Talk:Battery Charging

Battery theft?

I've seen that everybody has direct access to the battery pack. I suppose that there is no lock or something like that to deter a person to take away this battery pack or to substitute it with normal batteries. That could be very possible, since the OLPC batteries are very special ones, even unique. Because of that there could be a market for those unique batteries.

Another possibility: One child in a classroom gets after two years a new battery pack because his prior battery pack is damaged. The new pack has a higher capacity ain comparison to the others in class. So it is very possible that the other classmates realizes that and perhaps a quorral starts. It could even be possible that one classmate exchanges his old pack with lesser capacity with the new one with higher capacity, if there isn't an obvious sign that stands for the new pack.

You offer for identification serial numbers on the battery pack. Is this obvious enough so that a young child can easily identify his battery pack? Does OLPC offer some additional solutions?

Perhaps I've got a solution. You write a program that bundles one battery pack only with one XO-laptop. If a new battery pack with a different serial number is inserted the computer should stop using this battery pack. Only after confirmation by a teacher it should work together.

I think your solution would go against the idea of sharing.

Besides, the simplest solution is to grab a permanent marker and write the name (or some other identification) on the battery—you can use the underside if you want to keep the laptop 'clean'. Locking laptop-with-battery is setting up a police (via software) for a problem that may not occur, so why spend energy making a rigid system, when the objective is liberty? --Xavi 10:34, 3 June 2007 (EDT)

Disabling the mesh network

Another problem: You don't want the children to disable the wireless mesh function. Therefore it is not possible to shut down the built in router by software. But I suppose that time by time some children realize that they can save power by unplugging the whole battery pack if they are not using the XO for writing or chatting, etc.

For this problem I don't have a solution. Does OLPC have? A suggestion: One solution could be to write a program that measures how long the laptop was online for supporting the mesh. If it was to little online it should request the user to support the mesh for a longer time.