OLPC:News
LAPTOP NEWS
1. Hugh Herr and his students at the Media Lab have begun a set of preliminary efficiency tests on both the Squid pull-cord generator and the Freeplay crank generator. They are indirectly measuring the exertion of users and directly measuring the electrical power output.
2. São Paulo: David Cavallo and others, including the secretary for distance education of the national ministry, presented to TechEducation. Education officials from a large number of states in Brasil attended and discussed how to best bring immersive access to laptops for children in their states.
3. Chris Blizzard and others the GNOME community hosted a two-day hacking session and summit at the MIT Media Lab for GNOME in the embedded space. The embedding space is becoming increasingly important to the success of GNOME; representatives from Nokia, Garmin, Palmsource, and other companies were all in attendance. People shared thoughts, what they were working on, and what they needed to make the platform more successful. Chris gave a talk about Sugar: what we're trying to do and what we're not trying to do. It was food for thought for all in attendance, and there was excellent feedback.
Over the long holiday weekend, the larger GNOME Boston Summit will be held at the Media Lab as well. Anywhere from 50–150 people from all over the world will be in attendance talking about the latest goings on in the GNOME desktop.
4. Mark Foster reports that the first sample B-Test motherboards have arrived. These boards represent the first major revision of the system's electronics, including:
- Designed for incorporation of the DCON (Display CONtroller) ASIC.
- Direct support for the DETTL (double-edged TTL) interface used by OLPC's custom 7.5" LCD panel. The LCD interface is now fully integrated on the motherboard.
- Incorporation of the CAFE (Camera And Flash Enabler) in FPGA form. The B-Test motherboard incorporates a new high-performance NAND Flash controller, an SD card slot, and an interface to the new VGA resolution video/still camera.
- Replacement of the previous on-board wireless solution with a small daughtercard. The new wireless solution incorporates full shielding to improve RF sensitivity and range.
5. UI: Marco Gritti and Dan Williams have both been hard at work: the implementation of the chat bubble overlay is underway; and the migration to the HippoCanvas implementation has progressed—large parts of the UI are now using it.
6. Wireless: Work is progressing on the wireless driver. Both Marcelo Tossati and Dan Williams have been working on the driver, fixing it up to make it work as a full Linux driver. This week they spent time getting the various kinds of encryption working on the hardware. Dan also spent some time working on NetworkManager, getting closer to making it possible to use it on our platform.
7. Image: We have broken the Perl dependency and the dependency on bitmap fonts, freeing up much more space on the flash for user space. Some time this weekend we should have images that also include the newest X server, which is required for the X input-driver work. That X server has also been built without a lot of modules found in desktop X servers that we don't need, enabling even more space savings.
8. Keyboard: The team from Pentagram finalized the keyboard design for the B-Test machines. Six different versions of the keyboard are being made: Arabic, Portuguese, Spanish, Thai, Nigerian (for Hausa, Ìgbo, Yorùbá, Ẹdo, Ẹfik, Fulani, Kanuri, etc.), and US International.
9. CAFE: The camera driver written by Jon Corbet is substantially complete, and being merged (the camera is now running at its full 30-frames per second). All of the CAFE device drivers and the kernel touchpad driver have now been integrated into the OLPC development kernel source pool for testing. Remaining are a battery driver and the analog input mode of the codec.
10. Chris Ball joined the OLPC team in Cambridge and immediately tested 21 A-Test boards with a variety of second source parts; one memory related problem was uncovered in one of the DRAM's chosen, and problems programming one of the serial ROM varieties were encountered, but not yet resolved. Chris is setting up a build “tinderbox” for both basic testing of our software and hardware; he is also putting the infrastructure in place to monitor ongoing performance of our systems.
Laptop News is archived at Laptop News.
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MILESTONES
| 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 here.)
