OpenPandora Design Files Released

New submitter janvlug (3677453) writes "[As of Saturday, May 31], the OpenPandora case and hardware design files have been released for non-commercial use. The OpenPandora is a hand held Linux computer with gaming controls, but essentially it is an all-purpose computer. The OpenPandora offers the greatest possible degree of software freedom to a vibrant community of users and developers."

Comments

Why Non-commercial?

[Dwedit]

Why not release it allowing commercial use, and let anyone manufacture it? Availability problems have always been a huge problem for the OpenPandora team.

Re:Why Non-commercial?

[fat_mike]

According to the euro conversion, this thing is a MAME device that costs close to $600 before shipping and handling. The North America distributor is showing "Product no longer available" so it can only be ordered from Germany's Dragonbox. I also like the graphic on the website that says "Almost the same size as a Nintendo DS. Am I missing something?

Re:Why Non-commercial?

[obarel]

But you can't play 8-bit crap from 1984 on a Nntendo DS. Definitely worth the extra $400.

(Don't get me wrong, I was the right age in 1984 to really enjoy that crap. But it's 2014 now and I'm older and wiser).

Re:Why Non-commercial?

[ChunderDownunder]

Because these 2 kids building a console in their garage don't want, as per the previous story, Apple releasing a new product based on their ideas.

Re:Why Non-commercial?

[TheRaven64]

The big problem with OpenPandora was their time to market. When they started (2008), the Cortex A8 was pretty new (released 2007, but not much silicon until 2008) and there were few devices you could get with one in, although a few evaluation boards were starting to appear. They promised something in a small mobile form factor running a completely open software stack, which sounded like a fun platform. By the time they actually shipped anything (2010), the Cortex A8 was starting to feel a bit dated and was available in cheap mobile phones running Android. By the time they shipped to more than a token number of people, the A8 was ancient and you could get a dual or quad-core A9 or similar for half the price.

Oh, and their UK operation effectively went bust after taking huge numbers of pre-orders. Both the UK and German companies had the pre-order money in their accounts for 2+ years earning interest before they shipped anything, but at least people who ordered things from the German company eventually got something, even if it was worth a fraction of what they paid for it, as a result of being two years - over an entire generation of the technology - old by the time they got it.

Re:Why Non-commercial?

[Jesus_666]

To be honest, the Pandora actually looked pretty good when it was announced and still fairly passable when it was released. Nowadays it's decidedly unimpressive for it's price, though.

Re:Why Non-commercial?

[drinkypoo]

To be honest, the Pandora actually looked pretty good when it was announced and still fairly passable when it was released. Nowadays it's decidedly unimpressive for it's price, though.

Yes, it looked really good to me, too. However, I stopped short of preordering, because it didn't look credible. I was entirely correct. They never managed to produce enough units in order to build a healthy community.

Re: Why Non-commercial?

[tepples]

(Context: Accuracy of NES emulation on Nintendo DS with R4 card as an alternative to Pandora)

"Flawlessly" is a strong word. When I was in the DS homebrew scene, nesDS didn't support register $4011, which talking games require. Is Big Bird's Hide and Speak playable yet? And is Blades of Steel missing its announcer?

Re:Why Non-commercial?

[AdamColley]

Hi

Have a Pandora myself, excellent little machine.

It would have likely been out a lot sooner but there was a financial crash in 2009 (you may have heard something about it) which caused a fair number of delays/problems. Also Paypal decided to mess OpenPandora about to a massive extent, even refunding everyone and blocking purchases at one point!
As if that wasn't enough, the first PCB manufacturer proved to be completely incompetent, shipping faulty boards, at one time bent boards and failing to replace them, give the money back or in fact do anything to put right their screwup, it was when ED moved production to Germany things started running much more smoothly.

It was never supposed to be only a gaming platform, it is a full linux system which fits in your pocket (it can also run other operating systems from SD card, RISC OS for one)

The UK operation suffered from being operated by a liar and a thief, this was unforeseeable. (incidentally, the same person (Craig) has run off with all the icontrolpad 2 Kickstarter money as well it seems after using other peoples money to buy himself 3d printers and so on.)

Yes, the spec isn't as impressive as it was when announced but it's still a useful system.

Incidentally, the Pandora's successor (The Dragonbox Pyra) is in development now and has a far better spec. Also a Craig free system (Yay!), you can read some information about that at http://www.pyra-handheld.com/ if you're interested.

Re:Why Non-commercial?

[ShanghaiBill]

The hardware design is open.

Not by any commonly accepted definition of the word "open". The OSS Foundation, the Open Source Hardware movement, the Open Design movement, OpenCores, and even the FSF, consider "no-commercial-use" restrictions to be disqualifying. What OpenPandora is doing, is trying to get the marketing buzz of calling themselves "open" while restricting use of their IP by anyone than would have a reason for using it.

Re:Why Non-commercial?

[kimvette]

Also it has only 512MB RAM. At that price, I would expect an absolute minimum of 2GB RAM, preferably 4GB.

Re:Why Non-commercial?

[TheRaven64]

I was really interested in the Pandora when it was announced, but eventually got a phone with similar specs for about £50, before most people got their Pandoras. I've now also got an Asus TransformerPad TF700, which is a very nice machine, but I'd really like something that could run FreeBSD out of the box. The Dragonbox Pyra specs look pretty good, but I note a lack of any physical dimensions on the web site (other than a 5" screen), which makes it a bit difficult to evaluate. I didn't realise hns was involved - hopefully this will go a bit better than the GTA handsets...

TI is notoriously bad at documenting their non-CPU cores. The c64x still needs a proprietary compiler (which supports only a weird dialect of C). Is there some commitment from them to open specs for the OMAP5 SoC? One of the nice things about the ChromeBook is that Google has the purchasing power to be able to demand this from their suppliers. I don't think the Pyra has the same influence, so may need to shop around a bit more...

Re:Why Non-commercial?

[TheRaven64]

512MB made sense in 2008. It was the largest available Package-on-Package (PoP) RAM module you could buy. The OMAP series of SoCs are usually used in a stacked configuration, with the CPU, RAM, and Flash all vertically stacked. This reduces the complexity of the board a lot, because you don't need any traces to be run for RAM or Flash (only for external peripherals), but it also means that you're quite restricted in the memory chips you can use: they must be single-chip modules and must have a sufficiently low power and thermal envelope that they can sit happily on top of the SoC. 1GB PoP modules were released a few months after the Pandora team finished the design, but it was too late to replace it by then and they've never done a revision B.

Re:Why Non-commercial?

[AntiSol]

I bought one in January. It's absolutely spectacular. It's quite possibly the best computer I have ever owned.

this thing is a MAME device that costs close to $600

No. Calling it a MAME device is not even beginning to do it justice. Sure, I have something like 40,000 MAME ROMS loaded on mine, but that's just one SD card. Another SD card is a truecrypt volume. Another contains 40 years worth of X-Men comics. Another has all the SCUMM games, a ridiculous number of C64 games, and a bunch of Playstation games. I've just started playing with some of the audio production apps - soon I'll figure out how to use the pandora as a MIDI controller, that'll be cool. Chromium runs well for web browsing as long as you limit the number of tabs you have open. Office apps like Libreoffice and dia run well. But for me, I think that the terminal, scite, and ssh are the killer apps - some things aren't available on the pandora (which actually means "I haven't bothered trying to compile them yet"), sometimes I want to offload processing to a faster machine. And sometimes I need to restart my webserver... actually, the real killer "app" is the hardware keyboard.

The range of software available in the repos is staggering given the system specs (it runs blender! :O), and the quality generally high. The native games available should not be trivialised, either - special mentions go to asciiportal, boson-x, audiorace, pewpew2, and the arkanoid remake. Some of these are huge time sinks.

$600?!? pah! In AU, where we try to stay at least 10 years behind the rest of the world, it's nearly AU$800 once you throw in some accessories and shipping, but I really think it was worth every penny.

Yes, it's not as impressive in specs today as it was when it was designed. They got screwed and they had production problems, so it took a lot longer to get built than it should have. But they did manage to bring it to market eventually and they've done as much as they can to get units to the people who preordered. And they've been fairly transparent about all this, so I think that they're credible. On the other hand, I would have been really annoyed if I'd preordered and I'm glad I didn't.

People ask me what it is, and I describe it as a full computer which can do most things their laptop can do - it's the best way I've found to describe it. Flexibility is the key - I was running the JACK audio framework and a couple of software synthesizers last night and started to run out of memory, so I switched to my terminal and enabled the swap partition on my SD card. Problem solved.

It's not just a MAME machine!

Re:Why Non-commercial?

[Deb-fanboy]

It's absolutely spectacular. It's quite possibly the best computer I have ever owned.

I have had a Pandora for over a year and I agree with the above. It is a fantastic device for many reasons and I just love it. For the size, for the ready made programs and games available from the repository all neatly packaged for the pandora, for the very usable keyboard and great gaming controls, for the very friendly and productive community, for the exceptional battery life. Also it has an up to date firefox on the unit and I can use the pentadactyl add-on to give me vim style keyboard control of the browser.

There is more information to be found on the forums at openpandor.org The Pandora may be physicaly small, and the case does look a bit ordinary, but with it you get a lot, and there are still lots more that I could explore on the unit.

Especially for someone like myself, I travel a lot and have to travel light. I must take a company laptop filled with company software, I cannot mess to much with the company laptop, I need to produce official certificates and reports on this. There is really not enough room for another laptop in the bag.

The Pandora fits easily as an extra. I can play games, browse the internet, write some code, play some music, watch a film. It comes with me every time I travel.

I agree that it is not for everyone, and that is fine because it is great for a lot of us, there is no one device that fits all.

Re: Change the name now instead of later

[jd2112]

Too late. Once Pandora is opened it can never be closed.

Re:Never mind toys like this. I want a tricorder.

[drinkypoo]

You can buy a sensor package for your handheld now (there are others, this is just the first one I searched up and it looks pretty nice) but it's probably going to be more than a decade before you're going to get a terahertz scanner or anything else that interesting for a tolerable, pocketable price.

Re:Change the name now instead of later

[janvlug]

The name of the successor will by Pyra.

Re:"OpenPandorra"

[Jmc23]

This in Slashdot! Of curse it is.