Pandora Blog News - Paint it Black

April 14th, 2010, 00:25 Posted By: wraggster

News via http://www.open-pandora.org/index.ph...emid=2&lang=en

Here we go with the latest updates for the hungry masses!
First, my apologies for not updating the site a lot. That WiFi issue really did wear me out, I wasn't able to do much during that time. We all were a bit demotivated, but now that WiFi's working, we've recovered and are working fullspeed ahead!
Sorry for that, but after all, we're only human beings, too... and after years of constant work on the Pandora and our normal jobs... well, things can get a bit hard.

1. The hardware

Michael has finished working on WiFi and did manage to get it working quite well. Stable websurfing at about 500 KB/s. He tried webbrowsing, streaming music, etc.
This put our minds on ease, we really were quite scared when we found out about WiFi.
We now got FULLY WORKING HARDWARE, as we got drivers for EVERY component!

As can be seen on this picture, there's a lot of boxes shipping to UK. Some might go to Turkey, as Fatih got hold of a company who usually does laptop repairs, and they might help to fix the WiFi on the already produced 700 boards to speed things up a bit.

Boxes full of B...

This whole WiFi issue did throw as back a few weeks - but I hope you all do agree it's better we took the two weeks finding out what the problem was. Otherwise, you would've been gotten Pandoras with broken WiFi... not a good idea, if you ask me.
This seemed to happen for a big, well-known company whose latest product has serious WiFi issues (and WiFi working much worse than ours...)
We rather ship you something working - even if it did delay things by two or three more weeks!

2. The cases

While Michael was working on WiFi, the Chinese were working on increasing the case quality.
And we really do think it was worth the extra time - especially the final one that has some paint added looks spot-on!
Way better than anything we've seen before!

Was it worth it? That's up to decide for yourself. We sure do think so.

Unfortunately, adding paint did lead to one thing that has to be done: As it makes the case a bit thicker, Michael needs to approve that case and therefore is waiting for a sample.
To speed production up, Fatih will visit the company in China if necessary to make sure they won't mess around more but start shipping!
They still have a few days to ship, as applying the WiFi fix to the boards will take a while.

One thing that might interest you: You might have seen that they also painted a pink version of the Pandora... Michael will most probably put a Rev 4 board in and sell it on eBay soon!
Yep, that Prototype will probably be out shortly before we assemble and ship!

So if you want to own this case, keep your eyes on our blog!

Oh, some might think Painting is cheating... well, not really.
A lot of companies actually do it that way - and it doesn't wear off. Remember the old Nintendo DS? Not the DS Lite, but the old silvergrey one? I got one. Never had a carry case, it's really scratched (even the LCD is scratched).
But only on one corner it can be seen it's painted - and only because the base plastic color was white.
So black with black won't wear off - don't worry. It will simply LOOK better.

3. The software

I'm currently doing a lot of neat scripts while DJWillis prepare the image for the NAND.
Today I did create an LCD Gamma Manager - a small tool where you can create, load and save various LCD Gamma settings. I also created one that looks like an old CRT TV. Really cool - emulation on a handheld has never looked better!
To check out what's happening on the OS, simply go to http://git.openpandora.org

As Midori was a bit unstable and FireFox eating up RAM, we changed browsers once again. Arora is now included in the OS. Fast, without any rendering issues and it didn't crash yet for me.
The OS is getting more and more complete.

That's it for now - as soon as I know any more information (shipping dates for the cases, dates when we all meet in England, etc.), I'll inform you!
And sorry to my German readers: I'll translate the post tomorrow, it's 5:50 am now, I want to go to bed...

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