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
Yalp	Audio sampling toy	n/a	Ben Fisher	nothing - done
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.	Software Design / POE	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!	Software Design	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.
Mp3 Tagger	Program for adding/changing ID3 tags for mp3/ogg audio files. The freeware program Mp3Tag is very good but its source is closed. Also, I'd like to add some ways to make metadata entry faster.	Unknown	Ben Fisher	Finishing it, help with the gui	Will the user need to organize files? What is the XO's filesystem?
USB GPS Device	Hardware GPS to connect to XO. This would allow for many software possibilities, including the creation of accurate maps in small villages (roads and trails), and could tag pics taken with the built in camera with the coordinates, allowing for easy addition of pics to google earth.	Unknown	Andy P	Software modification	This is another example of hardware that could produce value to international companies, creating income generation opportunities.
Development Image on ACL Machine	Install Sugar onto an ACL machine so we can play with it, and test things out faster than on the XOs	Mark Chang, hopefully	Stephen L	ACL Machine, Sugar image, Fedora	Should be useful

Meeting notes

Archives of minutes can be viewed at the Olin university chapter/archives page.