The XO Kiss: Ingenious Song Swapping Method for OLPC Peru

   
   
   
   
   

The almost 300,000 XO-1 laptops that are currently being used in Peru are unfortunately still using the two year old software build 703. On the one hand this results in precious teacher training time being wasted on changing settings like the XO's name on the command-line (since Sugar's Control Panel which now allows you to do that comfortably didn't exist back then). On the other hand the software suffers from a variety of bugs and is missing features which were added since its release.

One of these features is the ability to send files from one XO to another one via a menu in Sugar's Journal. Since USB flash drives are relatively rare and relatively expensive to purchase in rural Peru some pupils in a ombined 3rd/4th grade class I visited came up with a method for copying songs from one XO to another one:


The Record activity on the first XO is started, then the second XO plays the song which the first one subsequently records. Ingenious!

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3 Comments

Hello,
are the two XOs really not connected
(by audio cable)? Because then it needs
to be very silent around them to not get
additional sound to be recorded, which
would result in something different from
a true copy on the second XO). Where does
the cable visible in the picture go, and
what is it for (power cable maybe)?
Thank you in advance.

Yours,
mabri

No cable - like a kiss, its just a soft touch.

That's interesting. No reason why you couldn't implement a simple acoustic modem to do that transfer losslessly.

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