OLPC:News

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Laptop News 2007-05-12

1. Ceibal Project, Villa Cardal, Uruguay: President Vasquez inaugurated the first laptop school on Thursday. Villa Cardal is a small community with only one school of 150 children, so it is truly 1:1. As you might imagine there was tremendous excitement: the children and their families were ecstatic.

Despite the fact that none of the teachers have had experience with computing, they diagnosed a bug in the software: a few of the machines were hanging—nothing could get them to boot fully. The teachers discovered that this was only happening to children with a tilde or ñ in their names. An impressive example of teachers learning to learn! (The bug has been fixed.)

2. Alan Kay, Kim Rose, and the Etoys team (Bert Freudenberg, Ian Piumarta, Yoshiki Ohshima, Scott Wallace, Kazuhiro Abe, and Maic Masuch) came together for a week-long mini Squeakfest at the OLPC office. It was week of a remarkable progress; highlights include: Burt and Yoshiki's integration of the Sugar presence service into eToys—eToys now supports collaboration over the mesh for sharing eToy objects and scripts, a shared workspace, VOIP, chat, etc; an update on Ian's “dynamically reconfigurable virtual machine”; and Kazuhiro's World Stethoscope project—an eToys extension that takes advantage of the XO's microphone jack to import data into projects (See http://squeakland.jp/abee/tmp/WSN-3A_QuickReference.pdf). Squeakfest07 will be held August 1–3 in Chicago (See http://imamp.colum.edu/eceim/squeakfest07/index.php).

3. The XO is one of the featured designs at the “Design for the Other 90%” exhibition at the Cooper-Hewitt Museum in New York. “Ninety-five percent of the world’s designers focus all their efforts on developing products and services exclusively for the richest 10 percent of the world’s customers,” said Dr. Paul Polak, president of International Development Enterprises and a member of the exhibition’s advisory council. “Nothing less than a revolution in design is needed to reach the other 90 percent,” he added.

4. B3 build: Quanta, Mary Lou Jepsen and David Woodhouse arrived in Shanghai (this morning) and have started in on the B3 build. Five B3 laptops are sitting in front of them at the moment, all working. David is working on a debug of suspend/resume. Mary Lou is focusing on the mechanical issues, safety and certification issues. OLPC will get 70 B3 machines for developers.

5. B3 housing: The B3 housing arrived in Cambridge this week. The most prominent new feature is the brightly colored XO on the back cover of the laptop. Other changes include a clean line on the battery housing and thinned out plastic on the front bezel for “glowing” camera and microphone “in-use” indicators. Improvements for robustness include: a steel plate in the keyboard area; a smaller battery cavity; rubber “bunny ears”, thicker bumpers and ribbing made out of pure polycarbonate, a longer keyboard cable, and a water resistance in touch-pad area. Improvements for usage include: increased display tilt; improved keyboard feel and responsiveness; improved touch-pad responsiveness; a gray bezel around the display; improved fit and finish of the buttons; X and O indicators on the touch-pad buttons; and the 400 unique XO color combinations (for IDing laptops in a crowded classroom).

6. Power measurement: Steve Smith and Chris Ball have a B3 XO connected to the tinderbox and have instrumented the power rails. Readings are obtained through a Python program.

7. Power management: This week we merged suspend/resume support in master. So far, it only works on the GX; LX resume is still not working in Linux (it works correctly in firmware testing). Andres Salomon is working on it.

8. Firmware: Mitch Bradley figured out how to access the new EC commands reliably, and documented it. Mitch also improved the audio self-test and used it to measure the speaker performance. Mitch is still working on B3 NAND FLASH issues. Lilian Walter added functionality to play PCM .wav files (in addition to IMA ADPCM .wav files) and is researching IPv6.

9. Presence service: This week was dominated by the run up to get sharing over the mesh working. Lots of bug fixes are in place and the first connect activities are in place and working. Thanks to the Collabora team, Dan Williams, John Palmieri and Marco Gritti. (The video-call activity also made a lot of progress this week.)

10. Journal: Tomeu Vizoso, Marco, and Ben Sadder also made a lot of progress on the data store and Sugar integration. The write and web activity now use the Journal and the data store. Most of the integration work on the Journal-side is largely complete. Marco also spent a lot of time working on the GTK theme that we're going to use with the new images since we're going down that path. Lots of progress has been made here as well.

11. In the community: Marc Maurer is making use of the presence service from a C/C++ application, Abiword. He has spent time working on the Abiword collaboration code and added functions to the XO write activity: the ability to set colors and font attributes, implemented more table support, and simple zooming functions. He also cleaned up a lot of the icons in the activity.

At the MIT Media Lab, students of MAS.964 (One Laptop Per Child) have been working since the winter on projects relating to the XO. They will be holding a poster and live demonstration session on Tuesday, May 15, from 2–4 PM at the Media Lab, lower-level atrium (http://whereis.mit.edu/map-jpg?selection=E15).

Polychronis Ypodimatopoulos set up a mesh demo where each laptop takes a picture at random times and tries to send it over to all other nodes in the mesh network. He has a web page where the aggregate data are displayed, based upon the number of hops between nodes. You can click on the pictures and see what the respective direct neighbors and nodes further than one hop are for the next node (See http://lyme.media.mit.edu/mesh.php). He also measures the rate at which presence information arrives at each node from every other node in the mesh, without doing a single broadcast, but only send frames from neighbor to neighbor. He can thus predict with fairly good accuracy if a node is still present in the mesh.

Junia Anacleto, a visiting scientist at MIT from the Federal University of San Carlos, Brazil, has been working with a small group of Portuguese-speaking students at the King School in Cambridge. The children took to the laptops immediately; they have blogged their experiences (See http://lia.dc.ufscar.br/olpcod), making extensive use of videos they have posted to youtube.

More News

Laptop News is archived at Laptop News.

You can subscribe to the OLPC community-news mailing list by visiting the laptop.org mailman site.

Press requests: please send email to press@racepointgroup.com

Milestones

Latest milestones:

Nov. 2007 Mass Production has started.
July. 2007 One Laptop per Child Announces Final Beta Version of its Revolutionary XO Laptop.
Apr. 2007 First pre-B3 machines built.
Mar. 2007 First mesh network deployment.
Feb. 2007 B2-test machines become available and are shipped to developers and the launch countries.
Jan. 2007 Rwanda announced its participation in the project.

All milestones can be found here.


Articles

  1. redirect OLPC:News#Press

More articles can be found here.

Video

Miscellaneous videos of the laptop can be found here.

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