[Robotgroup] The XO laptop

[Betty Dingus]

Off the top of my head:

Yes, the XO is the tiny Give One Get One laptop designed by  
volunteers for One Laptop Per Child, or OLPC. It's also called the  
Hundred Dollar Laptop, which is the goall, although currently it's  
$188 to make it (and they sell it at cost).

It's got a 7.5 inch screen, weighs 3.3 lbs, is bright green and  
white, super low energy, runs a new operating system called Sugar  
(Linux based). Everything you do is saved in a journal - not files.  
It's supposed to be intuitive; children are not office workers. It  
encourages cooperative learning in that every activity can be joined  
by another XO user (that's why we got two, although the mesh network  
is designed to be for the whole class or neighborhood. If one laptop  
gets the school internet any other XO within range gets it).  It's  
from a constructivist /constructionist educational slant - they want  
kids to learn by making things and doing things. It includes software  
for art, music (sounds, loops, and a synthesizer), writing and five  
kinds of programming. (Squeak Etoys, logo-like turtle art, Pippy  
python, etc. There is a source code key on the keyboard so kids can  
see and mess with the underlying code.) It has an internet browser  
but they want the kids to make their own music, not just download  
stuff. T-Mobile is giving one year of free Hot Spot access to buyers  
(Borders, Starbucks, other places, usually $30 a month!). It also has  
a built-in still/video camera, microphone, and stereo speakers. It  
has an audio tape measure program (?). It's rugged for kids - rubber  
membrane keyboard, and it was baked up to 120 degrees, put under  
water for ten minutes, dropped from five feet, has a handle, has  
antennae "ears" that pick up WIFI and fold back to cover the ports.  
It has no moving parts, but has 3 USB ports for adding a hard drive  
or printer. It can use a $10 solar panel or a yo-yo pull string (they  
decided against the crank because kids would want to crank it all the  
time). The screen has an LED bulb lighting the screen (less delicate)  
and can be switched to ultra high resolution black and white for  
sunlight viewing. It folds up into an ebook reader, viewed portrait  
mode and using only 1 watt. It has game buttons and the triple-sized  
touchpad is a graphics tablet.

There are a lot of critics, of course, and Intel now is pushing its  
Classmate laptop on countries that had wanted XOs. I've been  
following for awhile. You Americans can only get one if you order by  
Dec. 31st, and you have to order two (one for you, one for a program  
in a developing country). It has a giant Wiki and people are writing  
a user's guide and forming user's groups. Someone started one for  
Austin, of course, but we haven't met because lots of people haven't  
got theirs yet.



Some CORE IDEAS:
The rest of this is straight from http://wiki.laptop.org/go/ 
OLPC_Human_Interface_Guidelines
Activities, Not Applications

There are no software applications in the traditional sense on the  
laptop. The laptop focuses children around "activities." This is more  
than a new naming convention; it represents an intrinsic quality of  
the learning experience we hope the children will have when using the  
laptop. Activities are distinct from applications in their foci— 
collaboration and expression—and their implementation—journaling and  
iteration.



Tools of Expression

Starting from the premise that we want to make use of what people  
already know in order to make connections to new knowledge, our  
approach focuses on thinking, expressing, and communicating with  
technology. The laptop is a "thing to think with"; we hope to make  
the primary activity of the children one of creative expression, in  
whatever form that might take. Thus, most activities will focus on  
the creation of some type of object, be it a drawing, a song, a  
story, a game, or a program. In another shift in the language used to  
describe the user experience, we refer to objects rather than files  
as the primary stuff of creative expression.

As most software developers would agree, the best way to learn how to  
write a program is to write one, or perhaps teach someone else how to  
do so; studying the syntax of the language might be useful, but it  
doesn't teach one how to code. We hope to apply this principle of  
"learning through doing" to all types of creation, e.g., we emphasise  
composing music over downloading music. We also encourage the  
children to engage in the process of collaborative critique of their  
expressions and to iterate upon this expression as well.




Performance

The OLPC laptop bucks the trend of "more, faster, fatter"; we aim to  
provide a computer tailored to the needs of children in the context  
of their learning, not to the needs of frantic video games or office  
applications. We are, however, working within constraints of  
component cost, robustness, and power consumption. To satisfy these  
constraints, we have opted for NAND flash rather than a hard disk and  
a modest 256MB of memory (Please see hardware specifications). Thus,  
developers must make every effort to write efficient code while  
minimizing memory usage.



Transparency

OLPC also hopes to encourage the children using the laptops to  
explore the technology under the surface. Towards this end, a view  
source key has been added to the laptop keyboards, providing them  
with instant access to the code that enables the activities that they  
use from day to day. This key will allow those interested to peel  
away layers of abstraction, digging deeper into the codebase as they  
learn.

To enable such layered exploration, OLPC has written much of what can  
be in Python, a scripting language, to enable children to view the  
source code. This means, aside from general good practice, code  
should be both readable and well commented.



User environment

Sugar graphical user interface, written in Python, on top of the X  
Window System and the Matchbox Window Manager.
“Zooming” interface to mesh network;
Journal interface to file system;
Flash space available for other software content ~800 MiB.



APPLICATIONS

There are three types of activities distributed with the base system:  
tools for exploring, expressing, and collaborating. A matrix of  
applications that have been (or are being) built for the laptop can  
be found here.

Tools for exploring

a web browser built on the Firefox engine;
a simple document viewer based upon evince (including the ability to  
view PDF);
News Reader, an RSS (“really simple syndication”) reader (PenguinTV);
multimedia playback using gstreamer (the Real Networks Helix™  
platform has been ported to the laptop and is available for download  
but is not part of the base distribution);
OpenDocument Viewer to read documents in OpenDocument format, a  
highly-compressed format that is a fully open international standard  
(ISO 26300);
The Opera web browser and the Real Networks Helix™ platform have been  
ported to the laptop and are available for download but not part of  
the standard distribution.
Measure, a tool for exploring the physical world by measuring DC and  
AC voltages, observing them on a oscilloscope-like interface, being  
able to watch waveforms in frequency domain (spectrum analyzer),  
logging data at a specified time interval, and drawing the graph of  
logged data.
Tools for expressing

TamTam, a music synthesis and composition tool;
Etoys (see above);
a word processor based upon the Abiword project;
Record video, audio, and still-image capture and playback (a “video  
wiki” is under development);
Draw, a pixel-paint programming;
a journal;
MikMik, a wiki with WYSIWYG editing, using Crossmark (under  
development);
VIM and NANO text editors.
Tools for communicating

Chat and serverless instant messenger;
Video Chat (under development);
a VoIP client (under development);
Email through the web-based Gmail service;
Native email client (under development).
Other Tools

Calculator;
Spreadsheet (under development);
a shell and debugger;
Develop, an activity editor (under development);
Remote Desktop, a tool to remotely control XO laptop;
Games

Numerous games, including variations of the “memory game”, strategy  
games, etc.
See the games list on the activities download page Activities#Games

Shared Applications

All applications share a common data store accessible through the  
Journal; Most applications, including reading, writing, recording and  
browsing, allow for collaboration; through the network: child-to- 
child and teacher-to-child.

Peripherals/Robots

< Peripherals
The main idea here is to manage a simple robot from the analogue  
output of the XO, the first to do is making a simple activity that  
send signals to a simple circuit connected to a couple of motors. The  
output could be digital or analogue.The digital output is convinient  
for direct aplication to dc motors The source code has to be visible  
for the children. then this motors have to be joined in a simple  
platform, made form recyclable materials, so the cost of the  
construction are very slow. This activity also has to be shareable by  
the means of the hellomesh activity. in a later stage of development  
the little robot has to be controlled remotely.

Also the USB alternatives should be investigated.

Other projects

This page   http://www.instructables.com/id/OLPC-Telepresence/    
shows one example, an XO on top of a Roomba robot vacuum cleaner.  
This project cleverly uses the camera to show the robot's view on a  
webpage; the same page allows the robot to be driven remotely.
Within the 1A USB power limit, a few small hobby servos could be  
connected and run off of the OLPC's battery. They could easily  
receive a pulse width signal from the headphone port, or a $1 USD  
microcontroller to control them via USB.


SEE ALSO IDEAS AT http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Fun_hardware



=====What Do We Mean by Open: Software Freedom and OLPC=======

Author: Benjamin Mako Hill

The Laptop will bring children technology as means to freedom and  
empowerment. The success of the project in the face of overwhelming  
global diversity will only be possible by embracing openness and by  
providing the laptop's users and developers a profound level of freedom.

As the children grow and pursue new ideas, the software and the tools  
should be able to grow with them and provide a gateway to other  
technology.

To achieve these and other practical goals and to live up to the  
principles upon which we believe the success of our platform will be  
built, we insist that the software platform for the One Laptop Per  
Child project:

Must include source code and allow modification so that our  
developers, the governments that are our customers, and the children  
who use the laptop can look under the hood to change the software to  
fit an inconceivable and inconceivably diverse set of needs. Our  
software must also provide a self-hosting development platform.
Must allow distribution of modified copies of software under the same  
license so that the freedoms that our developers depend upon for  
success remain available to the users and developers who define the  
next generation of the software. Our users and customers must be able  
to localize software into their language, fix the software to remove  
bugs, and repurpose the software to fit their needs.
Must allow redistribution without permission -- either alone or as  
part of an aggregate distribution -- because we can not know and  
should not control how the tools we create will be re-purposed in the  
future. Our children outgrow our platform, and our software should be  
able to grow with them.   CONT'D at http://wiki.laptop.org/go/ 
OLPC_on_open_source_software





www.laptop.org if you want more info. I'll bring ours to a meeting  
sometime.


On Dec 24, 2007, at 2:00 PM, Paul Atkinson wrote:

> I haven't read the book, but I'm not surprised there is a video  
> about it.
> Probably yet another form of inexpensive advertising/coverage.
>
> Is the XO Laptop the green & white one that's is supposed to be  
> $200 for
> developing countries?
>
> Paul
>