Pandora News - What a day! (2011-12-14)

Whew - what a day.

Prototype production run

It started with some bad news: Micron didn't deliver the samples of the RAM as promised (should've been delivered last week), and without the RAM, we couldn't do the prototype run.
So both Global Components and me had our hands full to organize that RAM chip to be able to do the prototype run.
And we managed to get some.
Global Components found a distributor in US who had some parts left and ordered them express. They should arrive on Friday, latest Monday.
Well, and I contacted Nikolaus from the GTA04 team - they are using the same memory as we are and I know their production run starts early next week as well.
He has some spare RAM chips for us - so they're being picked up tomorrow morning (the company where he is doing the production isn't that far away, thankfully).
The parts from Texas have arrived at EBV / AVNet (the distributor) in the meantime and will be delivered tomorrow morning between 9 and 10 am at GC as well.
I think AVNet already checked the parts for completeness, so we should have all we need tomorrow.

As programming and loading the machines with parts takes quite a while (about 8 hours), the production run itself has been rescheduled for Friday, but preparing and loading will happen tomorrow.
My contact from Global Components will visit me tonight to grab some of the PCBs from GC, as that will speed up the programming and creating the solder profile.
(It's 8pm here, and it's a 1 hour drive, so I think it's pretty awesome he does that!).

So, whew, this was one fast solution. It did cost us some nerves, but we managed to get it done so far.


Even more bad news

While this caused me quite some stress today, it wasn't the worst message I received.
The worst message I received today was from an ICQ contact.
One of our fellow Pandora community members has been murdered a few weeks ago.
He already had a GP2X and was one of the very first preorderers from Germany.
He didn't have an account at these boards, but he was known as jonai on the German boards and on GP32x.com.

The (german) article about his death can be found here.

So, why am I posting this?
Not just because it makes me very sad - but also because the police is currently looking for clues to find out who did it.
While I am supporting them as good as I can, I didn't have much contact with him.

But maybe someone from the community was in close contact with him or has any other information where he can help out?
Please do contact me in case you might have some information, as I'm in contact with the police in Leipzig already to try to help them.

Thanks.

Let's think about him for a minute. As far as I was in contact with him, he was a very nice and helpful person. And it's always a loss seeing someone leave us early.
Especially if it was such a horryfing death like this.

http://boards.openpandora.org/index....ay-2011-12-14/