The flight has been booked


EvilDragon

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The time has come. The flight to Greece has been booked.
I'll leave on Tuesday morning, January 19th and will come back Friday noon, January 22nd.
That's two full days to test out and tweak the cases!

Exciting times, isn't it?

Oh - you're also asking what Nikolaus has been doing during the last week?
Okay, here's your answer: Fixing some small hardware bugs while working on the boards.

The Display Board

None of the display boards was working when we got them - something that cries out for some hardware bug.
Nikolaus debugged it for a day and luckily it was a simple fix: To save some costs, we replaced a power supply part for the display board with a different ones but that one did provide a bit lower voltage.
Easy fix: Change the resistor. Now everything is working fine here, including the rotator chip using our own display cable.

Oh, and as Nikolaus was working on the board anyways, he checked the sync output generated by the SSD and could confirm it sends sync signal each frame which we can use for tear free rotation with some software tweak.


The mainboard and CPU board

There was another slight issue with the mainboard power circuit which also could be fixed by simply choosing a different resistor.
What happened: Booting the system only worked using a battery or through the Console / Charger port.
When trying to power it through the USB OTG port, it didn't get enough power.
Why's that?
Well, usually, there's 1,8V set on the USB OTG port, so that a computer connected to it recognizes it as a high-power device. That works fine with a battery.
However, without a battery, the Pyra doesn't work and doesn't provide 1,8V there - so the Pyra thinks it's a low power device and limits it to 100mA, which is not enough to boot the system.

There is a way to tell the Palmas (power management chip) using some software and a resistor to also accept more than 100mA.

And yes, that worked, and the system boots up to U-Boot now. It doesn't start the kernel, which is something Nikolaus is looking into right now. That's some software tweak that needs to be implemented.

This would've only been an issue if you're using the Pyra without a battery, but as some probably want to do that, we wanted to fix that.

With a battery, it boots into the Linux kernel already, so don't worry about that.

So we're moving ahead slowly, but we're pretty close to having a fully bootable system - though it's hard to tell how fast that will go, as some software changes require reading hundreds of pages in a datasheet and take days to solve whereas others are found within minutes.

Still, it could very well be we've got a fully booting system when I leave for Greece - which would be a milestone, together with the case :)

I'll keep you updated, as usual :)
 
Awesome, thanks for the update, keep cramming those resistors in there, it seems to do wonders!
 
Ah, those days when you're visiting Greece are during the early days of the Australian Open. So you'll be able to watch the later rounds of the Open game when you're back home :).
 
Cool. I have a question, and hope I don't step on too much toes:

Is it possible to get the case with just the PYRA lettering, i.e. without that tribal-style logo?
 
Cool. I have a question, and hope I don't step on too much toes:

Is it possible to get the case with just the PYRA lettering, i.e. without that tribal-style logo?

No, unless you're willing to shell out about 10000€ for it.

The Logo is in the injection mould for the case, so another mould would need to be made which is extremely costly.

Also the logo part itself is translucent with RGB-Leds beneath it for notifications, so to light up another logo configuration you'd also need to modify the display driver pcb and make another mould for the logo replacement itself.
 
In theory ED could make some solid coloured logos to put in there instead of the translucent ones; that would kind of be the same.
Or you could commission someone to 3D print one.
 
Also the logo part itself is translucent with RGB-Leds beneath it for notifications, so to light up another logo configuration you'd also need to modify the display driver pcb and make another mould for the logo replacement itself.
Erm I don't see why... The display board only has 2 centrally mounted RGB-LEDs. There is nothing logo-specific about their placement.

It would theoretically be possible to create a lid with any logo you liked and use the exact same display board inside it. (though as mentioned already it would probably be cost-prohibitive to actually do so unless you have a very large amount of money to throw at the project.)

-Neelix
 
Erm I don't see why... The display board only has 2 centrally mounted RGB-LEDs. There is nothing logo-specific about their placement.

It would theoretically be possible to create a lid with any logo you liked and use the exact same display board inside it. (though as mentioned already it would probably be cost-prohibitive to actually do so unless you have a very large amount of money to throw at the project.)

-Neelix

The DP-Logo is higher than wide, the proposed PYRA logo would probably be wider than high.
IIRC the leds are placed up and down a bit from the centre of the logo.

Yes it sure could be done, but getting it to light up evenly might pose some challenge.

For someone who really doesn't like the logo it sure is a great opportunity to mod it.
 
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Ok so in 2 Weeks then..
Will you also take some cases whit you back to germany??
And how do you manage to get the Board and the Lipo on the plane??
 
Yeahr but on the flight to greace, there is just a lonely 6000 mah Batteriepack and some not known circuits..
Who says that this long heared bomber dosnt want to let the plane exloding whit this obvious looking parts..
Linux is an Terrorist OS
 
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He can put the parts into one of the 3D printed cases. It will look like enough like a finished device that he shouldn't have any problems.

-Neelix
 
... Linux is an Terrorist OS

funny thing is that even "the other side" is using linux
to "catch the terrorists". for example the "x-keyscore"
system the 5eyes+bnd/bfvs are using is running on linux
and mostly all of their other big iron too.
time for a gpl-change to cut their "freedom" to spy on us! ;)

@ed
cool, good flight and no volcanos!
as i have now assured the funds for my pyra... *bring it on!*
 
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