Open Hardware
It would be nice to have all the hardware projects of OLPC with open designs and blueprints (PCBs),we should have in mind what is open source hardware(see also Open design). As OLPC is an Open project all its components must follow open related ideas.
Unfortunately, commercial realities intrude. The development of the XO required many millions of dollars of engineering, tooling, and test runs. The company building the XO, Quanta Computer, Inc., invested this, with the hopes of recouping it through their very small (and limited) profit on the manufacture over many, many millions of units. In order to ensure this, they are maintaining strict control over the actual electrical design of the laptop.
OLPC is working to negotiate a more open design with the second generation.
Actually there are two threads of development, one is making USB peripherals ( or XO Peripherals ), and the other is extending and improving the analogue input of the laptop trough applications like Measure and projects like Digital Signal Processing, the latter is in a superior stage because it need less external hardware support, but is tied to the requirements of the internal audio chip of the laptop.
Resources
- A description of the laptop power circuitry
- XO Troubleshooting Guide
- Disassembly
- Photos (Photos of an early pre-production (B2) prototype's circuits)
- Geda.
- Xcircuits
- Pikdev
- Gnupic
- Education Electronics
- Xiaofan's blog, pic devel tools
Projects
- Test probe.
- ECG.
- Peripherals.
- Measure
- Robots (see Pyrobots)
- Digital Signal Processing (Part of Summer of Content)
- Measuring devices for the XO
- TeleHealth Hardware
