Olin university chapter

This is the wiki-homepage of the Olin college OLPC university chapter.

Projects

Please post proposed projects here, so that we can apply for Developers program support (like XOs to use).

Project Name	Project Description	Professor	Contact	Materials needed	Additional Information
the title/name of your project	a basic description of your project	which Olin prof is supervising your project? (required)	your name here (link to user page, if you have a wiki account)	what do you need to do it?	anything else you want to say
Distributed Mesh Weather Sensors as Educational and Research Tool	Create a USB weather data collection unit that can be inexpensively produced and provided to (students / schools). Units will be able to log basic meteorological data, "sync" data with other XOs across the mesh, and try to dial the data home to a central server. Users can log actual weather conditions, and learn about how pressure and temperature can be used to predict weather trends. Also, having a large number of data collection units in normally not-monitored-for-this-type-of-stuff places could provide interesting data to researchers. The first type of data collection we are considering is barometric pressure. That has advantages in that it is easy to collect -- the sensor can be inside, outside, in the sun, in the shade -- it doesn't matter. Moreover, barometric pressure would allow simple predictions of the weather without any communication with the outside world. In a mesh network setting it might be possible to see fronts move by watching the barometric pressure rise/fall throughout a large region. In addition to the hardware sensor the project would include a software component for logging the data and for comments on the day's weather. Graphs of pressure over time could show how low pressure often coincides with rain.	Pending	Greg	Some money for prototyping, some people who like electronics, some people who want to develop the backend, some people who want to develop the XO mesh logging software.	Just an idea Andy Barry, myself, and Evan Morikawa came up with.
"Lights" game for OLPCs	Implement the "lights" game for the OLPC. It is a game in which clicking a square flips adjacent squares to the alternate state of what they are (black/white). The goal is to get the entire board the same color. [Online version of game]. Fun logic games? Yay!	pending	Greg	An OLPC and someone who knows a bit about PyGame type stuff.	It's a super fun addictive game.
"Unicoder" Character Pad	Simple text editor for quickly entering non-ascii characters. All keystrokes can be customized. For example, I can decide that "Alt+a" inserts an a with acute accent. So far I have a good European mapping for standard English keyboards. This is intended for English users dabbling in other languages, not for native speakers (who would presumeably use the System-level keyboard config so that the keys would work in all programs).	Unknown	Ben Fisher	Completion, ideas, feedback, maybe someone who knows Sugar	I'm not sure whether this should be a dhtml-js or Python-gui. I have something that kinda works in Firefox.
MIDIpad	A program for creating electronic music. A full-featured MIDI editor with a well-thought out interface such that beginners can use it. Finished songs could be rendered using Timidity. (There used to be a Windows shareware program called WinJammer that might be worth looking at - it looks to have disappeared from the web but I have a copy).	Unknown	Ben Fisher	A bit more planning, implementation. I don't have enough time to do this alone.	Although many people associate MIDIs with cheap crappy audio, this is only only because modern computers tend to use low-quality instruments. Back in the day, there were actually good-sounding MIDI sound cards. Timidity can also render using SoundFonts, and there are some very good SoundFonts available online.

Meeting notes

Olin students visited the OLPC office on August 29, 2007. Here are the notes as transcribed from the board.

Random

• Community service group led by Nikki
• Mel is OLPC liason, will be on IRC (nick mchua) every Friday 3-5, and available through email.

Why University chapters are great

• Cutting edge technology
• Variety of perspectives
  • catching details
  • more dedication
  • more experience
• publicity
  • awards

Standards

• Financial independence
• Professional quality

Impact

What you do goes beyond your classroom walls - instead of making your software design project available to... say, Allen Downey, you make it available to thousands of children. "You're going to do it anyway... why not release your work in a way that other people can benefit from it?"

Continuity

• easier to make big things, long-term projects - can "pass it on" to

later students

• "apprenticeships" with students learning from those with more experience
• transfer of information between colleges
• development communities keep people motivated

Networking

• between schools
• between students at Olin
• between students and profs at Olin
• between Olin profs and profs from other schools
• between Olin students and students at other schools
• between all of the above and the free culture development community

What you can do

• development
  • hardware
  • software
  • content
    • textbooks
    • pictures/art
    • curriculum
    • games
    • lessons
    • music
• translation
• outreach
  • to local businesses
  • give demos
  • work with local kids
  • to government
• research/IS/passionate pursuits
  • in education
  • in engineering
  • in computer science
  • in sociology...
  • you want to do it, we'll find a way to make it happen

Current tasklist

Things to do or start on before next week's Friday meeting.

General

• administrative support - serv/core/"hey president miller, dr m., et al, we're doing this!" (greg, ellen, andyp)
• outreach program - running demo requests (ollie, once Olin gets some XOs; ollie, ping mel when the XOs arrive)
• flash conference through ideatree (molly)
• wellesley liason - do they want to help? start their own chapter? (andyp)
• talk to professors about advising projects, helping out, and especially about allowing Olin students to do OLPC projects for course assignments
  • POE (abarry)
  • SCOPE - coordinate student interest in a team (sallen)
  • ECS (steveo)
  • ICB (velin & ollie)
  • focs (yifan + ilari)
  • wired ensemble (?)
  • analog digital (steveo)
  • discrete (?)
  • software design (greg) done

Olin todo for OLPC

• apply to Developers program (Nikki coordinating)
• Olin chapter blog (kelliott coordinating)

OLPC todo for Olin

• development image (w/ Steveo)
• swag
• documentation (w/ Molly, Yifan, Sallen)
• "volunteer day" at the office
• spring OLPC conference w/ other area schools (later)
• university chapter blog (later)