How to (not) fry a Pandora

How to (not) fry a Pandora

December 29th, 2009, 12:31 Posted By: wraggster

News from the Pandora Blog:

First of all, since this is what most of would want to know: The Pandora did pass the CE testing! Yeah!

Now, for those interested in some more details on the test... here you go.

The quick test we did last time was just one of seven tests. The one that you can easily fail: The radiation testing.
This was the one we failed last time - but using tons of copper tape (well, not exactly tons... but quite a few stripes

), we shielded it good enough to pass it.

The other tests are more or less brutal: They all do test how sturdy the Pandora is.

Some are harmless, like shooting frequency waves from 80Hz to 1GHz onto the running Pandora to see if it will somehow flicker, crash or fail.
Well, it didn't. Linux doesn't crash, so the Pandora didn't even think of crashing just because of a few frequency waves.

The same thing has been repeated - this time with transmitting those frequencies into the power line, not directly onto the device.
Nothing. Angström was still standing there and smiling at us.

Of course, another similar test which had those frequencies directly from the power mains also didn't disturb our little friend.

The next test was easy: What happens when there's a power failure? Well, nothing of course, as the Pandora will simply run from battery then. Easy. Still, some devices do crash if the power failure is only for a few milliseconds. Well, some do. But not the Pandora.

Nothing to worry about here, now onto the more brutal tests.
(Note: If you are in risk of suffering a heart attack or something like that, you'd better not read on)

Next we have the ESD testing. Yep, electrostatical discharging. We did use a small device to fire statical electricity all over the Pandora. You could hear the LCD suffer, but it did survive without any damage. Of course, the OS was still running fine.

The next test is the most brutal one: What happens to the device, if there is a thunder struck near your house and the Pandora is connected to the mains via the AC Adaptor?
About 20% of the devices fail that test... they go down with a lot of sparkles and are dead. Yep. Dead, Jim.
So... we did try to fry the Pandora with peaks of 500V and 1000V. Nothing. Not even a blink. The OS was still working.

So, what did we learn here?
CE testing is brutal. And Linux is stable.

Nuff said. I will get the PDFs with the detailed testing reports tomorrow

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