Craig has posted new photos of the parts from the Pandora test injection. Keep in mind that these are test parts, and so aren’t as shiny as the final parts. Here you see the top of the Pandora’s case, with holes for everything. Read more for more photos.

The battery cover.

Screen front, with speaker holes.

The SD cover and stylii.

And finally, the shoulder buttons.

ED has posted another post on the official blog:

Well, Michael has already begun to wrap up one of those LCD cables in a nice shield. Those foils are REALLY thin, so there’s nothing we need to change with the case. It’s an easy fix.

The other thing you might want to know is that we placed our order for the production of those 3895 boards. Yep, mass production of the motherboards has started!

Now all that’s left to do is wait for the chinese company to finish the moulds. Yeeha!

Good news all around!

By way of preface, the term “bottleneck” should be taken as a bit of light-hearted melodrama, as it has on the forums in the past week. This stemmed from some questions about what will happen when the case moulds are done. Scenario: When the moulds are ready, 10,000 cases can (and will) be produced quickly. But at the moment, there are only about 100 boards to put in them. Boards take longer to make than cases… bottleneck! The obvious solution: Start making the boards sooner. The only obstacle: FCC/CE testing. Thankfully, this looks like one of those wide-necked bottles. Craig slams it down fast:

The boards are good so far, we are probably going to be starting mass production slightly earlier than mentioned in the last couple of weeks. Making those cases the bottleneck again

Vorporeal then asked the FCC/CE question:

So I assume you guys are confident that no issues will arise in FCC/CE testing? I wouldn’t expect anything to come up, but if you’re confident enough to risk more than just the first 105 not passing certification, we should be in pretty good shape hardware wise.

Which was answered by EvilDragon:

We did some constant testings during development, not fully accurate, but if there had been something really bad, we would’ve seen it.

Also, I’m going to take a board with everything together for a preview testing. If a board emits something, it will be worse without a case, so if that test is fine without any problems, the final one will, too.

This is going to cost a bit more, but it definately speeds things up, as we don’t have to wait for the final case to start the mass production of all of the boards.

That last sentence in particular, is a bit of a winner.

Source

Artist's Impression

Weekend updates are always a treat, even if you have to wait until Monday to get them. Some feisty forumers caught Craig in a chatty mood on Saturday, and eeked out some juice on where we’re at with cases and things. In short, the final two items of focus are hinge testing (because Open Pandora doesn’t want to pull a DS on you) and d-pad height (because DaveC cares about d-pads more than you’ll ever know). From a quality point of view, these things are good things. Rather than paste a few quotes here, we recommend you click through and read the entire thread – context being golden, and all that.

Hear it all from the horse’s mouth here.