One Laptop Per Child News on Hardware

OLPC Birmingham Surprise: Internet and Routers Needed

Posted on January 26, 2008 by Wayan Vota in Internet: Routers, Hardware: Wireless

The Birmingham Board of Education is quickly learning that the full implementation costs of One Laptop Per Child are much greater than a $200 laptop. This week's lesson? The Birmingham News reports that the BoE was just told it needed buy routers to provide wireless Internet service in every school.

[Bob] McKenna attended last week's seminar on the XO Laptop in Boston. "You need to add a router to every school and as long as there is one, every computer in that field can tap into it," McKenna said. "Depending on what type of router you buy, it's about $39 plus a monthly fee."

Now John Katopodis, adviser to Mayor Larry Langford, says he already has a solution - a router donation from Texas - but does he know about the OLPC Active Antenna?

The Active Antenna is a standalone version of the wireless mesh network interface used in the XO laptop. It connects to a host or power source through a 5m (16ft) USB cable. As a mesh networking interface, it both serves as network interface for any host connected through USB and as a repeater node in the mesh.

Two or three Active Antenna are used with each School server, one may be connected to an XO or other laptop to allow mesh networking, or they may simply be connected to a wall brick providing power. If connected to a USB host (and not just a power supply), it requires a specialized driver which uploads firmware and manages the mesh functionality.

Not only is this more cost effective than John's routers, it will also extend mesh networking outside the classroom, so children can learn outdoors too. I'm thinking OLPC Planetarium!

Sadly, B'ham School Board member Virginia Volker was thinking about a whole other use for the XO laptop: XO porn. And what was Bob McKenna's answer?

McKenna said filters would have to be added to the school routers, but parents need to be on the lookout as well. "We need to look at bringing all parents together to make them understand the power of this technology," he said.

Yep, parents have responsibility too, and need to be included in OLPC implementation. Concerned and engaged parents like Betty Dingus's friend.

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Inside the XO-1 Laptop with Bunnie Studios

Posted on January 21, 2008 by Jon Camfield in Hardware: Wireless, Laptops: XO-1

XO motherboard close-up

Bunnie Studios (e.g. Andrew Shane Huang), who just finished his Ph.D at MIT's Project Ares group, has published an insightful review of the hardware design of the XO

The review skips over the basic disassembly and looks more at the components and hardware design itself; concluding overall that

"its mechanical design is brilliant. It’s a fairly clean-sheet redesign of traditional notebook PC mechanics around the goal of survivability, serviceability, and robustness [...] When closed up for “travel”, all the ports are covered, and the cooling system is extremely simple so it should survive in dusty and dirty environments. [...] That’s thoughtful design."

The innovativeness of the design includes the oft-lauded power and heat management, where the XO really shines, such as the low-heat Geode paired with a heat spreader letting the cpu be more flexible in where it was placed in the design.

Beyond just the ruggedizing of the laptop, it's also designed to be field serviceable to a large extent, focusing on making the parts most likely to fail easy to replace, including the shock-mounted LCD (and its backlight).

Not all was happy hacker roses; though to be fair, on the hardware side of things, it basically was.

Andrew found that despite the high sensitivity of the wifi antennae, he had trouble getting Sugar to find his access point and stay there. Besides, everyone knows that the only real outstanding question is, in comparison to the iPhone, will it blend?

He further was under-impressed by the software and ease of adding new tools, seeing it as "appliance-like." To an extent, however, it is an appliance, and designed to be less of the super-over-flexible Linux desktop style. Not unlike the Eee, you want to drive the new user to very safe and stable actions.

The XO does allow advanced users to install their own software (or even their own non-RedHat/Sugar OS). If anything, there's a lacking middle layer enabling easier addition of known-safe programs that aren't packaged into actions as yet:

Extreme XO screen closeup

Overall, the software on the OLPC is clever but very “appliance-like”: there are some pre-loaded applications and it’s not immediately obvious how to add new applications using the native UI (it’s hackable from the command line but that’s not very beginner-friendly).

Then again, it does include some education-oriented scripting languages that kids can use to write programs, even if it does lack a local gcc installation, and it includes the basic infrastructure for chat, video, audio, and photo sharing functionalities.

In the comments section, he returns to this topic, adding an interesting angle on the need for novelty to sustain interest:

I guess my strongest gut reaction is that once the novelty of the few preloaded apps wears off, what’s there to keep you coming back? [...] It feels like the pre-loaded apps on the XO are geared toward more advanced curriculum–not quite something I’d see being the focus of entry-level curricula, and I don’t see entry-level teaching staff necessarily generating new applications on the fly.

Ideally, and as he discusses in his post, Squeak/eToys will provide the base for lots of mostly-easy-to-create (and share) software and tools, but it would be handy to have some more things ready out of the box that tie into curriculum needs as well as an easy, straightforward way to discover and install new tools.

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XO Space: Where You Are

Posted on October 19, 2007 by Robert Arrowsmith in Software: Applications, Hardware: Wireless, Laptops: XO-1

OLPC Space finding your place

We have all seen the original Sugar mesh network display showing other users of XO laptops. Clustering of little XO icons indicate others collaborating on different activities or single users randomly placed on the screen. Now, according to Walter Bender, we have 'Space', an intelligent display of users in your XO neighborhood with your XO in the center:

Mesh view: Polychronis Ypodimatopoulos has developed a new activity, "Space," which displays an alternative mesh network neighborhood; it offers a sense of space by placing you in the center and everyone else in the mesh network at a distance proportional to link quality between you and the node that is being displayed

As I had proposed in a comment on OLPCNews some time back, use is being made of the mesh network in some interesting ways.

While this new way to display XO users in Sugar is not what I would call 'Location Finding', its certainly a step in the right direction. 'Space' is making use of the networking protocol behind the mesh network and applying this to a map showing how many hops away other users are. As a result you get a real feeling of distance displayed on the screen rather than having information on who is collaborating.

For some time now, WiFi technology infrastructure has been used by several big players to provide facilities for 'Asset Tracking' of equipment or people. Just recently the Carolinas Healthcare System in the USA selected Ekahau Inc. to provide Wifi based real time location systems. University Campuses are looking at locating students, Hospitals want to locate medical equipment and manufacturers want to locate tools or even production items.

The technology for locating Wifi devices is based on several methods. The most common and least accurate is based on signal strength or RSSI. Some systems can utilise a 'Time Of Arrival' system similar to the way GPS works. So why wouldn't a signal strength system work with the XO?

Well it would but of course you need at least two other XO's providing your XO with strength of the Wifi signal. You can then map a triangle with three sides of known distance/length. With three known sides you can calculate the three angles in the triangle and plot the two important values, Distance and angle (compared to the other XOs). By adding in several fixed location wifi access points you obtain a real world fixed point orientation.

XO Space on the OLPC frontier

In a situation where the school has a Server and several Access Points the school staff can quite easily track locations of all the laptops in a school. Considering that the safety of the children is of utmost importance and knowing where the laptops are located (with the child attached) we begin to see the advantage of locating systems as an integral part of the laptops.

Could we see the development of software based on XO mesh signal strength? I'd like to think kids will be playing 'Hide And Seek' with their laptops using the wireless network to find others. If we take the idea a step further and make it really useful, we may see teachers receiving an email from the school server when a students laptop ventures outside of the school grounds during school hours.

The technology is available. It just waits for an enterprising person to produce the software.

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Marvell's 88ALP01 Driver Documentation Doesn't Satisfy

Posted on September 05, 2007 by Wayan Vota in Implementation: Maintenance, Internet: Routers, Hardware: Wireless

A Marvell wireless card

In September 2006, Theo de Raadt, the founder of OpenBSD, was not happy with One Laptop Per Child.

He accused OLPC of not being Open Source, going so far as to call the developers "morally bankrupt" because they signed non-disclosure agreements (NDA's) with Marvell, the suppliers of the OLPC wireless mesh hardware.

Theo was mad that Red Hat's developers acquiesced to NDA's to gain access to documentation required to write and maintain a kernel drivers for the proprietary firmware used in Marvell's wireless networking hardware, making independent driver maintenance and usage extremely difficult.

Now Marvell has seemingly opened up a bit, and released the 88ALP01 data sheet. This documentation covers the camera, Secure Digital, and NAND flash controllers. A LWN.net commenter asks the best question around the change in documentation:

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OLPC Mesh Networks Non-XO Computers

Posted on July 24, 2007 by Wayan Vota in Use Cases: Community, Internet: Routers, Hardware: Wireless

Hi David Snyder!

With 2,000 new One Laptop Per Child XO B4 computers in the wild, and rumours of Christmas OLPC sales about, software developers are having fun experimenting with the ever-changing Sugar UI builds.

Last week, I had my own "Sugarized" fun time as Jonathan Blocksom and I showcased two XO computers to Rob Pegoraro of the Washington Post.

While we gave a passionate rebuttal to his glowing Classmate review, Jonathan and I found an interesting ability of the newest XO Sugar build: On both the B2 and B4 "mesh view", we could see other computers.

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One OLPC XO Technology Per Military Warfighter

Posted on July 18, 2007 by Wayan Vota in Sales Talk: Products, Internet: Routers, Hardware: Wireless

OLPC-enabled military?!

Thinking about the multitude of OLPC technologies that could be commercialized for profit, I read the following Request for Proposal that World War E found with great interest:

develop intelligent autonomous radio relay nodes that exploit movement to establish and manage mesh networks in urban settings. The goal is to create small, inexpensive, smart robotic radio relay nodes that dismounted warfighters drop as they deploy in urban settings. The nodes then self-configure and form a mesh network – a temporary infrastructure that establishes communications over the region. As the situation changes, the nodes will adapt the network, such as self-healing if nodes are destroyed by the enemy (DARPA 2007, 3-4).

Yes, you read that right, "warfighters" is a nice euphemism for military soldiers and DARPA is the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the US military's research arm, and the RFP sounds perfect for the FCC approved OLPC mesh networking.

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OLPC Products: XO, Server, Charger, Antenna, & Repeater

Posted on June 11, 2007 by Wayan Vota in Hardware: Peripherals, Hardware: Power Supply, Hardware: Production, Sales Talk: Products, Internet: Routers, Hardware: School Servers, Hardware: Wireless

OLPC multi-battery "gang charger"

In this weekend's , OLPC VP Walter Bender casually drops an OLPC product lineup bombshell:

We are shipping five products this fall: (1) the XO laptop; (2) a school server; (3) a multi-battery charger; (4) an active antenna; and (5) a solar-powered WiFi repeater. Much of the emphasis has been on the laptop, but a push from Quanta this week has resulted in firmer plans for the other products.

While we are all intimately familiar with the OLPC XO, what are the other four "products" that Water speaks of? The last time we checked, school servers were still very much an idea or barely Beta, and now they're going to be production ready?

The multi-battery charger, or "gang charger" is even more mysterious. There is a basic Wiki entry, and now a photograph, but not much else.

Walter tells us about the active antenna for the first time in the very same update:

Thanks to John Watlington and the team from Cozybit, we have out first working "active antenna" prototypes. Attaching them to an XO lets you optimize the placement of the antenna: use with a mesh portal will double the network throughput. They can be used on the school servers or attached a 5V power supply to build a stand-alone WiFI repeater.

Luckily, thanks to Aaron Kaplan, we now know more about the solar mesh repeaters, but that was only last week.

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One Cheap Solar 802.11s Mesh Repeater Per Child

Posted on June 10, 2007 by Guest Writer in Internet: Access, Hardware: Power Supply, Sales Talk: Products, Internet: Routers, Hardware: Wireless

Mesh network testing

I am Aaron Kaplan and I was recently visiting the MIT, home of One Laptop Per Child. I think I have to tell my fellow OLPC News people about the wonderful new solar goodies that are being designed and tested there.

Since I myself come from a background of building and designing free community wireless mesh networks, I was naturally very interested in OLPC's mesh solution. So I was lucky to get a preview of what surprises OLPC might come up with soon.

With my background, one question I had was - "how does OLPC test their 802.11s mesh implementation"? Well, when entering the office, I was quite surprised to see XOs hanging from the ceiling everywhere :) As I discussed with Michail Bletsas, having a moving mesh will actually be something else. But this test setup can already give you a good impression of a school class.

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One Medical Application Per Community

Posted on June 01, 2007 by Guest Writer in Use Cases: Community, Hardware: Wireless

I have this diaper rash...

I am Sreeram (Ram) Dhurjaty, and have been in the Medical Electronics and systems field for about 30 years. In this post, I would like to point out a powerful, medical, application of this robust platform for areas that are under-served.

There are sub-Saharan countries where the whole country has less medical equipment than the equipment lying idle in the corridors of hospitals such as Massachusetts General.

I see the One Laptop Per Child Children's Machine XO platform as a powerful platform that can enable telemedicine in underdeveloped areas by bringing medical diagnostics, and treatment options which may, otherwise, be inaccessible.

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ISO: WiFi Mesh Networking User Support System

Posted on May 31, 2007 by Wayan Vota in Internet: Access, Implementation: Plan, Hardware: Wireless

OLPC wireless mesh view

One Laptop Per Child is making great strides with their implementation of the emerging 802.11s standard on Marvell wireless firmware. Walter Bender says:

Polychronis Ypodimatopoulos set up a mesh demo where each laptop takes a picture at random times and tries to send it over to all other nodes in the mesh network. He has a web page where the aggregate data are displayed, based upon the number of hops between nodes. You can click on the pictures and see what the respective direct neighbors and nodes further than one hop are for the next node

Now that sounds damn cool, eh? That sounds like the OLPC XO mesh network "just works" and there will be full out-of-the-box mesh functionality on the Children's Machine XO.

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Where Have All The OLPC School Servers Gone?

Posted on May 29, 2007 by Christoph Derndorfer in Internet: Access, Hardware: School Servers, Hardware: Wireless

OLPC XO servers needed

Browsing through the archives here at OLPC News and over on the official "Community-news" mailing-list I noticed that there's one topic that hasn't really been discussed all that much: the OLPC school servers.

Reading through Walter Bender's weekly updates to the mailing list there are only few recent mentions of the school server. In early March he wrote that "software architecture of the school servers is starting to come together". Then 4 weeks later he mentions that "the school server development continues" and "applications and content for the Library are starting to be installed". Development went on throughout April and apparently there's one trial setup being used at the OLPC offices in Cambridge but as of May 5 "work on the School Server hardware design continued".

With regards to the OLPC Wiki there are several entries dealing with school servers but there's relatively little in terms of (f)actual information. I assume this is also the reason why Walter Bender called the Wiki entries "really more of an introduction".

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Battery Power Your OLPC XO Mesh Network Today!

Posted on April 01, 2007 by Wayan Vota in Internet: Access, Software: Operating System, Hardware: Power Supply, Hardware: Wireless

Stable builds draw crowds

This weekend, Jim Gettys announced the next stable build of the Children's Machine XO laptop from OLPC: Build: 368 + Q2B85 Firmware.

What cool achievements might this combo bring to the One Laptop Per Child rush to compete the "$100 laptop" by the August ship date? How about all this developer eye candy from Jim's announcement:

Working mesh network! UI to select the Mesh network!
Battery charging is working well at last!
An greatly improved web browser
Gnash (free Flash player; still somewhat unstable) pre-installed; Flash 9 also works, but not packaged or installed.
touch pad driver fix for jumping cursor: the touch pad should be much more usable, and the tablet usable on B2 systems.
boot time has substantially improved due to a scheduler fix.
battery indicator in Sugar
availability of Helix Media Player
instructions for customizing your own image
30% system performance improvement when any network device is in use.

To get all these advances going on your BTest-3 XO, be sure to update both firmware and NAND image.

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One Laptop Per Thai Child Testing Begins!

Posted on March 22, 2007 by Wayan Vota in Use Cases: Education, Hardware: Screen, Countries: Thailand, Hardware: Wireless

OLPC wireless mesh view

While 10 OLPC BTest-1 Children's Machine XO's arrived in January, and 30 BTest-2 laptops arrived in February, the One Laptop Per Child Thailand group has just recently updated the wiki. Though I can't read Thai, I can see they're having a damn good time with the OLPC XO!

First off, it seems they have installed the stable 303 Build of the Sugar user interface and are experimenting with its very interesting wireless mesh view. With little XO's showing different laptop nodes and the peaks denoting Internet connections, the mesh view is a handy graphical representation of users and connections.

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Two New OLPC XO Fanboys: Håkon Wium Lie & Michael Calore

Posted on March 09, 2007 by Wayan Vota in Commentary: Press, Software: Third Party, Hardware: Wireless

What might happen when Opera CTO, Håkon Wium Lie shows a Children's Machine XO to Wired.com's Michael Calore? You get a OLPC XO fanboy meet-up and a demonstration of the laptop's hardware on video:

Now how fanboy might Michael be after seeing the One Laptop Per Child computer up close? Check his laptop review...

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OLPC BTest-2 Children's Machine XO Laptops Released!

Posted on February 27, 2007 by Wayan Vota in Hardware: Power Supply, Hardware: Wireless, Prototypes: XO

OLPC has announced that OLPC XO BTest-2 laptops are now shipping to those who can test and develop the "$100 laptop".

While full BTest-2 release notes are forthcoming, OLPC says that:

The BTest-2 hardware is continuing beta test for the electronics, beta test of the new screen (this time with a diffuser improving it futher) and touch pad. The industrial design is only somewhat improved from BTest-1; most of the learning from BTest-1 on mechanical improvements could not be incorporated in time for BTest-2 and so BTest-3 will be significantly more rugged than BTest-1 or BTest-2.

BTest-2's focus will start the process of testing the mesh network, and we are also working on suspend/resume, though as of this writing, suspend/resume is not yet running, though the preparatory work is now complete.

Oh and if you are one of the lucky Developer Program participants to get a BTest-2, be sure to note there are a few quirks in the hardware.

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Internet Connectivity: OLPC Wiki Says No, Negroponte Says Yes

Posted on February 14, 2007 by Wayan Vota in Internet: Access, Hardware: Wireless

The OLPC Wiki is an interesting experiment in collaborative expression. And also sometimes confusing. Someone reading the School Gateways section of the New Ask OLPC A Question page may get the wrong impression about One Laptop Per Child's commitment to Internet connectivity:

The OLPC networking concept is not Internet-based. We assume that there will be no Internet connectivity and no Internet gateways. The laptops are being deployed into countries which do not have a lot of native-language content available on the Internet.

That sounds quite official, like the OLPC Children's Machine XO will not be Internet-enabled. But then you read what Nicholas Negroponte says in Kevin Allison's "Clever kit to benefit the poor" Financial Times article and you get a whole other impression.

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We All Hope OLPC Mesh Networking Will "Just Work"

Posted on January 30, 2007 by Wayan Vota in Internet: Access, Hardware: Wireless

Does your wireless Internet connection "just work"? Do you seamlessly connect to any unsecured WiFi signal without your intervention? And does that happen on any network, not just one your programmed to be instantaneous?

I didn't think so. But this is the dream of One Laptop Per Child. As Gregory M. Lamb says in his A closer look at what '$100 laptop' will be article:

Built-in Wi-Fi antennas that automatically create a "mesh network" with any other XO computer within about one-third of a mile. A screen displays icons showing the other XO computers within range at any given time.

The mesh also means that if any one of the linked computers has access to the Internet, all of them will. That's important in places where Internet connections can be few and far between.

As yet, though, that goal is still, just that, a goal. OLPC XO Btest-1 units do get one kilometer WiFi connectivity, an impressive feat in itself. Still, OLPC mesh networking will need not just have great range, it will also need amazingly reliable and simple connectivity.

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OLPC is the Star at Consumer Electronic Show

Posted on January 17, 2007 by Guest Writer in Software: Applications, Internet: Routers, Hardware: Wireless

This week's guest post comes from Christoph, a self confessed movie addict with an insatiable appetite for all things OLPC. Sayeth Christoph:

While we await the first video of kids using the X0 machines, we'll have to make do with watching adults behave like children whist they demonstrate them.

Luckily, last week's CES 2007 show in Las Vegas provided just such an opportunity as video blogger "charbax" took the opportunity to record his ramblings on - and a good number of demonstrations of - One Laptop per Child's amazing XO Childrens' Machine laptop.

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OLPC XO BTest-1 Units Span a Kilometer in WiFi Connectivity

Posted on January 17, 2007 by Wayan Vota in Internet: Routers, Hardware: Wireless, Laptops: XO-1

How far does your laptop WiFi reach? Do you get 10, maybe 20 meters from your base station before the signal degrades? Wouldn't it be nice to get 500 meters? Or what about a whole kilometer, and that's with a stock laptop, not one modified with a directional antenna like the joe-cool BottleNet?

You soon shall with One Laptop Per Child. With their claim to be the first implementation of the emerging 802.11s standard, they are making Superman-sized leaps in connectivity using Marvell wireless firmware with full mesh functionality on the Children's Machine XO.

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Your independent source for news, information, commentary, and discussion of One Laptop Per Child's "$100 laptop" computer, the OLPC Children's Machine XO, developed by MIT Media Lab co-founder Nicholas Negroponte.