Participation in hardware development(OLPC)

[Mel Chua]

Gautam,

I don't "assign" anyone projects (after all, one of the neat things 
about volunteering on an open-source project is that you get to pick 
what you want to work on), but I can point you towards some open 
hardware-related projects that may be of interest - you may also have 
your own ideas of what would be fun and useful to work on.

http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Measure - the Activity that graphs data from 
the analog-in port. Simple, well-documented add-ons and activities (see 
the page for some examples) are always welcome.

http://wiki.laptop.org/go/TeleHealth_Hardware - a project to do basic 
health monitoring (USB sensor input for things like blood oxygen level, 
EKG, etc.)

http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Open_projects - another list of known open 
projects various people in the community would like work done on.

Ccing the devel list in case the community-at-large has some thoughts on 
this - I've also cc'd Arjun, developer of the Measure activity, Ian, one 
of the people behind the TeleHealth Hardware project, and Richard, 
OLPC's hardware engineer, on this email in case they have any ideas. 
Also copying Andrew, who is looking into simple sensor input board designs.

Cheers,

-Mel

gautam hans wrote:
> THANKS MEL,
>
> But actually we wanted to you to give us some projects( or problems 
> olpc is facing) based on embedded and hardware electronics.
>
> Our organization works on electronics embedded as well as hardware.
>
> And I've seen that u also have some projects which you give to various 
> organizations to complete.
>
> We would like you to give some of these projects.
>
> On Mon, Jun 30, 2008 at 12:58 AM, Mel Chua <mel at laptop.org 
> <mailto:mel at laptop.org>> wrote:
>
>     Greetings, Gautam.
>
>     Thanks for your interest in starting up a campus chapter - it is
>     one of the most useful ways for students to get immediately involved.
>
>     The way most university groups have done this is to start a club
>     (or community service group) at their school that can serve as an
>     umbrella for the different activities that the chapter does.
>     There's not a lot of structure - no registration, no forms to fill
>     out, no "official" list of chapters (though the
>     http://wiki.laptop.org/go/University_chapters page is a good place
>     to list yourselves) - it's about the kinds of things the student
>     body (and faculty and staff) at your school are interested in
>     doing and the types of things you're keen on helping with.
>
>     http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/grassroots may also be of
>     interest, as well as the #olpc-groups channel on IRC
>     (irc.freenode.net <http://irc.freenode.net> - see
>     http://wiki.laptop.org/go/IRC). In general, grassroots groups are
>     very (one could accurately say "completely") independent of
>     OLPC-the-nonprofit-organization, and define their own long-term
>     projects and in some cases even create their own deployments. The
>     "scratch your own itch" mentality is alive and well here.
>
>     Since you said you were interested in hardware development, one
>     thing you may want to look into the Developers' program,
>     http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Developers_program, which is where you
>     can ask to borrow machines to do hardware development on. What
>     type of hardware development are you interested in? Most
>     developers don't actually need XO machines - you can run Sugar on
>     an emulator, or hack the kernel on a regular computer, just fine.
>     It's mostly for things like firmware, power management, and mesh
>     testing that "real" machines are needed.
>
>     If you have any specific questions, please feel free to ask - you
>     can email me, ask on the channel or the mailing list above - it's
>     a friendly community and we all love new people.
>
>     Cheers,
>
>     -Mel
>
>