I am Richard Smith of One Laptop Per Child. Recently some posts of mine have been taken and twisted a bit in various blogs and Slashdot to indicate that the keyboard failures are "widespread". I would like to clarify what I see as incorrect info about the failure rates of the OLPC keyboard.
Stop the keyboard madness!OLPC does not have evidence that the keyboard failures are widespread like the blog posts I've seen indicate. The overall RMA return rate of all XO problems is less than 1%. Verified keyboard problems are a small part of that.
Correlating the RMA data to the actual failure rate of the keyboard is a bit more difficult because many people with the problem have discovered it outside of the 30 day RMA window. Its also hard to get a good estimate of how many unique users there are in the forums that reported keyboard problems.
There has not been a rash of reports from our other deployments so we believe that the problem was primarily in the early production runs. The first shipment of G1G1 machines were part of the early manufacturing runs. The manufacturers of the keyboard have worked with OLPC to make some changes to the internal construction of the keyboard. We think these changes will help with the sticky keys issue.
These changes have been rolled into the current keyboard production. If indeed the problem is much more widespread then OLPC needs more accurate data on the failure rate. OLPC invites the community to help.
If you currently have an XO with a sticky key then please add your serial number to the Stuck Keys wiki page and what key(s) appear to be sticking. Please don't add a lot of extra info. A simple one line post entry will be fine. I don't need e-mail addresses or long problem descriptions.
Thanks.
Tags: G1G1 | Keyboard Problems | OLPC Keyboard | RMA Window | Richard Smith | Slashdot | Stuck Keys |
