[Community-news] OLPC News (2006-10-07)

[Walter Bender]

1. Hugh Herr and his students at the Media Lab have begun a set of
preliminary efficiency tests on both the Squid pull-cord generator and the
Freeplay crank generator. They are indirectly measuring the exertion of
users and directly measuring the electrical power output.

2. São Paulo: David Cavallo and others, including the secretary for
distance education of the national ministry, presented to TechEducation.
Education officials from a large number of states in Brasil attended and
discussed how to best bring immersive access to laptops for children in
their states.

3. Chris Blizzard and others the GNOME community hosted a two-day hacking
session and summit at the MIT Media Lab for GNOME in the embedded space.
The embedding space is becoming increasingly important to the success of
GNOME; representatives from Nokia, Garmin, Palmsource, and other companies
were all in attendance. People shared thoughts, what they were working on,
and what they needed to make the platform more successful. Chris gave a
talk about Sugar: what we're trying to do and what we're not trying to do.
It was food for thought for all in attendance, and there was excellent
feedback.

Over the long holiday weekend, the larger GNOME Boston Summit will be held
at the Media Lab as well.  Anywhere from 50–150 people from all over the
world will be in attendance talking about the latest goings on in the GNOME
desktop.

4. Mark Foster reports that the first sample B-Test motherboards have
arrived. These boards represent the first major revision of the system's
electronics, including:

* Designed for incorporation of the DCON (Display CONtroller) ASIC.

* Direct support for the DETTL (double-edged TTL) interface used by OLPC's
custom 7.5" LCD panel. The LCD interface is now fully integrated on the
motherboard.

* Incorporation of the CAFE (Camera And Flash Enabler) in FPGA form. The
B-Test motherboard incorporates a new high-performance NAND Flash
controller, an SD card slot, and an interface to the new VGA resolution
video/still camera.

* Replacement of the previous on-board wireless solution with a small
daughtercard. The new wireless solution incorporates full shielding to
improve RF sensitivity and range.

5. UI: Marco Gritti and Dan Williams have both been hard at work: the
implementation of the chat bubble overlay is underway; and the migration to
the HippoCanvas implementation has progressed—large parts of the UI
are now using it.

6. Wireless: Work is progressing on the wireless driver. Both Marcelo
Tossati and Dan Williams have been working on the driver, fixing it up to
make it work as a full Linux driver. This week they spent time getting the
various kinds of encryption working on the hardware. Dan also spent some
time working on NetworkManager, getting closer to making it possible to use
it on our platform.

7. Image: We have broken the Perl dependency and the dependency on bitmap
fonts, freeing up much more space on the flash for user space. Some time
this weekend we should have images that also include the newest X server,
which is required for the X input-driver work. That X server has also been
built without a lot of modules found in desktop X servers that we don't
need, enabling even more space savings.

8. Keyboard: The team from Pentagram finalized the keyboard design for the
B-Test machines. Six different versions of the keyboard are being made:
Arabic, Portuguese, Spanish, Thai, Nigerian (for Hausa, Ìgbo, Yorùbá, Ẹdo,
Ẹfik, Fulani, Kanuri, etc.), and US International.

9. CAFE: The camera driver written by Jon Corbet is substantially complete,
and being merged (the camera is now running at its full 30-frames per
second). All of the CAFE device drivers and the kernel touchpad driver have
now been integrated into the OLPC development kernel source pool for
testing.  Remaining are a battery driver and the analog input mode of the
codec.

10. Chris Ball joined the OLPC team in Cambridge and immediately tested 21
A-Test boards with a variety of second source parts; one memory related
problem was uncovered in one of the DRAM's chosen, and problems programming
one of the serial ROM varieties were encountered, but not yet resolved.
Chris is setting up a build “tinderbox” for both basic testing of our
software and hardware; he is also putting the infrastructure in place to
monitor ongoing performance of our systems.

-walter

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