MWeston feeds some banana skins into Mr Fusion and logs the gigawatt hours. Ze text:
Here’s a video showing my ammeter in series with the Pandora battery. I wanted to double check the fuel gauge calibration because with lite settings, 15 hours is being presented. I thought that was crazy, but it’s true. With an average current of 278mA and a battery testing at 4200mAh, that really is 15 hours (under specific settings talked about below of course).
With the wifi issue blown wide open, unseen forces no longer impede our progress. Notaz and Pickle have signed up for the resistance. Soon, we will join them.
Just had some hard time attempting to mod my board. That resistor is really small, see for yourself (my index finger and small screwdriver for comparison)
(Notaz)
Finally – a new blog post. Wait, that’s ED’s line.
Finally – a new blog post. Did take a real long time, since there was so much we needed to figure out first.
Okay, here is what happened:
1. The WiFi issue – finally resolved
A lot of guys have probably already followed this on the boards: notaz was working on the WiFi driver and still couldn’t get it to work reliable. As he didn’t know what else to try, he thought it could also be a hardware issue – of course, that got us alarmed. Michael immediately stopped the board production (700 had been produced so far back then) to first do more tests with WiFi. We were totally in the dark. If you ever wanted to know how sudden death feels… well, we do know for sure yet.
The Pandora team has found the problem with the internal Wi-fi module. Turns out a resistor had an incorrect value.
It was a resistor.
Good news: The modification is minimal and can be done within a few minutes. We told the company to send the boards already produced and tested to UK ASAP and Michael will go there and start modding.
Then we need the cases – and assembly will finally start.
In this video, EvilDragon gets up to some networking ‘nanigans using the USB wifi stick that is set to accompany the first 1,000 Pandoras. For the benefit of the tubeless, he covers web browsing and forum posting with Midori, internet radio via the Exaile media player, downloading and installing a .PND from the archive, and unrelated to wifi, a quick look at the sleek, fast “Minimenu” app launcher recently put together by Skeezix. Onward to the bigger picture, ED has this to say on cases and boards:
We don’t have any word on the results of MWeston’s wifi tests, but you could probably make an intelligent guess based on the wheels that are now in motion. The first lot of boards are being packed up for shipping to the UK:
Arranging the Boards (etc.) shipping, wow, almost a metric ton.
…and EvilDragon is going full steam ahead on the wifi sticks:
In a nutshell: there aren’t any answers to the wifi question just yet. MWeston is now running some hardware tests.
We had a long night yesterday in IRC where we thought about all possible issues how to find out what could cause the slow speed.
Michael is going to modify a board to be able to read out the debug data from the module itself, that might also help a lot.
Regarding the first boards produced: As it looks like right now, Michael will test the debug output and then we’ll either let the boards we have already ship immediately (if he doesn’t find more about it) or will let them apply a fix if he finds out it’s hardware and it can be fixed easily.
That’s the last thing we can try out pretty quick, if it won’t help, it’s shipping and assembling time!
(EvilDragon)
A loong official blog post from EvilDragon.
Long time no blog post – and a lot has happened, really!
First, let’s start with some OS development.
The OS is getting better and better. We will probably add another minimal menu, similar to gmenu2x with no fancy effects and graphics but PND-Support.
This is for all the purists of you.Also, notaz and DJWillis are slowly stepping forward in getting WiFi working.
While it’s not perfect, the packet loss is decreasing and things are getting better.
It might still be a long way (or it might be finished soon, you never know with such things), but it’s improving.
As Pandora tiptoes its way towards public consumption, EvilDragon delivers a solid state of the nation on all things firmware related, giving first batchers a good idea of what to expect. Things have certainly come a long way, but there will be some beta-ish aspects to the firmware that will continue to be polished as units go out into the wild. Booting is on the slow side for now, and we shouldn’t expect the suspend-to-RAM function to be ready out of the box (see end of article for more on this). On the up side, USB peripherals, wifi, Bluetooth, .pnd recognition, and a first-boot setup wizard are just some of the things that are hot to trot.
Evil H. Dragon has blogged up a big one. If you’ve been reading PandoraPress you’ll know a lot of this stuff already, but it’s always nice to get a meaty serve of words from Pandora HQ. Images and video have been snipped to conserve pixels; you can find the post in its original form at the source. Oh, want to know what the above pic is all about? Don’t let your raging inner nerd miss the links at the bottom.
PandoraPress is Digg proof thanks to caching by WP Super Cache