Case moulds. They’re slow old things to make. When will the moulds be done? Soon. What are we waiting for? The moulds. Thanks blog people, big help. But maybe not everyone out there knows exactly what these moulds are? If that’s you, pull up a pew. Rather than reinvent the wheel, we’ll just tap into some existing educational resources. This technology students page offers a (deceptively) simple overview of the moulding process. They’re not making a gaming handheld, but they are making a blue hedgehog… it’s the best we could do. (You don’t have to take the test at the end). For a more serious read, there’s the slightly less fun Wikipedia page. Pandora’s moulds are currently in the machining phase.
Craigix: Oh, forgot to tell you all, the battery was upped to 4200mah and our tests are showing this monster is going to give something like 14 hours
A device that allows you to watch a 10 hour Eurovision marathon, then clock Mario 16 times? Finally! A nice win for frequent flyers, mountain climbers, and anyone who doesn’t carry mains voltage in their backback. Thanks to calc84maniac for spotting it first.
We’re used to speed bumps on this road; we’re not so used to spec bumps. Code guru Exophase has discovered some interesting revisions to the OMAP3530 data sheet, which seems to be giving us a little more head room in terms of clock speed than we had before. The Cortex-A8, known to us as a “600Mhz+” processor, is now being listed as “Up to 720MHz”. Also getting an on-paper boost is the DSP core, which has jumped from 430Mhz to 520Mhz. MWeston speculates:
It was all devs on deck today, with a little video-fuelled excitement on the boards and a bevy of questions answered. First up, a word from the Dragon.
Well, some quick news (I didn’t have time to do a blog post, as I was in Leipzig at the GCO and needed to catch up on everything).
The 105 boards are finished, though I have no idea whether the MP company did take some pictures or if we have to wait until they arrive at Michaels place.
The review of the case is complete, mould creation started.
The TV Out Cables are being built, as soon as Michael gets the first final one, there will be pictures for sure
WiFi is getting better, everything works except reading the calibration data, the rest is fine. DJWillis is still at it.
And Michael is currently putting the new firmware on all of the nubs… joy
On reading that, the observant Pandorian might be asking why the case mould is starting now, when we previously reported that it started two weeks ago? Just for you, it’s been asked and answered already.
Remember the mysterious nub tester we saw a little while back? A new photo has surfaced in MWeston’s album showing the rig in action, with the following caption:
Testing the final nub firmware to be loaded into 8000 chips!
I thought it worked well before, but now it is jitter free.
Craig is also enthused about the final firmware, if this tweet is any indication:
The final nub firmware is amazing. The new code is tight. Should make for a great experience on the Pandora and whatever else…
An actual video from actual Craig. Craig’s Youtube account anyway; it’s actually MWeston behind the camera. The team has heeded our calls for some Pand-only content and thrown together ten solid minutes of MAME, nicely framed for the d-pad lovers to boot. It looks… splendid. For the newcomers, this is not a final Pandora but a transparent CNC prototype that’s been around for a while. But it’s what inside that counts. <3
From the depths of MWeston’s bucket comes this shiny new photo. At first glance it doesn’t look that new, just a glossy keypad peering out from an old FDM prototype case. There are important tweaks underneath though. Compare it to the last one we saw, and you’ll see that they keys now sit higher in the case. The membrane tweaks apply to both the QWERTY section and gaming controls. Note that this isn’t a font or character map update (MW heads this off at the pass by noting the “non-final silk screening”).
ED gives us a short but good follow up to the recent Short But Good blog post. There’s more on the forums, where context is king, so hit that source link!
The next really interesting thing will be next week – when the first 105 mass produced boards should be finished
Then the moulding company gets a PCB so it can optimize the case to make the PCB fit perfectly – well, and then it’s all set for the mould production and the real real REAL mass production run
Some promising news from our favourite Dragon. If you live near DaveC, buy that man a beer!
Hi folks! You’ve been waiting for the weekly report, haven’t you? Well, I’ve been very very busy with various things, so I coldn’t catch up with everything until now. And I’ve got some short but really good news for you:
Dave finished every single step which was on the ToDo-List of the case!
This does mean, that the case moulding could start REALLY soon. We’re currently waiting for a review from the company – and will tell you more about the status as soon as we get some more information!
Oh, on a side note, most parts for the boards have arrived in Dallas (95%). This means that mass production for the full 4000 run can most probably start as soon as we give them a green light (which means: After we tested the 105 boards).
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