Official blog: Transmitting more news

EvilDragon has posted some more information about the WiFi situation on the official blog:

Hiya, it’s EvilDragon again.

I got some more fresh news, and those are not about delaying or anything like that.

As you have all read, the only driver problem is WiFi. To put things short (and as they are pretty complicated), here is what was our problem:

There’s a closed-source driver available for the WiFi chip, but we didn’t at all want to use it (hey, we’re OPENPandora, not ClosedPandora). Then we found an OpenSource project for that WiFi chip – we used it and it worked well at the beginning (you might remember some WiFi testing videos).
But that driver was poorly coded – and it did have more and more problems. We can’t even get to work it anymore with the latest Angström image, only with our testing rootfs (which is good, as we do know that the hardware is fine.

Well, DJWillis wanted to take on the WiFi task – and it’s already looking really good. He found another driver which should work way better – and it already compiled with our latest kernel.

So basically, that WiFi issue MIGHT be solved faster than we thought. There’s still a lot of work needed, but this has been a HUGE progress.

I’ll keep you informed.

Source

Official Blog: The evolution of the Pandora insides.

Posted by: tovmas

A new post from Craig on the official blog shows us three revisions of the Pandora board. As usual, click to embiggen.

Source

TI introduces optimized port of GStreamer

Posted by: tovmas

LinuxDevices reports that TI has released an optimized port of GStreamer, a multimedia framework for Linux.
From the article:

Aiming to improve Linux multimedia development using its processors, Texas Instruments (TI) has released a version of the open source GStreamer media plugin for its OMAP35x and DaVinci system-on-chips (SoCs). The Linux-based GStreamer library supports development of audio and video playback, audio and video synchronization, and recording capabilities, says TI.

More information can be found at the project website.

Thanks to forum member marshal for finding this.

New Port: The Mana World

Posted by: tovmas

Cpasjuste has posted a video of his port of The Mana World, a free 2D MMORPG project.
Great work!

Source

Official Blog: new pictures of transparent case and battery

Posted by: tovmas

Craig has posted new pictures of the transparent case and the final battery on the official blog.

As usual, click on the images for larger versions…

Source

Checklist on official site updated

Posted by: tovmas

The checklist on the official site has been updated, with more items being crossed off.

To-Do:

* Get the final Prototype case
* Build a test device and check if everything is okay
* Create the keymat mould (takes 20 – 25 days)
* Design the final keyboard layout (needs to be finished when the mould is ready)
* Create mould of final case (can be done once the case fits, takes 30 – 35 days)
* CE / FCC testing (can be done once the prototype case is here)
* Mass Production testrun for the final boards
* Stability testing (this will be fun)
* Wait for the last remaining pieces for mass production (LATEST deadline is second week of March)
* Mass Production
* Test the boards
* SHIP THEM!

Also, dates have been added to the official blog posts!

Looking forward to more updates in the coming week.

New video of Irrlicht engine

Cpasjuste has posted a video showing the Irrlicht 3D engine running on a dev board! Irrlicht is a fast and  extremely flexible graphics engine, allowing for all kinds of 3D applications.

More on the engine

A finger, a case and boring stuff

Progress is being made, as ED posted the following on the blog:

So, what has happened during the last days, you might ask?
Well, besides me starting to make the Pandora Matchbox theme to be more finger-compatible (so you can use it without stylus), Michael finally got his case and he began to assemble it properly.

I also had to do a lot of boring stuff… finding out a lot of the legal stuff and doing phone calls.

If you’re not interested in legal mumbojumbo, you can skip the rest of this blog entry.

Have you ever thought about how complicated it would be selling a battery within Europe? Firstly, you need to make sure nothing serious can happen… and if there are any special infos about how it has to be wrapped up. A lot of phone calls were needed to find out anything about that, as nobody seems to know much about that – not even the guys that are supposed to check if everything is fine. Well, I found everything I need to know. Even if some stuff is weird. Even the size of the “don’t-throw-it-away”-icon on the battery has to be correct…
Another thing about the batteries is that you actually need to take care about the recycling… I did also take care about that.

Similar stuff for the Pandora itself: Recycling is something that needs to be taken care of… that’s fun, eh?

Anyways, after those boring legal stuff, back to the really important things now: Finishing the Pandora and the OS!

New blog post and video

Posted by: tovmas

New blog post from ED, with video:

Hi,
still waiting for the case, however, I got some news: According to the factory, it should be finished by next week, so there was a one week delay because of the chinese new year here. Could be better, but it could also be worse!

So, in the meantime, I injected MDaves theme into my Angström image of my Pandora devboard and can show you a nice video (HD :)).
It shows, how easy it is to change the icon size to suit the menu to your needs.
As a little bonus I also ran some first version of ScummVM. Some seconds are missing though, as the video footage was broken for some reason.
Enjoy 🙂

More key layout news

Posted by: tovmas

New blog post from ED:

While the mould for the keymat is currently being produced, we’re concentrating on working more on the keyboard layout.
We mostly scrapped out old layout since we had too many important keys missing – so there are no Umlauts or language specific keys on the layout, it’s a plain English keyboard with a compose key to do special characters.

That layout is not final yet, it’s our current WIP.
It might look weird and mixed up at first sight, but there’s one major difference with a standard PC Keyboard: You only use two thumbs for typing on that one, so it’s much more important that the most used characters are convenient to reach (which can be a problem when using the Fn Button).

Link