[design] Lack of built-in serial and // port ?

[Mike C. Fletcher]

Ian Daniher wrote:
> On 10/23/07, *Samir Saidani* < saidani at squeakfr.org 
> <mailto:saidani at squeakfr.org>> wrote:
>
>     Hi,
>
>     I have heard about the OLPC initiative a while ago, and recently
>     I have decided to take a further look at this very interesting
>     initiative... Here are first thoughts about it...
>
>     I'm quite new to this project, and one thing that strikes me was the
>     lack of built-in serial and parallel port.  Why ? When you don't have
>     a lot of money, you tend to use obsolete technology which are cheaper
>     than the newer one, like parallel printers, serial modem, serial
>     mouse,
>     parallel scanner, etc ... This obsolete technology are easily
>     available
>     on poor countries, because it's easy for an non profit organization
>     to send this kind of technology that almost nobody wants anymore (at
>     least the enterprises, and the schools of rich countries update quite
>     often their hardware and throw the old one to the garbage or donate it
>     to a NPO).
>
If I read correctly we have a serial port on the XSX school server, so a 
school-wide (or 1/3 of school, or whatever) serial service would be 
possible for any serial-port-using technology (e.g. modems and the like).

Shipping old serial mice to the children doesn't really sound like it 
would be all that useful, USB mice are already well into the replacement 
cycle in most areas, so they'd be just as easy to source in large 
quantities if you wanted to send them.  Shipping costs for thousands of 
ancient ball-based serial mice are probably going to dwarf the costs of 
buying a few thousand new usb "laser" mice from China and having them 
shipped directly to the country.

There is a parallel-port header on the XSX boards, but no parallel port 
in the back-plane of the server.  Parallel ports/wires are reasonably 
cheap (pretty much free if you have a lot of old machines around, I 
think I have 5 or 6 sitting unused in my closet).  You could easily pack 
a few with each printer to allow schools to connect a printer up for 
each school server.  I'm not sure how useful it would be in the areas 
without power sources, paper, access to toner/ink and the like (keeping 
in mind that most printers require insanely expensive ink/toner these 
days), but more urban areas with higher incomes might find them usable.

I haven't actually seen a parallel scanner myself, though I've seen SCSI 
and USB quite lot.  SCSI probably won't happen without some serious 
work.  USB would work if the manufacturer has a Linux driver, but that's 
a pretty hit-or-miss thing from my understanding.  I'd be tempted to 
provide a "How to Convert an XO to a page scanner" document before 
trying to ship and connect up such devices.
>
>     So you can have the old tech for free, because they often end into the
>     gargage while they are still working great. And this is not a theory,
>     we have founded here in France a npo which locally is working to give
>     One Computer Per Child for 0 $.
>
There's actually quite a few similar operations world-wide.

One thing we'll need to do at some point is to look at how to integrate 
those projects into the OLPC project.  We are an educational project, 
not a laptop project, and we need to get the various educational 
initiatives to take advantage of the massive amounts of development work 
and content collection that's being done for the OLPC.

That said, most such projects take a "lab" approach, rather than a "one 
per child" approach.  The reasons for that are many, but lack of power 
in homes, need for security to prevent theft, and need to use wired 
networking are the most common ones I've heard.  Regular laptops are too 
valuable to hand to kids in most areas (they'd be subject to theft 
almost immediately), so normally kids need to go to a "lab" to use the 
computer.

There are advantages and disadvantages to the lab approach, I won't go 
into them here, suffice it that as a text-book reader (one of the OLPC's 
major use-cases), a lab-based machine is reasonably difficult to use.
>
>     We have already a lot of computers,
>     and we are slowing down the process to avoid a computer hardware
>     overload... Recycling is an ecologic approach to the environment,
>     and it
>     seems that it is a concern of the whole OLPC initiative. Recycling
>     allows
>     you to do things by yourself with little money (or none at all). I
>     know
>     that there is a serial/USB interface, but I'm not sure that it
>     would be
>     as easy to use as built-in ports (possibility to lost it, unable
>     to do it
>     by yourself due to the complex USB electronics component...). 
>
"Recycling" (reusing) old technology is not without some significant 
hurdles:

    * pollution in the recipient countries (most old machines (indeed,
      even most new ones) are chock full of poisonous chemicals that
      leech into the ground water and trigger nasty medical conditions)
    * power usage (particularly in areas without grid power, this must
      often be provided by burning petrol or diesel)
    * dead-on-arrival technology
    * integration costs
    * shipping costs (it costs a *lot* to collect and ship old
      computers, chap at a conference a few weeks ago was mentioning
      that he'd spent a quarter of a million shipping old machines to
      Africa from North America... hmm, should have asked how many
      machines, old machines tend to be large and heavy, particularly
      desktops and their monitors)

which is not to say it's not worth doing (indeed, it has helped in many 
areas), but you need to balance that against the positives when you 
decide which path to take.  The OLPC project went down a different path, 
but working with projects that took the reuse path is a desirable outcome.
>
>     So when you
>     consider the target audience (poor countries, rural zone, poor
>     people),
>     I think this is a design mistake. Or at least it's reducing a lot the
>     possibility of hacking and recycling obsolete hardware lying around.
>
Always open to the possibility that we've made a critical mistake.  The 
trade-offs we've made are many, and there are going to be thousands of 
examples of things where someone has to work around a limitation in the 
project.  That said, moving forward we're going to have to provide 
bridges to various other technologies.  Some of those bridges might 
include providing a pointer to a cheap USB-serial adapter that schools 
or ministries of education can order.  Similarly for parallel port 
adapters, though I'm more skeptical about those myself.
>
>     Maybe and probably do you have already talk about this matter ?
>
Indeed, but doesn't hurt to re-iterate the conversation for those just 
joining in,
Mike

-- 
________________________________________________
  Mike C. Fletcher
  Designer, VR Plumber, Coder
  http://www.vrplumber.com
  http://blog.vrplumber.com