One Laptop Per Child News on Internet

Have Active Antenna, Will Meet in DC on Saturday

Posted on February 22, 2008 by Mike Lee in Internet: Routers, Use Cases: User Groups

Tomorrow's meeting of the OLPC Learning Club-DC has had a last-minute location change which brings us to the regional office of Nortel Networks, one of the original investors in OLPC.

Nortel LearnIT, a community relations initiative of Nortel Networks, has kindly offered the use of an OLPC Active Antenna which will make possible the setting up of a mesh networked school server environment.

A team from Arlington County Public Schools (in Virginia) is setting up the OLPC school server and coordinating with the OLPC support gang to help install system updates, activate developer’s keys on anyone’s XO and generally troubleshoot technical issues.

The meeting will start with a few minutes of introductions by the leaders of the table activities. Then we will break into groups for about 30 minutes for discussion. We’ll pause for quick reportouts from each group on tips, discoveries, aspirations, frustrations, etc. Then we’ll all mesh some more until 1 pm.

What: Family XO Mesh Meetup
When: Saturday, February 23rd, 2008, 10 am to 1 pm
Where: Nortel Networks, 101 Constitution Avenue, Washington, DC (map)

For more meeting details, please visit the club blog.

The Nortel LearnIT folks will also capture some video clips of the meeting. Here's one they produced of Jeff Elkner, one of our meeting organizers:

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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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Mesh Networking XO Laptop Users - Globally

Posted on December 05, 2007 by Robert Arrowsmith in Use Cases: Community, Sales Talk: G1G1, Internet: Routers

A future global mesh?

The other day I thought wouldn't it be amazing if XO users all over the World could communicate with each other? As orders are taken through the Give One - Get One program and people contemplate XO user groups, promotional gifts and just plain having fun with their XO I asked myself how will users be able to take advantage of the collaborative aspects of the XO software activities?

If I sit at home looking at my XO neighborhood screen how many other users can I see? Obviously none if no one is within wireless mesh range. How then should I be able to collaborate with others? What if I could be in range of other users around the World? Surely the World Wide Web can help out here?

So I thought: Why not build a webserver application that can connect XO users?

Suddenly my XO neighborhood screen will fill up with other XO users that are using the very same webserver to connect us all together. I have yet to work out the details for the server but I can see it working much like the OLPC School Server does with wireless access points.

As always, a great incentive is getting a website started and promoting the concept of a world wide mesh. To that end I've purchased the domain name xouser.com/.net/.org and started to look at what I'll need to put it all together.

The purpose of the website will be little more than a registration site for XO users to obtain a small client program and access to the mesh. Once registered, their XO will treat the server like a meeting point where the XO neighbourhood is populated by other users around the World. You will be able to see what other users and groups are collaborating on and start collaborating with other users.

An XO laptop chat

The concept of client-server based systems has been around for a long time. Most of the Instant Message applications like the classic ICQ of the late 90s, MSN Messenger, Yahoo and many other all rely on a server somewhere to act as a central log in point to find others and talk to them. Many Linux users use Gaim (now known as Pidgin) that lets people access servers for many different IM programs and protocols.

The G1-G1 program was a great way for the OLPC to get money to pay Quanta for the first production batch of laptops. It was also a great way to get funding for distributing laptops to less fortunate students in other countries.

Unfortunately, by providing laptops to those that donate, the isolated laptop user misses out on the real advantages of a mesh connected, activity collaborating machine.

I hope that XOUser.com manages to alleviate the problem and brings XO Users around the World together.

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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 Server Per School: OLPC's Buy in Brazil

Posted on March 15, 2007 by Wayan Vota in Internet: Access, Countries: Brazil, Hardware: Production, Internet: Routers, Hardware: School Servers

The OLPC XO needs back-up to serve its student users. At a minimum, an Internet router for the mesh network and local storage for OLPC content: One Server Per School. But just what does one server per school look like, what does it cost, and who is making it?

So far the OLPC Wiki is in agreement that One Server Per School will facilitate Internet connectivity and have data storage for 100 Children's Machine XO's. Everything else is still up for debate: server hardware & OS, other services, and the actual Internet connectivity method.

No matter what the outcome, the servers will not be free or few. The OLPC Wiki shows the OSPS impact for Argentina:

Doing some quick math based on Argentina Statistics, at the national level you have 5,151,856 kids in K-12 grades in 27,888 public schools, giving ~180 laptops / school (or ~3 servers / school).

Or 8,3664 servers total. Now while the final cost for the servers is still unknown, an OLPC feel-good pricing guesstimate would be $200 each or an additional $16.7 million dollars of Argentinean debt financing for one server per Argentinian school.

Interestingly enough, we do know who will be making the first 50,000 OSPS's: Brazil.

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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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Green WiFi for Wireless Power

Posted on August 02, 2006 by Wayan Vota in Internet: Routers, Hardware: Wireless

News.com reports that OLPC is finally starting to think about power - power for the WiFi networks that is. They still are thinking ~~hand crank~~, ~~foot pedals~~, strings to power the actual laptop.

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One Laptop Per Child News

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.