Oh, there's still coming people here. Let's join in. I want to tell a bit about the Pandora and the Pyra, which will be the successor of the Pandora that's currently in development. And we'll take a quick look at the history and a sneak peek at the future. First, for those who don't know, what is the Pandora? Just a quick look.

Basically, it's a miniature handheld PC, as can be seen here. Completely open runs Linux. It's basically a mixture between a video gaming system, so we've got D-pad and analog controls. But at the same time, it's also a complete miniature PC.

Right now, I have it here and I'm watching the IRC from our community, because the people might have some questions as well. And if they are watching the livestream, then I can answer these questions right here. It's always been made to be hacker-friendly, so there's no bootloader that you can kill or something like that.

It's always recoverable. It's not locked down in any way. You can boot any operating system you want. And of course, there's no force for registration or anything like that, so you don't need a Google or anything else account. You can do what you want with it. Basically, it's just like a normal PC, just a bit smaller. It was also always very important to have a long battery life.

So the Pandora normally has 10 hours of battery life, which is pretty amazing for such a small PC. And one of the most important things is that it's community-driven. Which means, well, it's basically, you all know that, the same with Linux all the time.

It's a bunch of people working together, and as the world is very big, there are a lot of people working together just to make this work. There's no big company or huge company behind it. Well, quite expensive, that can be seen as you like, but if I look at the current smartphone with the Cortex-A15,

they are at 800 euros, so it's expensive. And they're even cheaper to build, because it's just a flat case and nothing else on the screen and an SoC. So compared to the big ones, we are pretty cheap actually,

because we have to pay a lot more to get the parts than they do. But we basically have the same price. It's expensive compared to other gaming handhelds. Well, to gaming handhelds, yes. But those gaming handhelds usually fund themselves with sales of games,

which is not the case here, because here we are running open source games and emulators and ports. Okay, let's just do quick pictures, because if I just hold it in my hand, you can't see very well. As said, we've got a D-pad, we've got a keyboard, we've got a few knobs. At the back we've got USB ports, shoulder buttons, TV out port and mini-USB.

So it's pretty much as said, a computer combined with a gaming handheld. Now let's just do a quick look at the history of the Pandora. Basically, in 2007, three guys, I was one of them, who were selling the GPTWX Linux handheld from Gamepark Holdings.

Well, we decided to create a new Linux gaming handheld device. After a while, we found a case in the PCB designer in the community, and that's basically how the Pandora was born. Well, yeah, at first we only thought of it as a gaming device. That it can be a PC, basically, or a complete mini-laptop, that's something we found out later.

The idea basically was we wanted to have a device that could at least emulate an Amiga in full speed, which means we needed to have a system that has a touchscreen, a keyboard and a CPU that's fast enough, and that's basically how the first shape of the Pandora came to be. More ideas have been gathered from the community.

We actually made a thread about what would your dream handheld be like, and then we picked everything that would be possible from the thread and included it into the Pandora. Then the developing starts with some valued community members, like DJ Willy, Snowdas and Skisix, who were active in the scene before,

worked on the operating system and drivers. And then in 2008, that was just one year later, we had the first prototypes, but only prototype PCBs. The case was not finished yet. That was revealed to the public. At that time, a Cortex-8 had impressive CPU power, so we suddenly had a large press coverage.

When we started pre-ordering in September 2008, the plan was to have it released in December 2008, which didn't work, but it was our plan. Over 4,000 orders had been taken within two or three days because of that,

and then we just had to cap it because it would have been an issue producing even more. And, well, it was our first try producing a handheld. Well, 2008 to 2009, a lot of issues occurred, mainly with the cases, which led to a lot of delays.

People were waiting. And in 2010, that was one and a half years later than planned, the first Pandora's got delivered, but as there still had issues in the production, it was a very slow delivery, and some even went up on eBay for, I think, 1,800 euro,

simply because it was such a rare device. But the users who got it were still impressed, so they all said it was worth it. Well, but it wasn't over. We had a lot more delays and issues, which also used up a significant amount of money, and Craig, that was one of the other guys from the first team,

decided to sell premium upgrades to deliver Pandora's faster to the customers who already pre-ordered. I wasn't too fond of that, but he was the guy doing basically the organization back then, and it seemed the only way to rescue the Pandora. But it didn't really work, because early 2011, more issues occurred,

and about 1,000 PCBs had been scrapped. So, yeah, it was a bit of unexperience, it was a bit of bad luck, basically, and probably also a lot of misorganization, and that nearly killed the whole project. Up to then, about 2,700 Pandora's had been delivered, and about 1,200, in theory, were outstanding.

At the time, Craig decided to give up, basically, and close the company, but I didn't want to give up and look for investors, which I found, and decided to move the Pandora production to Germany and have it properly organized,

so that it would be a smooth run in the future. Early 2012, the time had come, and the production resumed in Germany. Without any major issues, just a small, well, few issues, you always have been starting a new board production, but it wasn't a big deal, and from then on, the Pandora's were available from stock.

That was the first time they were available from stock. Since we still had a lot of pre-orders, the idea was to both deliver them to all the new customers. Basically, the new customers financed the Pandora's for the old customers. There was no other way to get money back into the pot. Even though the hardware was basically outdated back then, the sales were still pretty good.

For various reasons, first it was the only device, or still is the only device, that can do all that up until now. There's no mini Linux PC with that size. Thanks to Linux and a very optimized operating system, it runs a lot faster than an Android phone.

For example, we've got some emulators like Drastic, the Nintendo DS emulator, and actually it runs faster on my Cortex-A8 Pandora than it runs on my Cortex-A9 phone, simply because there's not all that overhead and all that services that are running on Android. In September 2012, the current Pandora, the 1 GHz Pandora, with an improved case had been released.

Craig decided once again to offer pre-orders for the 1 GHz Pandora's, which led to another fiasco, but I don't want to talk too much about Craig and all those pioscos. I'm pretty happy that basically this is all behind us now, except for remaining pre-orders that are still there,

but we're working on getting them the Pandora's as well. In January, I had all my pre-orders delivered, so I don't have any debts to them. About 150 of Craig's customers should have been still outstanding, but in reality it seemed there were about 600 left,

which is what we're currently trying to finance with donations, and I'm selling them for production costs. All we're getting there, but now in October 2013, the final Pandora batch of about 500 Pandora's has been announced, mainly because the parts are end-of-life, so it's impossible to get the nubs,

it's impossible to get more Wi-Fi modules, the system is now five years old, so getting parts will be more and more difficult. So it was time to go to an end-of-life, and well, end of 2013,

the first information has been released that I am working on a successor without Craig. That will be called the Pyra, and well, that's what we will be talking about here from now on. One thing I can say right now is that every customer from Craig who hasn't received the Pandora until the Pyra will be released, they will be able to get them for production cost price.

That's all I can offer, but at least for all the waiting, they can get it for a pretty cheap price. Well, before we're talking about a successor, we have to think about what's good and bad about the Pandora. Pretty good are the great gaming controls, the D-pad is being pretty good, I'm a gamer myself,

and all our customers said, well, that's one of the best D-pads they ever had. The buttons are great, the nubs are great when they're working. Yeah, we're getting there on the what's not so good side.

The size is great, it's pocketable, I can put it into my pocket and that's it. It's got a full Linux system which is great, well, at least for me, I don't want any, well, anybody here wants to run Windows 8 on handheld? No? Okay. Well, it's not locked down, you can choose whatever else you like, and I still like the freedom to

don't have any account anywhere and just have a computer which runs my software. That's still something I like, but it seems people now these days are happy to have Google accounts and Windows accounts and link them all together so that you can steal everything at once. Well, what's also good is that it has standard ports like a USB port and the SD card slots,

so got a USB stick, got an external hard disk from a friend, just plug it in, copy stuff over, connect the DVPD stick and watch TV. Well, it's a mini PC, you can do anything you can on a big PC. What's also awesome is the community, we've got a very active and friendly community,

they're helpful, they're porting and optimizing software and ports. And we also got the PND system which is easy to use for newbies, robust and reliable. I know some people don't like it that much, but we also decided to keep it together with a standard operating system for the future because it has some advantages,

but I want to get to that later. What's also great of course is the battery life, so that's also something we would like to keep. What's not so good is the case quality, it looks a bit cheap and it's not too robust, sometimes it develops cracks, we have it improved with the current version,

but the old version developed a lot of cracks in a pretty fast way, but we still want to improve it. Then we had a lot of issues with Asian manufacturers. I don't want to say all Asian manufacturers are bad, they certainly aren't, but mostly the Chinese market focuses on large production runs,

so 100,000 devices and more, they don't care about the small customers. And there are good manufacturers and there are bad ones, but to find out which one is good and bad would mean you have to visit them all and try to work with them, and that's not just possible for such a small team.

So we had some issues there and that was some problem with the Pandora as well. The analog controls, as I mentioned, sometimes they are inaccurate, when they work they are great, but sometimes when you try to move left, say they move left up and stuff like that, so they could be improved.

Wednesday? Only Wednesdays. Only Wednesdays? When do they not come? So, I think it depends, not Wednesdays, but it heavily depends on the NAP. So some work always, and some don't work at all, and there's anything in between.

So if you got a unit which has great working NAPs, you're happy, but we can't test all of them and replace them all of the time, because we would have to have a stock of 100,000 NAPs or something like that. So that's why we need to improve that as well.

The screen resolution with 800x480 is a bit too small for Linux programs, because many of them expect 800x600. It's not that big a deal, because you can move the windows around, but it's a bit annoying, so that could be improved as well. Yeah, that's great.

The internal storage these days is a bit small with 512MB, which means we also only have a minimal operating system on there, not a full-fledged one. If you want to use a full one, you can put it onto the SD card, but it would be nice having a full operating system already on the internal storage,

and then having the SD cards on top of that. The keyboard is hard to use in the dark, because you can't see the labels, so even I have the problem typing at the dark sometimes. It feels a bit squishy, but it also depends a bit on the person.

Some persons love it, some persons think it could be improved, but we're going to take a look at them. While not so good, some parts are not available to buy anymore, and not so good is the sad story that Craig hurt the community and respected members. It went so far that he even said bad words about some of the members,

and that was not so nice. I don't want to turn this into Craig bashing, because he certainly had a lot of his shoulders, but it has to be said that he will not be involved in the next device,

at least not in my one. Well, what are the goals? Of course, update the hardware to current gen, because the hardware is now five years old. Improve all the current issues, the case and upsetter. Tight integration with the community, which is always something I always try to do, because I always felt like a community member more than I felt of a producer or something like that.

I'm always available at the IRC and at the web boards, and I love following it, and I'm happy that all those people are working together to create one great device. We also try to be as open as possible. It's not possible in every way, but we're trying to do that as good as we can.

Another thing is we want to offer a more standard OS as a main OS. Right now we're running Debian on it, the standard ARM Debian. We want to put additional optimizations by the community, for example hardware acceleration and stuff like that, that will be in a different repository.

The reason the most standard OS is better, of course, is you can easily compile. You can easily stay up to date, because Debian ARM, for example, has its own repositories. They're always kept up to date. With the current OS, we have libraries that are a few years old, because it's very, very complicated to keep your own operating system always at the latest state.

We haven't decided yet, but I think so, because the package management from Debian is great. There's an ARM port available. It's also easy to create your own distribution with the bootstrap and then put your own repositories with optimizations on.

We haven't fixed it yet, but it looks like it, yes. Okay, about the... The ARM flood port. ARM flood? Yes, ARM HF. ARM HF, ah, yes.

We want to switch to ARM HF, of course, yes. Yes, right, we are not using ARM HF on the Pandora right now, yes. That's something that will also be optimized. Well, of course, we want to keep what's good, the gaming controls, the audio output and the battery life, and we want to improve the hinge as good as possible, but that's something... It's not easy, but we're doing our best.

So, you could say keep what's good and improve what can be improved. That's basically the idea for the successor. A pretty easy idea, but... basically, that's what needs to be done. I skipped a few things. Okay.

Now, let's first start with DragonBox Pyro, which will be the name. Where does the name come from and what does it mean? First, I didn't want to use Pandora because first I wanted to have a new name to forget the bad things that happened and also to... Well, I'm not sure if Craig would be angry if we called it Pandora because he was involved in it, so I just wanted to have a different new name.

The name should be related to the Pandora because during the last years we really had a great community. The Pandora was doing well, so it should be related. It should be easy to remember in short and not something like, well, just enter Pandora into Google and now you've got Pandora accessories, you've got Pandora radio,

you've got the Pandora battery, you've got anything Pandora. So I wanted to have a name which is not yet used that much. So we had suggestions and votings from the community. Well, Pyro was basically what has won. Well, in English you would probably call it Pyro.

In German it would be Pura, don't know in your language. We'll see what the people will call it. And going back to Greek mythology, Pura, that's a bit different written but I didn't want to have the name like that because nobody would be able to write that. That's the daughter of the Pandora which fits as well.

So that was the reason for the name. And what will it be like? Well, I said state-of-the-art CPU, LCD and speakers, new accurate knobs that don't wear out. That's simply because the new knobs are magnets with hall sensors. We've got them on the dev board. We will be back at the table tomorrow

so anybody who wants to try out the dev board can do so tomorrow, the whole day. We want to have a backlit keyboard which is also something that I have been missing on the current unit. Robust and better looking cave, improved connectivity so Wi-Fi will be improved, the state-of-the-art. We are planning to have 3G and UMTS

but only as optional modules so if you don't want it, simply don't buy it. USB ports and a standard HDMI port which would also make it possible to design a breakout cradle at home so you can just put it into your docking station. The docking station is a normal HDMI monitor and the keyboard and mouse attach and then you have a PC at home

which is also great. Of course, RAM needs to be upgraded. 512MB is nothing these days and the internal storage as well. We still want to use an analog audio wheel because I still hate those buttons and you never know when you switch your device on. Is it on? Is it off?

Sometimes the buttons, you take 1, 2, 3 seconds to react so an analog audio wheel is what the community wanted and what I still want to keep because it's simple, turn left, turn right and it works right away without using any CPU power. I have a question with 3G. Can you also use it as a phone?

You can, in theory, use it as a phone, yes. The question is will it be usable? We have a microphone in there and speakers so you could talk like that. A bit like the N-Gage side talking. But you could, of course, use a headset or a Bluetooth headset but it would be possible, yes. It's useful.

It's useful, sure. But I'd rather use it for mobile internet. So let's take a look at the main SoC, the processor. Actually it took us about one year to find a proper SoC for that. We had a lot of talks with different manufacturers

but it was always something that we didn't like. NVIDIA, for example, when working with NVIDIA they told us we have to use their own partner companies to do the design and production and I don't think with such a niche product and such a low quantity we would have found any company. Samsung didn't want to sell us their SoC

because we were below 100,000 or something like that. All the Chinese SoCs have the issues that they either have no Linux drivers or they don't have a hardware documentation or both which makes it really hard to design a PCB around it. So in the end we went back to the Texas Instruments OMAP.

We had a Texas Instruments before in the Pandora. I know a lot of people were crying. Well, Texas Instruments, they went out of business of that. That's not true. They just went out of the smartphone business but they're still in automotive and medical business which was all their main goal before that as well.

So the huge advantage is that we can get it in low quantities because everything that's made for industrial usage can also be gotten in low quantities. Of course if you have medical design or if you need for your company a few things

you don't need to buy 100,000 SoCs. So we can buy them. We've got a good documentation and they have also Linux drivers available for us. So we've got a state-of-the-art Cortex-A15 which is what current high-end smartphones have with up to 1.7 GHz each. That's pretty fast. We were running outside on the table.

We were running KDE4 with Battle for Wesnoth and I think GIMP and at the same time two PlayStation emulators on one screen and it worked without any issues in full speed. He already started again. So if you take a look there, that's just the board. Of course you can play around with it tomorrow

or outside the table as well. But it's pretty impressive how fast it is. One of the bad things is the PowerVR which is the 3D processor and it doesn't have any open source drivers available. Except for the Mali I think there's no open source driver

for any of those SoC 3D chips available. And the Mali was only in the Samsung chip I guess which they didn't want to sell to us or in slower SoCs. So that didn't have to help. Well, it still has DSP and Neon and probably we want to go to 2GB of RAM.

More gigabyte would probably just make it more expensive and on the other side would need more power. And right now I think when we had a lot of things running at the same time we were using about 600MB. So I'm not sure if you need more than 2GB on a mobile device. Only if you want to compile Westmoth. It should work with 2GB.

In debug mode. In debug mode. Okay, well, you've got swap. You've got two SD card slots that goes up to a few terabytes so that should be enough for swap. For power saving basically.

Big little architecture. Yeah, similar to the big little, yeah. So you use M4? You can do that, yes. Right now the Cortex-A15 cores simply go down so that you don't need that much power. But I'm not sure what we exactly can do with the Cortex-M4.

We just started with the hardware development. What you see here is without any hardware acceleration yet. It's just a standard Debian and there's no hardware acceleration chip used yet. It's just running on CPU with software motors. Yeah, but fast enough for that.

Then let's go to the LCD. The one we will probably use is a full HD one 1920x1080. That's a bit of an overkill in resolution I think, but it was impossible to get a lower one. Either you get 800x480 which is a bit too low or you get higher ones because the smartphone business

moves on to 4K and Ultra HD on those small screens, whatever. Yes, a question. No, that's probably just because I was typing it to this morning. I'm not sure it can be interlaced in a display.

No, it's P, yeah, 1080p. Thanks. It's got a fast response time of 20 milliseconds which is great for an LCD. If you've got a Google Nexus 5, it's the same screen so you can already take a look at what it is.

One thing I thought about is that a high resolution could also be used to accurately simulate a CRT monitor. When playing all Super Nintendo or DOS games, you need a lot of lines in between to make blooming effects or something like that. I think that would be possible with that resolution. Somebody needs to code that, but it would surely look awesome.

Otherwise, of course, it's great for web viewing videos or pictures, but you can also use a half 720p resolution and just upscale it. I don't think you will see too many pixels. But it's interesting. It's not possible to get any 720p displays anymore

because the industrial doesn't need that high resolution and the smartphones need a lot more these days. Things are going crazy. Well, let's go to the gaming controls, LEDs and keyboards. As you can see there on the dev board, we've got a few LEDs already lighting up. That's the backlit.

Of course, you can control them in brightness, switch them on and off with software. That's all in the user space. We will also have some RGB LEDs, which can be used for SD cards, or you could use one RGB LED for the battery status, red when it's empty, green when it's full and something in between

if you want to see how much juice there is in the battery left. Of course, you can also use it for email notification. Whatever you want to do, it's a user space you can code it in. We will also have a D-pad, then four shoulder buttons. That was a huge request from many Pandora members.

We will most probably also have six face buttons, though we have to check if that can be done in a good way to fit in the space right now. The case company is currently checking that, but it looks like we will have six face buttons, which is okay for some fighting games and stuff like that.

Oh, that's even more complex and complicated. Why do you need them except for Xbox emulation, which won't be possible? Well, you've got analog controls like the knobs for racing games.

Okay. Well, we have to make a limit somehow. One thing I always want to do, I don't want to go into anything overly complex because the more you try to improve it, the more can also go wrong.

So we try to improve the important things and keep it simple. When everything works, we can work on the next device and improve even more things. But as a small company where there's no huge financing backing in my back, we have to see where we can... Yeah, okay, I'll make a Kickstarter just for those shoulder buttons.

Well, the case will be available as case design files, so you can design it and print it yourself, if you like. It's a hacker-friendly device. Okay, power button as set with the RGB LED,

backlit keyboard, and two more RGB LEDs right now. This is a quick mock-up I made with your Pandora. Ignore the keyboard layout. It's not yet fixed or anything, but you can see we've had the key row go down so that you can have the numbers like that.

You will have the speakers up there, so we have more room for the screen. And we have a power button, not a switch anymore because, well, I don't know why the switch is just not needed at all. It can all be done with a power button, and that's what we want to use. Also, we want to have Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, stuff like that, buttons.

As I said, the keyboard layout is not fixed. We want to work on that with the community together. But... Well, the microphone will simply be a digital microphone,

and same as on the Pandora, each hardware will be designed so that it can be completely switched off. You don't need a hardware switch for that, but if you can switch it off in software with root, well, of course, it could, in theory, somebody could hack into your Debian and try to switch it on, but I'm not sure if that device will be the top priority for hackers.

Well, maybe, but I'm not sure about that. We have a microphone in the Pandora as well. I think nobody tried to hack into it. Yeah, yes.

Well, yeah, that would be possible. Something to think about, but... Yeah, sure. Stuff like that is what always improves all those ideas. Okay, let's go to connectivity. Wi-Fi will be improved. We haven't yet decided on the chip, but it will probably be 8002.11abgn.

Maybe only bgn because a is not really used widely anymore, but you will have 2.4GHz and 5GHz available. It will have Bluetooth. Not yet 100% sure if 3.0 or 4.0. As mentioned, optional UMTS3G and GPS because that's built into the UMTS module as well.

So you could use it for navigation, for quick web serving outside. You could use it as a phone, as mentioned. HDMI out, so you can connect it to standard flat screens, which is great like that. Just go at home, connect it to your monitor, use it as a PC. It will have a full USB host port with a hub included,

which is... I'm mentioning that because the Pandora doesn't have a hub in, so you can only use pure USB 2.0 device. If you try to connect the USB 1.1 device, it will simply crash. You need a hub in there. That has to be changed and that will be changed. We will have a micro USB port on the go as well, two SDXC card slots and a headset port.

So nothing much has changed from the Pandora. It just has been improved. The components will be more recent. The battery, which was also a lot of discussion about, the battery will be the same as the Pandora for various reasons. First, batteries can only be really bought in China

and our current distributor and manufacturer is reliable. So we bought them from them within the last years and he was always fast, reliable. We had no issues with them and we don't want to try anything and choose another one and then have another Chinese company with issues.

So the batteries will be the same. We also talked to him and he said, the only way to improve the capacity right now with the current technology would be to improve the battery size, but then again we had to improve the case or the size of the Pyra and we didn't want that. Which one do you want?

Which one do you want? The light body battery. Yeah. But you said it has an inside battery. Okay. Did I? No. I haven't said anything about the type of battery. The same type. The same type, yeah. Oh yeah, okay. Okay. Not just the same type, but the same battery.

Well, the case will be improved because the current case we had to put some bumpers in there so that the battery will fit properly that will be improved so that it will fit right from the beginning. And one advantage is still if there are people who have a Pandora and don't want to upgrade to a Pyra or anything like that

they don't have to feel that they won't get batteries in the future because it will be the same battery so we will have them on stock. Well, if you got a Pandora and a Pyra you can use both batteries for both systems which is always great as well. Well, the battery life. That's pretty hard to say right now because our dev board is currently connected to the official TI-OMAP EVM

but it should be approximately the same. The standard components like Wi-Fi and the LCD use the same power and the performance per watt is a bit lower it's better on the current systems, on SOCs

so when doing the same task it should use a bit less battery than the Pandora and of course when doing high rendering stuff running two PlayStation emulators or something like that then you need a lot more battery than on the Pandora, that's for sure. But for mostly daily work and web browsing and stuff like that it should be about the same as the Pandora

which is about 10 hours right now standby time a lot more listening to MP3 is also a lot more but normal work time is about 10 hours. Let's come to the case. One of the huge issues we still have with the Pandora because it doesn't look like a 500 euro device it looks like a 50 euro device

and that was a bit of a problem sometimes. The case will be completely redesigned and produced by a company in Europe formed actually in Greece and there's one advantage that one company is both doing the design and the production first the designer knows the specification tolerances of the machine

so he knows exactly what he can design and what will work that was a huge issue when we did the case for the Pandora because the designer was sitting in USA and the case company was in China and then he sent them some designs then they had cracks in their

they had shrinking marks in anything and then the issue was the designer it was the fault of the manufacturer and the manufacturer said it was the fault of the designer. Two people, one company, one person and one blaming each other I have no idea who's wrong, who's right but if I have it in the same company

they can't say that because they have to take care that the design is properly. We also have a faster turnaround times because I can call them up I say we need these and these changes the designer can do the change then he goes 20 meters further and just produces a new prototype case

and then we have it within a short time frame with the Pandora I think we had about 4 to 5 weeks for just small changes which led to a lot of delays so it's good that we don't have this issue anymore communication is also easier I don't have to speak Chinese

and our contact partner there speaks German fluently and English as well so there's no language barrier and the distance is also no issue I was there in Greece last weekend and we had with the hardware designer of the PCB and then we discussed the different details, etc. and going to China with all those customs and stuff like that

is also an issue So in the end we will have a high quality of the case Question about the case How far are you there already? With the port size and stuff like this You mentioned HDMI port Which kind of HDMI port do you need? Full size? No, micro You can put a full size on the back

you don't have that much space Well basically what they did is they first made a copy basically of the Pandora design just with already improvements that it looks better and that it doesn't have any shrinking marks and from there on they are improving the case with every board revision they get so we always send them the latest revision

and they change it Are they also working on improving the ergonomics a little? Yes Because right now when holding the Pandora for some hours you will have marks on your hands Exactly Well if you hold it and use the shoulder buttons If you don't use the shoulder buttons it works but if you use the shoulder buttons then you have marks on your hands That is something I've spoken with them as well

We are closely working together I'm having contact with them once or twice a week already Which is way better than with the Chinese company We had contact We had a question, got an answer four weeks later I think So that's already a huge improvement

I can't tell when the case will be finished because it all depends We're still looking into the hinge because that will be the most complex part to design We're also looking into the key mat design because such a key mat is not easy to produce so we're looking for companies there and of course as long as the PCB isn't finished they can't finish the case design

but that's happening at the same time so the designer of the PCB and of the case are both working together closely so that we don't have to wait until the PCB is finished before they start designing the case How problematic is the specification of the CPU? As far as I know those A15 ones

can produce a lot of heat and seeing that in the current design of the current Pandora the position of the chip is pretty close to the battery The batteries really love heat Do you already have a plan how to handle the amount of heat? Yes, we have different plans there First as you can see on the EVM

the processor has a heat sink on it which we will also do We have a company who is specifically doing a wide area heat sink so that the heat will be shared around the area and I think the battery is suited to go up to 50° or something

40° or 50° and I made already some measurements On a full load we won't get more out of the CPU as 70° but that's without heat sink So right now 70° seems to be the maximum maybe a bit more when the GPU is still active So with a heat sink that basically goes over the whole back side

there will be a lot less and then there is plastic in between as well which can also have some metal inlay if we want We are trying to do that Do you want to increase the heat sink or not? 70° or without heat sink or with that heat sink?

Without It has an internal temperature measurement With the heat sink it goes up to I think about 55° with that one Could be, yeah Okay So 74° was the maximum we had right now

What you can also do is You could cap it because the CPU has a temperature sensor in there So you could simply lower the CPU power when it goes too high But that's not our favorite way we want to do But in case it really gets too high we could do that as a worst case scenario

because usually it doesn't get that hot Maybe when compiling Westnaught, yeah for hours Yeah, I know Well, production will happen at a reliable company of course Production and assembly will happen at Global Components in Germany

which is the same company that has been producing the Pandora for years now without any issues They are fast, flexible and reliable and another advantage is that they are just a couple of minutes away from the PCB designer Who that will be? Well, the team will follow soon Something about the operating system, I mentioned it already

It will probably be based on Debian ARM Right now we are having the unstable distribution running without any major issues There will be a repository to optimize Pyra packages For example, SDL with hardware acceleration and stuff like that Maybe we will also recompile some of the most important packages

Because Debian has the problem that they are compiling with Thump which makes smaller binaries but a slower system We probably want that the base system is fast Well, LibreOffice or stuff like that, I'm not sure if Thump makes a huge difference

but at least for the base system we want to see that it will be as fast as possible For the US, what's the plan with the kernel changes? The old Pandora then was quite a problem that the changes were kept in an ARM repository and it was difficult to get to a more recent kernel

Not just because of the power we have The problem with the kernel is that a lot of things have been thrown out of the main line and they don't accept it So if you want an ARM kernel, you can go mainline basically I'm not sure how exactly that is right now I just know from the old OMAP3

I think Notas mentioned that there have been quite a bit of things removed We don't know how that will work out Notas always tries to get the things into the main line kernel But there will always probably be some optimizations that can't go mainline But we will have of course our kernel git as well Right now it's not running a really optimized kernel

It's just a standard kernel that has a few configuration options enabled in there And we're trying to stay as standard as possible But we will have our own git probably again Can you please make sure that the two NUPS are seen as one gamepad device, not as separate joysticks?

Well, that's something we can tell Notas, yes Please do so Well, it should be possible now because we don't even have Well, the NUPS have changed They don't have their own Atmel drivers They're just basically I2C devices So you can do anything with them if you like

Good The PND system is met or as I mentioned before Something similar will be kept as well Simply because of the reason it's easy for handling large games and packages on your SD card For example, stuff like Shadow Knights or emulators with ROMs or something like that I'm happy to have that on my SD card

I can remove the SD card, put it into another system and use it there And you don't have any data loss of games, game data, save data or anything else Then you have a system crash If the internal memory crashes for some reason shouldn't happen But always can happen And you can boot the system It's easy to refresh the operating system

But it's probably a bit more complicated to rescue any data saves you have And when you got that on your SD card Which you can easily backup with your PC That's a lot easier It's also pretty easy for the developers to upload it into the repository We've got our own repository Which can automatically update the packages and stuff like that

And you don't have to open up your own Debian repository There's just one website And you just create your account, upload it And then you've got the PND ready for anyone The cards can, as mentioned, simply be put into a different system So if I just remove my card from my Pandora and put it into this Pandora

Then I have all my games, saves and programs as well So if you ever have to send in the system for a repair Just remove your SD card Put it into the new system, you've got all your stuff Of course things like Firefox, web browsers, email clients and LibreOffice Can be installed using the standard Debian repository

But everyone knows Debian is not a famous gaming system So while there are quite a few games in Debian We have a lot more games for the Pandora available that are in the repository And so we want to keep that the same You have the Debian repository for all your standard programs you want to use

Like GIMP, it will be kept updated And you've got the PND system for the games that can be handled as on the Pandora Well, what can you expect power-wise? We have tests running on the current dev board It runs full KDE4 without any issues This doesn't mean you have to run KDE4 You can of course run OpenBox, LXD, whatever you like

What's in the Debian repositories Right now I simply have LXD, XFCE4 and KDE4 running So you can simply select what you want GIMP runs fluently and smooth So even filters are just a couple of seconds with large pictures It does multitasking without issues and is staying responsive

You've got two PlayStation emulators running at the same time in an operating system I think that shows what we can expect in the future Because that's all done without any hardware acceleration right now Well, based on the experience with the Pandora The Pandora does full speed emulation up to PSX with Amiga and DOSBox And up to a slow Pentium basically

The Pandora runs a few PSP-emulated titles in full speed Many DS games already Some in 64 titles And most Dreamcast titles near full speed So I think 3, 4, something like that, 75% So the Pyro should easily be able to emulate all these in full speed

And of course you have a snappier desktop experience Yes, a question Are you saying that the Pandora runs with do-dat while it is only looking at one screen? Well, the resolution is high enough to have both screens on the same Or you've got a TV-out cable where you can use your TV, a second screen

And the Pandora's first screen Which is pretty amazing because I was playing Okamiden with my girlfriend for example She was watching the screen and I just had the map on my Pandora screen That works pretty well So it is possible Let's go to the team

Well, that's me, one of the founding members of the Open Pandora Originally my job was taking care of the Pandora community But since 2012, as mentioned, I took over and managed everything that had to do with the Pandora And since then we had a smooth run So I'm pretty much experienced now with manufacturing and production

Then the hardware designer will be Nicolas Schaller Not Michael Weston anymore Simply because the reason Michael has a full-time job now and also has a family to take care of So I asked him but he already mentioned he doesn't have too much time So we had to stick with another one

But you might know Nicolas Schaller because he was the one who designed the GTA 04 Or currently the Neo 900 So he's experienced with Omid designs as well He's doing this for years, has worked for Siemens and is now running his own company He's experienced with hardware designs and Linux And well, one of the good things is he's living in the same place where the manufacturing companies

So whenever there's a prototype run, he just goes over and can debug right away And check if there's a hardware folder, a software folder, whatever He's also the one who helped me a bit with moving the Pandora production over to Germany He suggested to use global components

He helped me a bit with the prototype run to find some errors So he's the one doing the hardware right now And of course, Egrashvidas Ignotas, I hope I spoke that name correctly Also known as Notas If anybody owns a Pandora, I don't think I need to tell anything about Notas He was already helping to debug the Pandora hardware from the very beginning with dev boards

He improved and optimized all the drivers, the kernel and a lot of software for the Pandora For example, the PlayStation emulator or PicoDrive And he's a long time respected member of the community I'm pretty happy to have him back in the team

Or still in the team because he's really doing a great job with all those optimizations Then we still have Fatikilich Some might remember him from the Pandora He's also one of the founding members Even though he has not been active in the community during the last years But he was still helping me sourcing all the various parts

He's experienced with Asian companies and sourcing parts from manufacturers As mentioned, we try to do as much as possible in Europe But some things like batteries or carry cases, AC adapters Just are best to be bought in China

Simply, if you go to a European company and want to order AC adapters All that we do is simply order them from China as well Then there are other community members like Skisig, Zeb3, DJ Willis, PT Zeb, Lunixbox and various others Who helped with the Pandora before And they also said they want to help with Pyra as well when they have the time

How does it look with financing the device? Well, to fund the divine, develop and manufacture the device up to the final prototype already exists So, that sentence doesn't make any sense I think But what I wanted to say is that we've got enough money already up to the stage to the final prototype

So, the full design process is already funded We won't need any money before the device is really working and has a proper case Then only the mass production run needs to be financed There are various options to do that like pre-orders, Kickstarter, bank loan, investments, etc. We will take a look at that as soon as we've got the time

I'm trying to hurry And of course donations are always welcome You can check the homepage for more information Or buying pandoras and other stuff from my shop That's www.dragonboxde also helps here Everything goes back into the Pyra When will it be available?

Well, we made that mistake with the Pandora and said it will be available end of December This time I won't say anything No specific date But you can follow the development blog The homepage has now been opened I will post regularly on the blog what's happening You can think about yourself It couldn't be that long now

But I won't give you any dates So if you want a portable Linux device right now Maybe get a Pandora And wait for the Pyra If you've got a lot of time you can wait for the Pyra But we've got limited stocks I think that's just the last page Other less important tidbits The schematics and case design files this time will be made public

So if you want to hack around in the hardware You've got the design files for that If you want to design your own case or change anything in the case You can simply print it out and change it A huge community already exists from the Pandora So we've got a lot of developers right from the start

We try to get it as much compatible as possible And try to produce as little as possible in Asia Simply because we don't have the manpower to control them all Well, what can you do? Support us, spread the word Join the community, buy Pandora's Thanks a lot for your support Two short questions Yes One, do you already know how much memory you want to include as an end?

Nope Two, what do you plan for charging? Do you plan to go the micro-USB? Yeah, micro-USB That's the normal standard these days Yeah, exactly Well, if you want to visit the developers' blog That's open on pyraentile.com The website has been opened Well, the time flew We didn't have that much time for questions

But if you want, you can come to the table tomorrow You can go to the boards and ask questions And they will be replied to Okay, thanks a lot