Yearly Archives: 2010

OLPC realness summit begins

Posted on by
Reply

Waveplace has been putting together a ‘realness summit’ to gather ideas and inspiration from organizers of small pilots around the world. The audience coming reminds me a lot of the early bridge bloggers who came to the first Global Voices summit five years ago.

Christoph Derndorfer and Beth Santos have been in the Virgin Islands since the start of this week, and today the Waveplace Readlness Summit begins in earnest. It sounds as though they are having some amazing conversations already.

You can follow the conference online via Twitter (#xomaho , and Christoph’s other updates on @random_musings) and on the Waveplace blog.

Uruguay offers individual and school XO sales

Posted on by
Reply

Uruguay’s Plan Ceibal is now offering individual sales of XOs to students, parents and schools. This is handy for students who have lost their XO (under some conditions schools replace XOs for free when they are lost or broken, but only within limits), for parents whose students are in private schools that don’t have XOs yet, or for schools that want to have an extra supply of machines to set up additional computer centers, hardware labs, or the like.

Yama commented that schools can get lots of up to 60 XOs at low cost to keep at the school — which are then owned by the school, unlike the XOs given to children, but they must commit to connectivity:


Schools wishing to purchase XO lots are required to get at least a 3 Mb fixed IP connection. Those [that do and have] already purchased XOs at a higher price will be comped with extra XOs.

I like the sound of that. That’s about what Chester Community Charter School required for every 1000 students they brought online…

XO-3 update: OLPC and Marvell partner to design a line of tablets

Posted on by
33
XO-3 design by Yves Behar
XO-3 taking a photo

This post is now in French on the OLPC France blog – thanks, Lionel!

I’m happy to announce that today we finalized a partnership with Marvell to design a line of education-focused tablet computers. Some of these will be OLPC machines targeted for the developing world, such as the XO-3. The line will be based both on Marvell’s reference design for its Moby tablet and on OLPC’s XO-3 designs (particularly for the low-power end of the line).  (Hat-tip to Charbax for predicting this in March.)

Update: see also this video of Nicholas discussing our current tablet plans. (If you look closely, you can see that some of the highlights were from a talk in the new Media Lab building.)

The first tablets in the line will be based closely on the Moby, ”’not”’ the XO-3, and focused more on children in the developed world. They will be on display at CES 2011 in January, and available next year for under $100. The original XO-3 design is still planned for 2012.  More details after the jump.

Continue reading →

$100 computing in 2010

Posted on by
Reply

It’s time to take the old meme of $100 computing seriously.

There has been a steady rise in honest-to-goodness $100 computers over the past year, starting with the 7″ Cherrypal Africa (which does indeed exist and can be yours for $100 — we bought 2 which arrived in our Cambridge office, and happily tested them out) and Marvell’s Moby (projected at $99, but the design may change), and 5 new Android devices VIA expects to see come out for between $100 and $150 next year.

At some point, smartphone manufacturers will sit up and take notice — hardware manufacturing is becoming extremely cheap, and it’s worth consolidating further on a few really good designs and interchangeable parts.

What is your favorite sub-$100 piece of technology, present or future? For education in particular: what do you wish you had with you at home or in the class?

Self-replicating XOs, Part 1

Posted on by
2

Vik Olliver developed the RepRap 3D printer, an early draft of the holy grail of 3D printing: a printer that can replicate itself. Since then, RepRaps have taken hold of people’s imaginations and workshops around the world. Vik currently runs his own out of his basement, driven by Linux software running off of an XO.

To add another layer of awesome, Vik has been turning out gen-3 viewfinders for the XO. Cruder than gen-2, perhaps, but 10x cheaper.  For those of you who don’t regularly use your XO as a camera, here is the evolution of the XOview viewfinder:

But I just today saw my first of these third-generaiton XOviews, when Mike passed out a stack for our Cambridge office. (Thanks!)

As to how an XO is driving this machine making XO parts, OLPC NZ posted a lovely ‘how do they do that?’ video last fall as well. I’ve watched the video a couple of times, and I still want to see it in person. Are any local reprap owners willing to give a live demo?

A great video from Yirkalla

Posted on by
Reply

Yirkalla is being well-covered by Australian media. TEN Digital devoted part of a weekend episode to the deployment, including this video from the classroom during the first day of the deployment. They catch a priceless expression on this child’s face 1:10 in, as he either learns to play Maze (as the shot suggests) or discovers Rick Astley for the first time.