OLPC XO
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NiMH or LiFePO4 removable battery pack | |
Dimensions | 242 mm × 228 mm × 32 mm (9.5 in × 9.0 in × 1.3 in) |
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Mass | LiFePO4 battery: 1.45 kg (3.2 lb); NiMH battery: 1.58 kg (3.5 lb) |
Website | laptop |
The OLPC XO (formerly known as $100 Laptop,
The
The
The latest version of the OLPC XO is the XO-4 Touch,[12] introduced in 2012.
History
The first early prototype was unveiled by the project's founder Nicholas Negroponte and then-United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan on November 16, 2005, at the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) in Tunis, Tunisia.[13] The device shown was a rough prototype using a standard development board. Negroponte estimated that the screen alone required three more months of development.[citation needed] The first working prototype was demonstrated at the project's Country Task Force Meeting on May 23, 2006.[citation needed]
Steve Jobs had offered Mac OS X free of charge for use in the laptop, but according to Seymour Papert, a professor emeritus at MIT who is one of the initiative's founders, the designers wanted an operating system that can be tinkered with: "We declined because it's not open source."[14] Therefore, Linux was chosen.
In 2006, there was a major controversy because Microsoft had suddenly developed an interest in the XO project and wanted the formerly open source effort to run Windows. Negroponte agreed to provide engineer assistance to Microsoft to facilitate their efforts. During this time, the project mission statement changed to remove mentions of "open source". A number of developers, such as Ivan Krstić and Walter Bender, resigned because of these changes in strategy.[15][16][17] The version of Windows that ran on the XO was Windows XP.[18]
Approximately 400 developer boards (Alpha-1) were distributed in mid-2006; 875 working prototypes (Beta 1) were delivered in late 2006; 2400 Beta-2 machines were distributed at the end of February 2007;[19] full-scale production started November 6, 2007.[20] Quanta Computer, the project's contract manufacturer, said in February 2007 that it had confirmed orders for one million units. Quanta indicated that it could ship five million to ten million units that year because seven nations had committed to buy the XO-1 for their schoolchildren: Argentina, Brazil, Libya, Nigeria, Rwanda, Thailand, and Uruguay.[21] Quanta plans to offer machines very similar to the XO-1 on the open market.[22]
The
On May 20, 2008, OLPC announced the next generation of XO,
The design received the Community category award of the 2007
In 2008 the XO was awarded London's Design Museum "Design of the Year", plus two gold, one silver, and one bronze award at the Industrial Design Society of America's International Design Excellence Awards (IDEAs).[7]
Goals
The XO-1 is designed to be low-cost, small, durable, and efficient. It is shipped with a slimmed-down version of
- Minimal power use, with a design target of 2–3 Watts (W) total
- Minimal production cost, with a target of $100 per laptop for production runs of millions of units
- A "cool" look, implying innovative styling in its physical appearance
- E-bookfunction
- Open source and free software provided with the laptop
In keeping with its goals of robustness and low power use, the design of the laptop intentionally omits all motor-driven moving parts; it has no
A built-in hand-crank generator was part of the notebook in the original design; however, it is now an optional clamp-on peripheral.[32]
Hardware
This section is in prose. is available. (June 2015) |
The latest version of the OLPC XO is the XO-4 Touch.[12]
Display
- 1200 × 900 7.5 inch (19 cm) diagonal LCD (200 dpi) that uses 0.1 to 1.0 W depending on mode. The two modes are:
- Reflective (backlight off) monochrome mode for low-power use in sunlight. This mode provides very sharp images for high-quality text
- Backlit color mode, with an alternance of red, green and blue pixels
- XO 1.75 developmental version for XO-3 has an optional touch screen
The first-generation OLPC laptops have a novel low-cost
The
Jepsen has described the removal of the filters that color the RGB
The remainder of the LCD uses extant display technology and can be made using extant manufacturing equipment. Even the masks can be made using combinations of extant materials and processes.
When lit primarily from the rear with the white
"Mode" change occurs by varying the relative amounts backlight and ambient light. With more backlight, a higher chrominance is available and a color image display is seen. As ambient light levels, such as sunlight, exceed the backlight, a grayscale display is seen; this can be useful when reading e-books for an extended time in bright light such as sunlight. The backlight brightness can also be adjusted to vary the level of color seen in the display and to conserve battery power.
In color mode (when lit primarily from the rear), the display does not use the common RGB pixel geometry for liquid crystal computer displays, in which each pixel contains three tall thin rectangles of the primary colors. Instead, the XO-1 display provides one color for each pixel. The colors align along diagonals that run from upper-right to lower left (see diagram on the right). To reduce the color artifacts caused by this pixel geometry, the color component of the image is blurred by the display controller as the image is sent to the screen. Despite the color blurring, the display still has high resolution for its physical size; normal displays as of February 2007[update] put about 588(H) × 441(V) to 882(H) × 662(V) pixels in this amount of physical area[citation needed] and support subpixel rendering for slightly higher perceived resolution. A Philips Research study measured the XO-1 display's perceived color resolution as effectively 984(H) × 738(V).[38][39][40] A conventional liquid crystal display with the same number of green pixels (green carries most brightness or luminance information for human eyes) as the OLPC XO-1 would be 693 × 520.[citation needed] Unlike a standard RGB LCD, resolution of the XO-1 display varies with angle. Resolution is greatest from upper-right to lower left, and lowest from upper-left to lower-right. Images which approach or exceed this resolution will lose detail and gain color artifacts. The display gains resolution when in bright light; this comes at the expense of color (as the backlight is overpowered) and color resolution can never reach the full 200 dpi sharpness of grayscale mode because of the blur which is applied to images in color mode.
Power
This section may be confusing or unclear to readers. (October 2009) |
- DC input, ±11–18 V, maximum 15 W power draw
- 5-cell rechargeable NiMH batterypack, 3000 mAh minimum 3050 mAh typical 80% usable, charge at 0...45 °C (deprecated in 2009)
- 2-cell rechargeable LiFePO4 batterypack, 2800 mAh minimum 2900 mAh typical 100% usable, charge at 0...60 °C
- Four-cell rechargeable LiFePO4 batterypack, 3100 mAh minimum 3150 mAh typical 100% usable, charge at −10...50 °C
- External manual power options included a clamp-on crank generator similar to the original built-in one (see photo in the Gallery, below), but they generated 1/4 the power initially hoped, and less than a thousand were produced. A pull-string generator was also designed by Potenco[41] but never mass-produced.
- External power options include 110–240 Volt AC and input from an external solar panel.[42] Solar is the predominant alternate power source for schools using XOs.
The laptop design specification goals are about 2 W of power consumed during normal use, far less than the 10 W to 45 W of conventional laptops.[19] With build 656, power use is between 5 and 8 watts measured on G1G1 laptop. Future software builds are expected to meet the 2-watt target.
In e-book mode (XO 1.5), all hardware sub-systems except the monochrome dual-touch display are powered down. When the user moves to a different page, the other systems wake up, render the new page on the display, and then go back to sleep. Power use in this e-book mode is estimated to be 0.3 to 0.8 W. The XO 2.0 is planned to consume even less power than earlier versions, less than 1.0 W in full color mode.
Power options include batteries, solar power panels, and human-powered generators, which make the XO
Networking
This article's factual accuracy may be compromised due to out-of-date information. (October 2009) |
- Wireless networking using an "Extended Range" ARMprocessor is included.
- Dual adjustable antennas for diversity reception.
Whenever the laptop is powered on it can participate in a
Building a
Shell
Input and ports
- Water-resistant membrane keyboard, customized to the locale in which it will be distributed.[45] The multiplication and division symbols are included. The keyboard is designed for the small hands of children.
- Five-key cursor-control pad; four directional keys plus Enter
- Four "Game Buttons" (functionally PgUp, PgDn, Home, and End) modeled after the ).
- Touchpad for mouse control and handwriting input
- Built-in color camera, to the right of the display, VGA resolution (640×480)
- Built-in stereospeakers
- Built-in microphone
- Audio based on the AC'97 codec, with jacks for external stereo speakers and microphones, Line-out, and Mic-in
- Three external USB 2.0 ports.
More than twenty different keyboards have been laid out, to suit local needs to match the standard keyboard for the country in which a laptop is intended. Around half of these have been manufactured for prototype machines.[45][46] There are parts of the world which do not have a standard keyboard representing their language. As Negroponte states this is "because there's no real commercial interest in making a keyboard".[47] One example of where the OLPC has bridged this gap is in creating an Amharic keyboard[48] for Ethiopia. For several languages, the keyboard is the first ever created for that language.[11]
Negroponte has demanded that the keyboard not contain a
Beneath the keyboard was a large area that resembled a very wide
Release history
The first XO prototype, displayed in 2005, had a built-in hand-crank generator for charging the battery. The XO-1 beta, released in early 2007, used a separate hand-crank generator.[citation needed]
The XO-1 was released in late 2007.[52][53]
- Power option: solar panel.
- CPU: 433 MHz IA-32 x86 AMD Geode LX-700 at 0.8 watts, with integrated graphics controller
- 256 DRAM (in 2006 the specification called for 128 MB of RAM)[54]
- 1024 kB (1 MB) flash ROM with open-source Open Firmware
- 1024 MB of SLC NAND flash memory (in 2006 the specifications called for 512 MB of flash memory)[32]
- Average battery life three hours
The XO 1.5 was released in early 2010.[55]
- Via/x86 CPU 4.5 W
- Fewer physical parts
- Lower power use
- Power option: solar panel.
- CPU: 400 to 1000 MHz IA-32 x86 VIA C7 at 0.8 watts, with integrated graphics controller
- 512 to 1024 DRAM
- 1024 kB (1 MB) flash ROM with open-source Open Firmware
- 4 GB of SLC NAND flash memory (upgradable, microSD)
- Average battery life 3–5 hours (varies with active suspend)
The XO 1.75 began development in 2010,[56][57] with full production starting in February 2012.[58]
- 2 watt ARM CPU
- Fewer physical parts, 40% lower power use.
- Power option: solar panel.[59]
- CPU: 400 to 1000 ARMMarvell Armada 610 at 0.8 watts, with integrated graphics controller
- 1024 to 2048 DDR3 (TBD)
- 1024 TBD kB (1 MB) flash ROM with open-source Open Firmware
- 4-8 GB of SLC NAND flash memory (upgradable, microSD)
- Accelerometer
- Average battery life 5–10 hours
The XO 2, previously scheduled for release in 2010, was canceled in favor of XO 3. With a price target $75, it had an elegant, lighter, folding dual touch-screen design. The hardware would have been open-source and sold by various manufacturers. A choice of operating system (Windows XP or Linux) was intended outside the United States. Its $150 price target in the United States includes two computers, one donated.[60]
The OLPC XO-3 was scheduled for release in late 2012. It was canceled in favor of the XO-4. It featured one solid color multi-touch screen design, and a solar panel in the cover or carrying case.
The XO 4 is a refresh of the XO 1 to 1.75 with a later ARM CPU and an optional touch screen. This model will not be available for consumer sales. There is a mini HDMI port to allow connecting to a display.[12]
The XO Tablet was designed by third-party Vivitar, rather than OLPC, and based on the Android platform[61][62] whereas all previous XO models were based on Sugar running on top of Fedora. It is commercially available[63][64] and has been used in OLPC projects.[65]
Software
Countries are expected to remove and add software to best adapt the laptop to the local laws and educational needs. As supplied by OLPC, all of the
- A pared-down version of Fedora Linux as the operating system, with students receiving root access (although not normally operating in that mode).[68]
- Open Firmware, written in a variant of Forth[69]
- A simple custom Mozilla Firefox.
- A word processor based on AbiWord.
- Email through the web-based Gmail service.[19]
- VoIPprograms.
- interpreted programming languages are included, such as JavaScript, Csound, the eToys version of Squeak, and Turtle Art[70]
- A music sequencer with digital instruments: Jean Piché's TamTam
- Helix.
The laptop uses the
Jim Gettys, responsible for the laptops' system software, has called for a re-education of programmers, saying that many applications use too much memory or even leak memory. "There seems to be a common fallacy among programmers that using memory is good: on current hardware it is often much faster to recompute values than to have to reference memory to get a precomputed value. A full cache miss can be hundreds of cycles, and hundreds of times the power use of an instruction that hits in the first level cache."[54]
On August 4, 2006, the
The laptop's security architecture, known as Bitfrost, was publicly introduced in February 2007. No passwords will be required for ordinary use of the machine. Programs are assigned certain bundles of rights at install time which govern their access to resources; users can later add more rights. Optionally, the laptops can be configured to request leases from a OLPC XS central server and to stop working when the leases expire; this is designed as a theft-prevention mechanism.
The pre-8.20 software versions were criticized for bad wireless connectivity and other minor issues.[76]
Deployment
The XO-1 is nicknamed ceibalita in Uruguay after the Ceibal project.[77]
Reception and reviews
The hand-crank system for powering the laptop was abandoned by designers shortly after it was announced, and the "mesh" internet-sharing approach performed poorly and was then dropped.[11] Bill Gates of Microsoft criticized the screen quality.[11]
Some critics of the program would have preferred less money being spent on technology and more money being spent on clean water and "real schools".[11] Some supporters worried about the lack of plans for teaching students. The program was based on constructionism, which is the idea that, if they had the tools, the kids would largely figure out how to do things on their own.[11] Others wanted children to learn the Microsoft Windows operating system, rather than OLPC's lightweight Linux derivative, on the belief that the children would use Microsoft Windows in their careers.[11] Intel's Classmate PC used Microsoft Windows and sold for US$200 to 400.[11]
The project was known as "the $100 laptop", but it originally cost $130 for a bare-bones laptop, and then the price rose to $180 in the next revision.[11] The solid-state alternative to a hard drive was sturdy, which meant that the laptop could be dropped with a lower risk of breaking—although more laptops were broken than expected—but it was costly, so the machines had limited storage capacity.[11]
See also
- Classmate PC
- Comparison of netbooks
- Computer technology for developing areas
- eMate 300
- Digital gap
- Lemote
- Linutop
- OLPC XO-3
- PlayPower
- Sakshat
- Sinomanic
- VIA pc-1 Initiative
- Zonbu
Notes
- ^ Lanxon, Nate. "Netbooks: Credit OLPC, not just Asus – Nate Lanxon, MP3 & Digital Music Editor – Technology Blog at CNET.co.uk". reviews.cnet.co.uk. Archived from the original on 2009-02-02. Retrieved 2009-01-17.
- ^ "Give one, get one: '$100 laptop' project to sell to public". CBC News. September 24, 2007. Retrieved 2009-01-07.
- ISBN 0-465-01830-0.
- ^ "Negropontism: A CM1 to 2B1 Backstory".
- ^ Ward, Mark (September 27, 2007). "BBC News – Technology – Portables to power PC industry". BBC News. Retrieved 2008-01-25.
- ^ "Vision: Children in the developing world are inadequately educated". Retrieved 2008-01-25.
- ^ S2CID 144391627.
- ^ Negroponte, Nicholas (February 2006). Nicholas Negroponte: One Laptop per Child. Ted.com (video). Retrieved 2013-08-16.
- ^ "One Laptop per Child: Ways to Give". Retrieved 2009-06-14.
- ^ "OLPC's Software". The OLPC Wiki. One Laptop per Child. Retrieved 2007-12-24.
- ^ a b c d e f g h i j Robertson, Adi (16 April 2018). "OLPC's $100 laptop was going to change the world – then it all went wrong". The Verge. Retrieved 2018-04-23.
- ^ a b c "XO-4 Touch". OLPC Wiki.laptop.org. 2008-05-27. Retrieved 2013-08-16.
- ^ UN debut for $100 laptop for poor. BBC, 17 November 2005.
- ^ Stecklow, Steve (November 14, 2005). "The $100 Laptop Moves Closer to Reality". Wall Street Journal.
- ^ Microsoft Windows XP on the Children's Machine XO?! (5 Dec 2006). "Microsoft Windows XP on the Children's Machine XO?!". OLPC News. Retrieved 2013-08-16.
- ^ Fildes, Jonathan (May 16, 2008). "'$100 Laptop' Platform Moves On". BBC News.
- ^ "XP on XO: Negroponte has lost his bearings". ZDNet. 2008-05-16. Retrieved 2013-08-16.
- ^ Fildess, Jonathan (May 16, 2008). "'$100 laptop' platform moves on". BBC News.
- ^ a b c d Markoff, John (30 November 2006). "For $150, Third-World laptop stirs big debate". The New York Times. Retrieved 17 February 2016.
- ^ Jan Melin (November 7, 2007). 100-dollarsdatorn masstillverkas. NYTeknik. Retrieved on December 24, 2007.
- ^ IDG News Service (December 15, 2007), One million OLPC laptop orders confirmed. Itworld.com. Retrieved on December 24, 2007. Archived January 13, 2008, at the Wayback Machine
- ^ "OLPC manufacturer to sell $200 laptop". Arstechnica. 29 March 2007. Retrieved 2007-03-29.
- ^ "One Laptop per Child has no plans to commercialize XO Computer". Business Wire. Archived from the original on 2007-01-20. Retrieved 2007-01-16.
- ^ a b "One Laptop Per Child – XO Giving". OLPC project. 2007-09-23.
- ^ Nystedt, Dan (2008-11-17). "Amazon launches OLPC 'Give 1 Get 1' laptop drive". IDG. Archived from the original on 2008-12-05. Retrieved 2008-11-17.
- Technology Review. Retrieved 2008-12-16.
- ^ "Low-Price Laptops Tested at City Schools". The New York Sun. 2008-09-30. Retrieved 2013-08-16.
- ^ "World's Largest Design Award, Top 6 Winners Announced", Digital Journal, August 25, 2007
- ^ "Index:Award > 2007 > Winners 2007 > OLPC XO". Archived from the original on 2011-07-21. Retrieved 2010-07-29.
- ^ "A conversation with Mary Lou Jepsen", ACM Queue journal, November 1, 2007
- ^ Tom Sanders and Paul Briggs (December 5, 2006), Microsoft looking to run Windows on OLPC, VNUnet. Vnunet.com. Retrieved on 2007-12-24
- ^ a b Stephen Shankland (2006-04-04). "Negroponte: Slimmer Linux needed for $100 laptop". CNET. Retrieved 2007-12-24.
- ^ "Mary Lou Jepsen Bio". Mary Lou Jepsen, Ph.D. December 3, 2007. Archived from the original on January 24, 2005.
- ^ "Companies make 5–10% profit from not for profit initiative". Retrieved 2008-09-09.
- ^ Negroponte, Nicholas (March 2008). "One laptop per child" (Lecture). American Association for the Advancement of Science. Retrieved 2008-04-01.
- ^ "One Laptop Per Child – a Preview of the Hundred Dollar Laptop". Worldchanging. November 3, 2005. Archived from the original on October 12, 2007.
- ^ Jepsen, Mary Lou. "Our screen, described by its parts". Retrieved 2008-06-16.
- ^ Mary Lou Jepsen (May 27, 2008). "Higher resolution than we thought: the XO laptop screen". Archived from the original on October 11, 2008. Retrieved 2009-10-27.
- S2CID 62562594. SID08. Archived from the originalon 2008-12-07. Retrieved 2008-06-16.
- faculty page.
- ^ "Potenco – Products". Archived from the original on 2008-02-03. Retrieved 2008-01-25.
- ^ "One Laptop Per Child". Retrieved 2008-11-18.
- ^ "Bug report: WPA/WPA2 not working with Marvell Libertas". Retrieved 2007-09-30.
- ^ Brooke, James (January 26, 2004). "Technology; E-Mail on Wheels". The New York Times. Retrieved 2008-01-25.
- ^ a b Keyboard layouts for over a dozen languages.
- ^ OLPC Keyboard layouts, OLPC Wiki
- ^ ABC. (2008, March 22). The Science Show: One Laptop Per Child. Retrieved May 7, 2008, from [1]
- ^ OLPC (2008, April 21). OLPC Amharic Keyboard. Retrieved May 7, 2008, from OLPC:OLPC Amharic Keyboard
- ^ a b Don Marti (October 27, 2006),Doing it for the kids, man: Children's laptop inspires open source projects, LinuxWorld.com. Retrieved on December 25, 2007. [dead link]
- ^ a b http://wiki.laptop.org/images/b/b0/KGDMFA001-non-confidential.pdf, 7 March 2011
- ^ 7 March 2011
- ^ Hardware specification. The OLPC Wiki. Retrieved on 2007-12-24.
- ^ "CL1 Hardware Design Specification" (PDF). One Laptop per Child. 2008-09-28. Retrieved 2011-05-16.
- ^ a b "Interview: Jim Gettys (Part I)". LWN.net. June 28, 2006.
- OLPC team. "Hardware specification 1.5". Retrieved 2011-01-19.
- ^ Matthew Humphries. "OLPC XO 1.75 laptop is faster with ARM chip than x86 models". Retrieved 2011-01-19.
- OLPC team. "XO_1.75_A1". Retrieved 2011-01-19.
- ^ "Xo 1.75 C2 - OLPC".
- ^ "XO-1.75". Retrieved 2011-08-11.
- ^ XO 2.0. Popular Science Feb 2008
- ^ "XO Tablet Review". tabletsforkidsguide.com. Retrieved 2014-06-11.
- ^ "XO Tablet Technical Details". xotablet.com. Retrieved 2014-06-11.
- ^ "Introducing the XO tablet". Retrieved 3 October 2014.
- ^ "XO-3". Retrieved 3 October 2014.
- ^ "Labrador Aboriginal Youth Abroad participants embark on journey of a lifetime accompanied by OLPC technology". 21 July 2014. Retrieved 3 October 2014.
- ^ Localization. The OLPC Wiki. One Laptop Per Child. Retrieved on December 25, 2007.
- ^ Software components. The OLPC Wiki. One Laptop Per Child. Retrieved on December 25, 2007.
- ^ "Interview with Jim Gettys, part II". LWN.net. July 6, 2006.
- ^ a b OLPC – Hardware and Software Archived 2007-10-12 at the Wayback Machine, Michael Gartenberg, Jupiter Research, 27 April 2007
- ^ Turtle Art is a visual programming language that, like Logo, manipulates an on-screen turtle.
- ^ "One Laptop Per Child Includes Wikipedia on $100 Laptops; Subset of online encyclopedia to be available in static version to children and teachers in developing world". Wikimedia Foundation (Press release). 4 April 2006.
- ^ "User talk:Jimbo Wales". Wikipedia.
- ^ "SimCity for OLPC". Slashdot.org. 2007-03-08.
- ^ GDC: SJ Klein Asks For Serious OLPC Content, Gamasutra Industry News, 6 March 2007
- ^ Electronic Arts. "EA Donates Original City-Building Game, SIMCITY, To One Laptop Per Child Initiative". Retrieved 2008-01-25.
- ^ Bender, Walter (16 December 2008). "Criticism and Rebuttal on Sugar User Interface". OLPC News. Retrieved 2013-08-16.
- ^ La última ceibalita, Portal 180, October 14, 2009 (in Spanish) Archived October 18, 2009, at the Wayback Machine
References
- $100 Laptop Nears Launch, SPIE; The International Society for Optical Engineering. The Optics, Photonics, Fibers, and Lasers Resource, July 2006
- $100 laptop production begins, BBC News, July 22, 2007
- $100-laptop created for world's poorest countries, New Scientist, November 17, 2005
- Doing it for the kids, man: Children's laptop inspires open source projects October 27, 2006 Article about how the project's hardware constraints will lead to better apps and kludge-removal for everyone
- First video of a working "One Laptop Per Child" laptop – demonstration of the first working prototype, by Silicon Valley Sleuth blog
- "Hand-cranked computers: Is this a wind-up?", The Independent, November 24, 2005
- "Hardware Specification". OLPC Wiki.
- "Laptop with a mission widens its audience", The New York Times, October 4, 2007
- "Make your own $100 laptop...?", Make magazine, December 2, 2005
- "Red Hat Adds Muscle to One Laptop Per Child Movement". Retrieved 2006-02-01.
- Sugar, presentation of the userinterface – Videostream
- The $100 Laptop: an Up-Close Look – Web video of the first laptop prototype, by Andy Carvin[dead link]