[Community-news] OLPC News (2006-11-11)

[Walter Bender]

1. Shanghai: Mark Foster reports that the first prototypes of the OLPC XO-1
are up and running! The team hand-assembled the first 10 units to evaluate
the system's many custom components, to perform systems-integration
testing, and to ensure that the production process is solid, all in
preparation for next week's B1-Test build. Quanta will assemble 900 OLPC
machines that will be used for destructive testing and distribution to our
development partners. Our vision is a step closer to becoming a reality.

It cannot be overstated how much both the hardware and software teams have
poured their hearts and souls into reaching this milestone. Kudos to all of
them.

2. Washington: IX Reunión Hemisférica de la Red de Educación is the annual
gathering of the vice ministers of education from Central and South America
at the Inter-American Development Bank (IADB). They hold an open discussion
about the most critical issues that they are facing; topics are suggested
by vice ministers themselves—this year they asked that one laptop per child
be the theme of their meeting. Nicholas, Walter Bender, Antonio Battro, and
David Cavallo presented at the meeting.

3. The cover story of this month's Technology Review is an article about
OLPC, “Will This Save the World? The $100 Laptop.” The eight-page article
highlights both our technological innovations and our model of
“enterprising philanthropy”—an analogy is made to Andrew Carnegie's
successful campaign to foster the building of thousands of libraries during
the late 1800s. “OLPC will, should it succeed, serve as a new model for
getting the nonprofit, private, and public sectors to work together
efficiently and productively. Technology Review also filmed interviews with
Nicholas, Walter, and Seymour Papert, which will appear on the Video
Section of their website, www.techreview.com.

4. An ultraviolet-exposure (UV) test chamber has been built and exposure
tests are underway; however, we expect no problem on this. Why? The
polarizer—newly selected this week—has extremely low UV transmission to the
liquid crystal (0.1% throughput in the 310–400nm). Further data on the
liquid crystal was provided by Merck suggesting that it is extremely
resistant to UV damage. UV blocker has been added to the plastics in the
housing to make it more robust in UV. To be safe, we are testing anyway.

5. Jim Gettys and Chris Blizard report that this week has been incredibly
busy for the software team. We have “frozen” for our alpha software release
for the B1 machines, although it being an alpha release, "the ice is
relatively slushy due to the fluid nature of early development and critical
bug fixes will be applied up until the last moment." We expect to have the
Sugar framework, web browser, chat, a simple text editor derived from
Abiword, a simple version of the music application (mini-Tamtam), a memory
game, and eToys in the base system. Numerous other applications and demos
will be in a repository where they can be readily downloaded.

6. Pierre Ossman, the secure digital host controller interface (SDHCI)
Linux driver maintainer, and Andres Salomon worked on testing SD on CAFE,
which has been released for tape-out. Together they got high-speed mode
working for some cards. Some patches made it into the official OLPC-2.6 git
repository, so users can now do about 5–6 MB/s data reads from SD and MMC
cards (rather than the rather slow 1.5 MB/s). Performance of NAND is much
faster than the Geode NAND controller, but full performance isn't expected
until we get the CAFE ASIC back.

7. Jon Corbet continued working on the camera driver, which can now support
multiple image sizes including QVGA. Last to come, probably not before B1,
will be hooking up the brightness and hue/saturation controls; this is due
to lack of timely response from Omnivision—the requested information only
arrived Friday evening. Andres merged Jon's latest updates into the OLPC
tree, and worked getting gstreamer's v4l2src plug-in to work with the
camera. It provides a quick and easy way to grab images and video from the
camera module.

8. Audio has been tested, and, short of formal audio testing that will take
place during B-Test, appears to be very high quality. However, we will not
have the analog input working at the beginning of B-Test.

9. Mitch Bradley and Richard Smith made innumerable firmware releases, and
have one ready for production this week, which is fairly stable in the face
of quite a bit of difficulty with the DCON starting up properly; the last
blocker bug for the firmware is for the EC code to address power up
problems and that BIOS is in test as this is written. The Open Firmware
release will be within a couple of days.

10. Lilian Walker delivered to Mitch the first draft of Geode
power-management code. That code provides forth words to put the OLPC board
into various power management states:

   G0/S0/C1:      CPU suspends upon HLT
   G1/S1/C2:      Sleep
   G1/S1/C3:      Save-to-RAM
   G1/S4:   Save-to-disk
   G2/S5:   Soft off

-walter

---
Walter Bender
One Laptop per Child
http://laptop.org