OLPC:News
LAPTOP NEWS
1. Mechanical system: Mark Foster and the hardware team have been working hard responding to field feedback on the B1 machines. It is always very satisfying to ship out the first build machines, but now comes the serious work of transforming the OLPC machine into a production-worthy system. This enhancement process will impact all areas of the system. The mechanical engineering team, for instance, is now focused primarily on increasing robustness and longevity, fit and finish, and on improving production efficiency. Special thanks to Bret Recor for his incredible efforts this week assisting the mechanical team—his contributions were both impressive and sincerely appreciated!
2. Electrical system: The electrical team is particularly focused on signal integrity. Thanks are due here to AMD, for their advice and suggestions, which will definitely improve the robustness of the system. In addition, some power-system issues have been reported in the field, so the system's front-end has been significantly improved to handle the wide variety of operating environments that we are encountering. Fortunately, some of these issues are controllable by the built-in firmware in the system's embedded controller and so may easily be updated in the field. Special thanks to Mitch Bradley for creating a super easy-to-use update tool that will make it easy to rapidly update our systems in the field with the new code!
3. Software: Work continues on the wireless driver. Marcelo Tosatti has apparently tracked down the scan hang we were seeing. We'll see a fix for that in our builds at some point. We are getting pretty close to an upstream merged of that code.
4. Dan Williams, Marco Gritti, and Robert McQueen have been discussing changes to the underlying protocol we have been using on the local mesh network to communicate between the laptops. This is required to set us up to be able to scale up to server-mitigated networks using Jabber, the underlying protocol used in many chat networks, including Google Talk.
5. Robert also did some testing using the gstreamer framework and reports that video conferencing looks entirely doable on the laptop. He says that video streaming works smoothly with FFmpeg's H263 codec at QCIF resolution (about 176×120) at 15 frames per second, taking up about 40–50% of the CPU to encode and about 10–15% to decode. Increasing the resolution takes the CPU usage up considerable, but it might be possible to do QVGA (320×240). More testing and performance work is desirable. Audio streaming works fine with PCMU (one audio encoding) but he wasn't able to test Speex (another audio coding) because it appeared to be broken. We'll have to do some more testing.
6. User interface: Dan, Marco, Ivan Krstić, and Eben Eliason held a day-long charrette at Pentagram. The primary focus was on the journal design and a set of first features to implement has been selected. Also moving along has been activity-bundle implementation and the beginnings of how the clipboard will work.
7. Performance: As Nicholas has repeatedly pointed out, for the last 15 years, software has become larger and often much slower. Ian Piumarta (and others working with Alan Kay) has been working on an extensible, dynamic, object-oriented language system that holds the promise of radical performance improvement on languages such as Python and Javascript, now heavily used by OLPC. This work seeks to both radically simplify building such languages and achieve much higher performance. Building an implementation of Javascript or Smalltalk in this system can be as little as a few thousand lines of code; a simple Javascript implementation can be done in just over 400 lines of code, yet be faster than the carefully crafted conventional interpreter orders of magnitude larger. It is entirely possible the technology Ian has developed will not only be used for languages of key interest to OLPC, but even long before then, it may result in greatly increasing the performance of graphics on the OLPC and the Linux desktop in general.
8. Chris Ball started serious exploration of Python performance on OLPC, and established a baseline of the Cairo graphics library performance on our hardware, and confirmed the great performance improvements seen elsewhere in Cairo. By linking Python differently, it appears a 40% improvement of performance is easy to achieve. Chris also worked with Mitch on completion of an extremely simple system update procedure. We can now update the software entirely on an OLPC system in about 3 minutes elapsed time and 20 seconds of human time.
9. Mitch and Richard Smith will shortly release a new version of the BIOS, containing fixes for some of the battery-charging problems that have been reported.
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MILESTONES
| Nov. 2006 | First B1 machines are built; IDB and OLPC formalize an agreement regarding Latin American and Caribbean education. |
| Oct. 2006 | B-test boards become available; Libya announces plans for one laptop for every child |
| Sep. 2006 | UI designs presented; integrated software build released; SES-Astra joins OLPC |
| Aug. 2006 | Working prototype of the dual-mode display |
| Jun. 2006 | 500 developer boards are shipped worldwide; WiFi operational; Csound demonstrated over the mesh network First video with working prototype [1] |
| May 2006 | eBay joins OLPC; display specs set; A-test boards become available; $100 Server is announced |
| Apr. 2006 | Pre-A test board boots; Squid and FreePlay present first human-power systems |
| Mar. 2006 | Yves Behar and FuseProject are selected as industry designers |
| Feb. 2006 | Marvell joins OLPC and continues to partner on network hardware |
| Jan. 2006 | World Economic Forum, Switzerland UNDP and OLPC Sign Partnership Agreement news release |
| Dec. 2005 | Quanta Computer Inc. to Manufacture Laptop (html)(pdf) |
| Nov. 2005 | WSIS, Tunisia Prototype Unveiled by UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan; Nortel joins OLPC Photos: (Image 1)
(Image 2) (Image 3) |
| Aug. 2005 | Design Continuum starts design of first laptop |
| Jul. 2005 | Formal signing of original members of OLPC |
| Mar. 2005 | Brightstar and Red Hat come on board |
| Jan. 2005 | Laptop initiative officially announced at World Economic Forum, Davos, Switzerland; AMD, News Corp. and Google agree to join OLPC |
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