Pandora News - Prepar ...

Pandora News - Preparations for the near future

January 19th, 2010, 02:20 Posted By: wraggster

More great news concerning the Pandora Console:

This week should be an interesting week. The next (and hopefully final) sample cases should arrive at Michaels place. We're all excited, as they will look so much better than the already good-looking cases we already got.

In the meantime, while it has been quiet around here, a lot of other things have happened.

Preparing the Assembly

Michael has spend all his time preparing for the mass assembly.
He created a well documented assembly manual for the Pandora which contains several parallel processes that can be set up as stations. There are six sub stations and two main stations. The main stations (assembly of lid and assembly of base) require the most staff in order to crank them out faster. The sub stations require one person each (could be more if there are people) and are monotonous (ie. trim and solder speaker wires, apply copper tape, etc.). They could also be combined into more tasks and fewer stations.

Building the boards is a well understood process at this point and done very quickly. The pick and place machine can jam them out as quickly as you can keep the reels loaded. The boards are being built in batches according to how fast they can be tested. Currently that is going to stay at about 450-500 at a time. The process is to build 500, get them into testing and build the next 500 while the first ones are being tested. Once cases are available, the third parallel step will be to have a batch of 500 being assembled while a previous set is in testing and another new set is being populated.

All 4000+ antenna boards and LCD cables have been assembled and inspected. Things are progressing in the natural fashion a small run (by any big company's standards) like this should be done. When the cases show up, this parallel process will fall right into place and pump out shipments at a steady and predictable rate that has been expected from day one. We can't build and ship all 4000 in a day or even a week but it will be done as quickly as possible.

Michael himself will probably spend 12-15 hours a day on the floor helping to build building these bad boys to get them to you all as fast as humanly possible. It's going to be an exhaustive and miserable process, but that will help speed things up a bit. Yep. You read right - some of you guys will actually get a Pandora assembled by the creator himself!

Preparing the OS

The devs have continued to work on the OS. DJWillis fixed (and is fixing) quite a few bugs while also doing various tests to make it NAND-ready.
The OS itself is in a pretty good state. XFCE4 is working nicely, all those installed apps (AbiWord, Midori, ClawsMail, XChat, etc.) run flawlessly. PND Discovery and starting is also working fine. The standard stuff (closing the LID switches off the backlight, battery charging, etc.) is also included.

Here are the current issues still to fix:

* Include pmenu as second startup-option
* WiFi works, but can't be stopped once running. If we can't fix the driver in time, we'd probably put in a small tool where you can enable and disable WiFi on start.
* Bluetooth works fine but is missing a GUI.
* Some permissions need to be fixed (so a normal user can change maximum clock speed, etc.). Nothing spectacular

* Other minor stuff (keyboard mappings, etc.)
* Include scripts to enable TV Out.

So while it will surely not be perfect on first release, you can be sure playing, surfing, working, etc. works fine. It just is in need of more tweaking.

Preparing the shipping

I don't know how Craigs shop looks like at the moment, but I got over 700 empty boxes lying around, waiting to be filled with Pandoras. We're ready to ship them out as fast as possible when they come in!

So - everything is prepared from our side. And as soon as the cases are good... let the fun begin!

For more information and downloads, click here!

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