[sugar] Sugar on Beagle Board training at ESC Boston

[Jason Kridner]

On Tue, Aug 19, 2008 at 3:01 AM, Tomeu Vizoso <tomeu at tomeuvizoso.net> wrote:
> On Tue, Aug 19, 2008 at 4:23 AM, David Farning <dfarning at sugarlabs.org> wrote:
>> On Mon, 2008-08-18 at 16:00 -0500, Jason Kridner wrote:
>>> Call for presentation from Sugar developers,
>>>
>>> I think it would be great if the Sugar community would put forth a
>>> training at the Embedded Systems Conference in Boston in October[1].
>>
>> What sort of class do you have in mind?  I will see what we can put
>> together.

It is a 90 minute session.  I think some small portion covering the
experience of the port would be useful, but I would be particularly
interested in 2 aspects:
 * Can and how can Sugar be used to provide a rapid prototyping
front-end to embedded devices targeted towards some end-equipment
space?
 * Is graphical programming something useful outside of education and why?

Those certainly don't have to be the topics, but those are interesting
to me and I think could help close the gap between the educational
programming and embedded programming divide.

Electronic collaboration is becoming a very important aspect of our
daily lives and it is becoming quite possible for many more people to
create devices that solve different aspects of this collaboration.  It
can be shown that building a UI in Sugar is relatively simple and that
collaboration capabilities can "come for almost free".  Just one idea,
could something like this be put into the UI for a caller-ID telephone
to share notes and address book entries with the other phones in the
house?  It doesn't have to be the most practical idea you ever heard,
since the idea is to get the audience thinking about the problems for
themselves and to walk out with a new tool in their belt.

Simply understanding the value for building educational devices would
be useful, though most of the audience won't be building educational
devices.  It is better to show that Sugar and graphical programming
can be used to enable devices that could previously only be programmed
by experts can now have programmable capabilities controllable by
many, many more people.  That seems like something useful to me in our
everyday lives, rather than just in the classroom.

The class will be hands-on, so the "show me, don't tell me" principle
should apply.

>>
>>> They will be holding several classes[2] on the Beagle Board and I
>>> believe the board is well-suited for higher-level educational
>>> environments (low-cost, low-power, small, DSP capabilities, 3D
>>> graphics, etc.).  It is certainly no OLPC replacement, but I'd like to
>>> get the people who are playing with that board thinking a bit
>>> differently about how we train programmers to think about computers--
>>> and I believe Sugar is a good tool for that.
>>
>> Further collaboration between the embedded world and Sugar has the
>> potential for significant payoffs down the road.  We share a common
>> interest in doing more with less.  Less power, less cpu, less memory,
>> more usefulness.
>
> One more point where can be synergy between the two projects is that
> Sugar has shown how viable is to do an alternate desktop with
> technologies like python, the GNOME stack, etc. Even if people decide
> to build their own thing instead of just porting it, Sugar will
> benefit from other platforms using these technologies in similar ways,
> and we can share our experience in exchange.

Great!

>>> Let me know if you are interested.  I'd be happy to help with the
>>> port.  Python, GTK+, and GECKO are already running.
>
> That's already a very big part of what's needed. Would love to have
> some spare cycles to directly help in the port, but I guess I will
> only be able to answer questions for the foreseeable future.

I think getting Sugar running will be the easy part.  I need someone
willing to teach a class about this port.

>> I have subscribed to the beagleboard group at google.  Please let me
>> know if they are other communication channels to which I should
>> subscribe.
>>
>> In terms of getting a project like this going.
>>
>> 1. Gather together a small group of people who are interested in the
>> port.
>
> Yes, I trust some current contributors to Sugar will be interested in
> helping with the port.
>
>> 2.  Create a minimal infrastructure.  Wiki page, mailing list.... to
>> coordinate your work.
>
> Specially at the beginning, keep the Sugar mailing list informed of
> your progresses.

I'm familiar with eLinux wiki, so I created a page there[4].  I think
we can follow-up on this e-mail thread for now, with both mailing
lists copied, depending on how many people get involved.  I'm
'jkridner' on IRC and will frequent the #beagle and #sugar channels.
We can all update status on the wiki page.  A related page on the
Sugar wiki might make sense at some point.

>> 3. Start working on the port.

Will do.  'git' is next on my list to build for the Beagle Board going
down the native build path.  I'm going to try native on-top of
Angstrom first, then revert to cross-compilation where I get stuck.

>>
>> 4. As soon as you have made some reasonable progress on the port, go to
>> the nearest mountaintop and start yelling, 'look at the cool project we
>> are working on.'
>>
>> 5. Repeat step 1 though 4.
>>
>> I will assist you however I can in steps 1,2, and 4.  My short term goal
>> will be be replacing myself with someone who can help you with steps
>> 1-4;)
>
> Good luck!
>
> Tomeu

Thanks, but again, doing the port is one thing.  I'd need a Sugar
community person to track the port progress and give the talk.  They'd
need to get familiar with the Beagle Board soon.

Regards,
Jason

[4] http://elinux.org/BeagleBoardSugar