[Community-news] OLPC News (2006-09-30)

[Walter Bender]

1. Michail Bletsas worked with Professor George Sergiadis,  Aristotle
University of Thessaloniki, on novel broadband antenna designs for the $100
Server. These antennas can be constructed with adhesive copper foil and
glass at a very low cost and can support operation on both the 2.4 and 5.7
Ghz bands.

2. Alan Kay reports that Steve Jobs has agreed to relicense Squeak under
the Apache License so we can include it with the base software in the
laptop.

3. Mechanical design: Mark Foster reports a significant milestone: The
first release of the system's mechanical design is now completed; all of
the enclosure's component designs have been released for the creation of
system tooling. These tools are hardened-steel molds that will be used to
form the actual enclosure components from different blends of PC/ABS
plastic. Many thanks to the team at Quanta for their incredibly hard work
to complete the mechanical design on-time for the upcoming B-Test build.

4. Electrical design: Mark also reports good progress on electrical design.
With successful completion of the debugging of the initial version of the
CAFE (Camera and Flash Enabler) prototype chip, the team at Marvell has
produced a second version of the CAFE design. The electrical team has also
made great progress on the system's motherboard. This new “B-Test”
motherboard is designed to work with the CAFE chip, as well as the DCON
(Display CONtroller) ASIC.  The first batch of B-Test motherboards has been
fabricated and assembled.

C. Touch pad: The first full prototype of the system's touch pad, created
by Alps, is scheduled to arrive early next week. Using an earlier
prototype, Andres Salomon has the dual-mode touch pad working on our
machines.

5. Chris Blizzard reports that we've made some more progress in shrinking
the size of the OS.  We've been able to remove some package dependencies in
the gnome stack and work is underway to finally break the dependency on the
old X font server, bitmap fonts and perl.

6. UI: The Sugar team has also been investigating a library called
“HippoCanvas” that Havoc Pennington has been writing as part of his mugshot
work.  It's a canvas that fits very well with our model—as opposed to the
other GNOME canvas libraries. Marco Gritti has been working hard on getting
the canvas building in our environment and has started on python bindings
for it.

7. Camera: Jon Corbet reported that the CAFE camera is working at about
15FPS (VGA resolution) using the PCI FPGA CAFE development board, which is
about half of the ultimate hardware specification. A CAFE board was also
sent to Pierre Ossman for SDhci driver testing. A third board arrived in
Cambridge for additional driver testing.

8. VSA: Jordan reports that AMD has released the Virtual System
Architecture (VSA) code under an open license; this is a major transition
in how Geodes are treated and will be beneficial to AMD customers in
general.

9. Test framework: AMD also released into open source a performance-test
framework and some specific implementations of high-use routines
implemented by John Zulauf. John did most of this work on a Geode LX, but
the GX and LX are similar in most areas.

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