Is Pyra capable or will be capable in waking up by certain notification?


vatin

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Such as incoming emails or instant messaging. This capability is crucial as an effective communication device.
 
TL;DR: Yes, but it needs to be set up/coded first.

First off, the Pyra has these two small, low-power, processor cores that might have been interesting to keep on while the main, fast but power-hungy cores are disabled. But there is a CPU bug that prevented that idea: See, the chips are now targeted for automotive usage (for in cars) and they expected them to be "always on", so the low-power modes were not tested enough and the chip was send off to production with that flaw.

The way the Pandora does it is to send a SIG-STOP to all processes, and go into 125Mhz mode, leaving on what needs to be enabled (but wifi, bluetooth, etc are disabled if you "sleep" your Pandora). Also the screen is a big drain on the battery, so we turn that off.
The Pyra has led lights on the backside, those can be used to send statuses.

Now, in Debian, the Linux flavour that Pyra is getting we have:

Code:
$ apt-cache search pop3 |igrep check
mailcheck - Check multiple mailboxes/maildirs for mail
pop3browser - Allows one to check a pop3 mailbox before downloading any mail
Unfortunately, both have been orphaned (no maintainer). And mailcheck seems to have your passwords in clear-text, not good for a portable device...

So those would be the programs that would not go into lowpower mode. However, before they start checking, the hardware needs to be started (or be kept enabled, but then the battery will not last long, just like with modern smartphones) however a small wrapper script can take care of that.

So if you don't mind the security, a very small script can detect incoming email and "turn the Pyra on", that is, send a melody to the speaker or start flashing leds of the main display at maximum intensity, for example.

The alternative is the bigger mail programs, but then... we need to synchronize their check with enabling the hardware (either wifi or the gsm). Which is easier if we just have it enabled continuously.


And then there is Instant Messaging (Signal, WhatsApp, Slack, Facebook, Google Talk, AOL/AIM/iChat, Yahoo!, ICQ, Vkontakte, Mail.Ru Agent, Odnoklassniki, Yandex chat, Oovoo, Treema, Mamba.Ru, Tox, Element, Jitsi, Mig33, SINA Weibo, Renren, Fetion, Gadu-Gadu, MeinVZ, Teams, Telegram, Snapchat and Jabber). I intentionally mention them, because no 2 IM programs are alike and most of those are closed source, and detecting new messages is done by detecting file modifications (or if running inside a webpage, by hooking up to a web-element). So for those, there was this idea to run an android virtualization layer that just ran android and that application was doing all the powersaving. Unfortunately, that also means that you hand over control of the hardware to that, so you lose Linux powermanagement and run Android fullscreen, so to say.

So the most logical is to use anbox, but I have no idea if dev's already have been playing with it (first mention of it in the forum was 5 years ago):


And for that route, It was done on the Pandora, I do not see why it will not run on the Pyra:

4:54: E.D.: Well, I got 3 balls, pretty awesome.

note that this is probably a full SD card with only Android, so it runs natively, not as a subprocess from Linux, like anbox would.

And then comes the "waking up by voice"... which is interesting, but I have no idea: https://github.com/aidygus/LinVAM
But it would be nice to say "Hey Pyra, play despacito"
 
Last edited:
Thank you for such extensive explanation. Maybe better to wait a few year after launch for all of this to get "done".
 
But that was to gain speed... And that IS a feature. However, this is extra functionality (which I assume can be installed, or not, at a whim)
 
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