix, moulds, mweston | 72 Comments »
November 29, 2009
Posted by: gruso
First, an apology from PandoraPress for copy/pasting this tale of shrinkage so long after the fact (“I was in the pool!”). Second, an apology from ED for excitedly jumping the gun last week upon seeing the new case parts. And who could blame him?
Your all waiting for more shiny case pictures, right? Well… we all are.
However, I did make a fault with my last blog post – as the pictures had been released, I assumed the shipment to Michael was on the way. It isn’t yet – sorry about that, I was so excited about that myself, I really thought it was on the way.
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Posted in Hardware, Official | Tagged Boards, evildragon, moulds | 36 Comments »
November 18, 2009
Posted by: gruso
ED has followed up today’s tantalising Texan photos with an official blog post, and some pictures of his own.
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.
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Posted in Hardware, Official, Software | Tagged Boards, evildragon, moulds, silkscreen, themes, xfce | 67 Comments »
November 17, 2009
Posted by: gruso
Pictured here are the remainder of the first 105, following the successful completion of stress testing. MWeston:
103 out of 105 passed. The other two may come up after another reflow but sometimes they are just dead and get tossed aside. This whole time has been spent working on the ones that have been functional and building the test jig with pins that probe the PCB. We’ve also been focusing efforts on adding more features to the software so that an automated application can be run on top of the OS to check all of the hardware functionality with as little human interaction as possible.
A result so good, that:
It’s very likely we are just doing them all next. The smaller runs *might* not be needed now. (craigix)
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Posted in Hardware, Official | Tagged 105, Boards, light pipes, mweston, pcbs | 42 Comments »
November 3, 2009
Posted by: gruso
We’ll deal with the not-so-shiny news first, then we’ll get onto those mysterious photos. The not-so-shiny news is that we won’t be seeing the first production cases this week:
Sorry everyone,
I had to pull the countdown timer. I dared to be brave and got bit in the ass once again. 
Craig suggested I was crazy but there didn’t seem to be anything else that could be screwed up at this point and I even factored in a couple extra days.
There was one part coming out of the molds messed up and they were to fix it, make new parts and ship everything tonight. Now, two more molds need the extra treatment and will take a few more days. I’m hoping they ship new parts this weekend but no more count downs. Unbelievable.
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Posted in Hardware, Official | Tagged Boards, Case, craigix, moulds, mweston | 75 Comments »
October 19, 2009
Posted by: gruso
Just in case you missed the latest update to the unofficial roadmap (don’t feel bad if you did, it’s only been there a few hours), MWeston had been advised by the case factory in China that the mould completion date would be October 23rd at worst. Now he’s heard from them again, and believe it or not, they were bearing good news…
I just got another confirmation that actual injected parts will ship to me next week. Some of the molds are completely done right now, others (I suspect the more complicated ones like base bottom, outer lid and definitely hinge mechanism area on base top) are still being shaved and tweaked this week. I asked if the delays were because they were still cutting them or if they were testing them and thankfully the delays are because they are testing them. They have an NDS lite as a reference for the color (within a few shades, not necessarily 100% exact), matte finish and build quality that we are looking for (except for hinge build quality, our parts are much thicker there). That was the easiest way to get over the language barrier that always gets in the way. “You make this now!” seemed easier. 
Hoping for the best as always…
Oh, and second wave production PCBs (3895) were ordered on Sept. 30 just to get in the queue. We knew they wouldn’t be starting until after the Chinese holiday anyway which is how it went down but we wanted our place in line. That gave us time to resubmit modified files if we had to before they did anything, but not lose our place. The boards should be deep into formatting and CAM inspection by now and perhaps already into the etching stage of inner layers.
Source
Posted in Hardware | Tagged Boards, moulds, mweston, production | 48 Comments »
June 5, 2009
Posted by: gruso
Video? That was so last week. Thankfully things are always rolling behind the scenes, HD eye candy or no HD eye candy. And Craig spake:
I hope to have a more recent prototype, with the MP nubs this coming week.
So the last one is old news.
The board tests look good. A bigger run is about to happen, the boards from this run will be used in final consoles.
Source
Posted in Hardware, Official, Pandora | Tagged Boards, craigix, pcb | Comments Off
April 19, 2009
Posted by: PlopperZ
Craig posted this on Twitter:
Final boards are being ordered this week….
Source
Posted in Hardware, Official, Pandora | Tagged Boards, Final, Ordering, twitter | Comments Off
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