OLPC:News
LAPTOP NEWS
1. Shanghai: Mark Foster reports that the first prototypes of the OLPC XO-1 are up and running! The team hand-assembled the first 10 units to evaluate the system's many custom components, to perform systems-integration testing, and to ensure that the production process is solid, all in preparation for next week's B1-Test build. Quanta will assemble 900 OLPC machines that will be used for destructive testing and distribution to our development partners. Our vision is a step closer to becoming a reality.
It cannot be overstated how much both the hardware and software teams have poured their hearts and souls into reaching this milestone. Kudos to all of them.
2. Washington: IX Reunión Hemisférica de la Red de Educación is the annual gathering of the vice ministers of education from Central and South America at the Inter-American Development Bank (IADB). They hold an open discussion about the most critical issues that they are facing; topics are suggested by vice ministers themselves—this year they asked that one laptop per child be the theme of their meeting. Nicholas, Walter Bender, Antonio Battro, and David Cavallo presented at the meeting.
3. The cover story of this month's Technology Review is an article about OLPC, “Will This Save the World? The $100 Laptop.” The eight-page article highlights both our technological innovations and our model of “enterprising philanthropy”—an analogy is made to Andrew Carnegie's successful campaign to foster the building of thousands of libraries during the late 1800s. “OLPC will, should it succeed, serve as a new model for getting the nonprofit, private, and public sectors to work together efficiently and productively. Technology Review also filmed interviews with Nicholas, Walter, and Seymour Papert, which will appear on the Video Section of their website, www.techreview.com.
4. An ultraviolet-exposure (UV) test chamber has been built and exposure tests are underway; however, we expect no problem on this. Why? The polarizer—newly selected this week—has extremely low UV transmission to the liquid crystal (0.1% throughput in the 310–400nm). Further data on the liquid crystal was provided by Merck suggesting that it is extremely resistant to UV damage. UV blocker has been added to the plastics in the housing to make it more robust in UV. To be safe, we are testing anyway.
5. Jim Gettys and Chris Blizard report that this week has been incredibly busy for the software team. We have “frozen” for our alpha software release for the B1 machines, although it being an alpha release, "the ice is relatively slushy due to the fluid nature of early development and critical bug fixes will be applied up until the last moment." We expect to have the Sugar framework, web browser, chat, a simple text editor derived from Abiword, a simple version of the music application (mini-Tamtam), a memory game, and eToys in the base system. Numerous other applications and demos will be in a repository where they can be readily downloaded.
6. Pierre Ossman, the secure digital host controller interface (SDHCI) Linux driver maintainer, and Andres Salomon worked on testing SD on CAFE, which has been released for tape-out. Together they got high-speed mode working for some cards. Some patches made it into the official OLPC-2.6 git repository, so users can now do about 5–6 MB/s data reads from SD and MMC cards (rather than the rather slow 1.5 MB/s). Performance of NAND is much faster than the Geode NAND controller, but full performance isn't expected until we get the CAFE ASIC back.
7. Jon Corbet continued working on the camera driver, which can now support multiple image sizes including QVGA. Last to come, probably not before B1, will be hooking up the brightness and hue/saturation controls; this is due to lack of timely response from Omnivision—the requested information only arrived Friday evening. Andres merged Jon's latest updates into the OLPC tree, and worked getting gstreamer's v4l2src plug-in to work with the camera. It provides a quick and easy way to grab images and video from the camera module.
8. Audio has been tested, and, short of formal audio testing that will take place during B-Test, appears to be very high quality. However, we will not have the analog input working at the beginning of B-Test.
9. Mitch Bradley and Richard Smith made innumerable firmware releases, and have one ready for production this week, which is fairly stable in the face of quite a bit of difficulty with the DCON starting up properly; the last blocker bug for the firmware is for the EC code to address power up problems and that BIOS is in test as this is written. The Open Firmware release will be within a couple of days.
10. Lilian Walker delivered to Mitch the first draft of Geode power-management code. That code provides forth words to put the OLPC board into various power management states:
| G0/S0/C1: | CPU suspends upon HLT |
| G1/S1/C2: | Sleep |
| G1/S1/C3: | Save-to-RAM |
| G1/S4: | Save-to-disk |
| G2/S5: | Soft off |
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MILESTONES
| 10 Nov. 2006 | First B1 boards are built |
| Oct. 2006 | B-test boards become available |
| Aug. 2006 | Working prototype of the dual-mode display |
| 06 Jun. 2006 | First video with working prototype [1] |
| May 2006 | A-test boards become available |
| 28 Jan. 2006 | World Economic Forum, Switzerland UNDP and OLPC Sign Partnership Agreement news release |
| 13 Dec. 2005 | Quanta Computer Inc. to Manufacture Laptop (html)(pdf) |
| 16 Nov. 2005 | WSIS, Tunisia Prototype Unveiled by UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan Photos: (Image 1)
(Image 2) (Image 3) |
| Jan. 2005 | Laptop intiative officially announced at World Economic Forum, Davos, Switzerland |
PRESS
Video
(Misc. videos of the laptop can be found.)
http://stanford-online.stanford.edu/courses/ee380/061004-ee380-300.asx | Mark Foster delivers presentation to Standford University