Olpc hardware hack

Yes, knowing all your state capitols how to spell "neighborhood" properly and whatnot isn't a bad thing, but memorizing facts and procedures isn't going to inspire kids to go out and learn by teaching themselves, which is the key to a good education. Instead, OLPC is trying to figure out a way to teach kids to learn, which is what this experiment is all about.

Rather than give out laptops they're actually Motorola Zoom tablets plus solar chargers running custom software to kids in schools with teachers, the OLPC Project decided to try something completely different: it delivered some boxes of tablets to two villages in Ethiopia, taped shut, with no instructions whatsoever.

Just like, "hey kids, here's this box, you can open it if you want, see ya! Just to give you a sense of what these villages in Ethiopia are like, the kids and most of the adults there have never seen a word. No books, no newspapers, no street signs, no labels on packaged foods or goods. And these villages aren't unique in that respect; there are many of them in Africa where the literacy rate is close to zero.

So you might think that if you're going to give out fancy tablet computers, it would be helpful to have someone along to show these people how to use them, right? But that's not what OLPC did. They just left the boxes there, sealed up, containing one tablet for every kid in each of the villages nearly a thousand tablets in total , pre-loaded with a custom English-language operating system and SD cards with tracking software on them to record how the tablets were used.

Taped shut. No instruction, no human being. I thought, the kids will play with the boxes! He powered it up. Within five days, they were using 47 apps per child per day. I think the next step is just installing this on the OLPC and getting rid of Sugar at least till it is ready for prime time. You're implying here that running Sugar is not " Hence Ubuntu on the XO. My point again XP is not really only about not being able to edit the code, but also about lack of collaboration features.

Unfortunately Ubuntu, as with many other Linux GUI try the better they can to mimic the windows experience so ex-Microsoft clients will feel at home. Until the day collaboration on Ubuntu is as easy as in Sugar, until they have a contextual IM friends list built in the system and not as in a separate app, until you can see what your friends are using, download, install and run it seamlessly, until you can set the collaboration features even before launching an app, until you have a shared space for files in every application by default, then I will see this as no more than a mmmm-okay hack..

Next step: Can someone post a review of how well Ubuntu runs on the XO? Pros and cons? The big pro, I reckon, would be that there are more applications compiled and ready-to-go right now for ubuntu Ubuntu would be really nice on the XO but without the special power management provided by the next release Update-1 of the Sugar OS it does not stand a chance in usability.

It would give you only hours of use as currently with Sugar which is nothing compared to the runtimes OLPC promised and I hope will come with Update Of course, if somebody hacks all of the power management features of Sugar into a customized Ubuntu image, I will be the first to get rid of Sugar completely. Not meant to be an offense to Sugar developers but it is simply not ready yet and I believe is suitable for really young children. Ubuntu on the XO is not a comment on the viability of Sugar.

It is meant as a better alternative to XP. All things equal - Sugar is the UI of choice. Sadly, for some governments, Sugar will be too radical, too much a change from what they expect, or want their children to use. I gave XOUbuntu a try this morning Snowday, woot!

I used moocapiean excellent instructions and got it running using only the XO, and I just got basic Linux knowledge. It runs quiet smoothly, in my opinion a bit faster then sugar, thats always showing me a lagging frame and so on when only Browse is open.

Network connection wasn't an issue, neither with an usb-ethernet adapter nor wireless in an unprotected network. I installed some smaller programs like Abiword and it is usable.

When i tried to install OpenOffice. Major concern for me is that the screen orientation key doesn't work so using it as an ebook isn't possilbe. And as a personal note, I hate that tapping the mousepad is recognized as left-click, but didn't find a way to turn it off.

Verdict: it is relatively easy to install, works reasonable fast and for some it might be a good alternative to Sugar. I hope at some point in the near future there will be an 'XO For Dummies' handbook available. Some of us need to be led step by step through the process of installing improvements that the more 'savvy' have developed.

With all the negative comments about Sugar, I will defend it. I for one will continue to use Sugar no matter the alternative. Consider LeNet , a pioneering deep neural network, designed to do image classification.

In it was shown to outperform other machine techniques for recognizing handwritten letters and numerals. But by AlexNet , a neural network that crunched through about 1, times as many multiply-and-accumulate operations as LeNet, was able to recognize thousands of different types of objects in images. Advancing from LeNet's initial success to AlexNet required almost 11 doublings of computing performance.

During the 14 years that took, Moore's law provided much of that increase. The challenge has been to keep this trend going now that Moore's law is running out of steam. The usual solution is simply to throw more computing resources—along with time, money, and energy—at the problem.

As a result, training today's large neural networks often has a significant environmental footprint. One study found, for example, that training a certain deep neural network for natural-language processing produced five times the CO 2 emissions typically associated with driving an automobile over its lifetime. Improvements in digital electronic computers allowed deep learning to blossom, to be sure. But that doesn't mean that the only way to carry out neural-network calculations is with such machines.

Decades ago, when digital computers were still relatively primitive, some engineers tackled difficult calculations using analog computers instead.

As digital electronics improved, those analog computers fell by the wayside. But it may be time to pursue that strategy once again, in particular when the analog computations can be done optically. It has long been known that optical fibers can support much higher data rates than electrical wires. That's why all long-haul communication lines went optical, starting in the late s.

Since then, optical data links have replaced copper wires for shorter and shorter spans, all the way down to rack-to-rack communication in data centers. Optical data communication is faster and uses less power. Optical computing promises the same advantages. But there is a big difference between communicating data and computing with it. And this is where analog optical approaches hit a roadblock. Conventional computers are based on transistors, which are highly nonlinear circuit elements—meaning that their outputs aren't just proportional to their inputs, at least when used for computing.

Nonlinearity is what lets transistors switch on and off, allowing them to be fashioned into logic gates. This switching is easy to accomplish with electronics, for which nonlinearities are a dime a dozen. But photons follow Maxwell's equations, which are annoyingly linear, meaning that the output of an optical device is typically proportional to its inputs. The trick is to use the linearity of optical devices to do the one thing that deep learning relies on most: linear algebra. To illustrate how that can be done, I'll describe here a photonic device that, when coupled to some simple analog electronics, can multiply two matrices together.

Such multiplication combines the rows of one matrix with the columns of the other. More precisely, it multiplies pairs of numbers from these rows and columns and adds their products together—the multiply-and-accumulate operations I described earlier. My MIT colleagues and I published a paper about how this could be done in We're working now to build such an optical matrix multiplier.

The basic computing unit in this device is an optical element called a beam splitter. Although its makeup is in fact more complicated, you can think of it as a half-silvered mirror set at a degree angle.

If you send a beam of light into it from the side, the beam splitter will allow half that light to pass straight through it, while the other half is reflected from the angled mirror, causing it to bounce off at 90 degrees from the incoming beam. Now shine a second beam of light, perpendicular to the first, into this beam splitter so that it impinges on the other side of the angled mirror. Half of this second beam will similarly be transmitted and half reflected at 90 degrees.

The two output beams will combine with the two outputs from the first beam. So this beam splitter has two inputs and two outputs. To use this device for matrix multiplication, you generate two light beams with electric-field intensities that are proportional to the two numbers you want to multiply. Let's call these field intensities x and y.

Shine those two beams into the beam splitter, which will combine these two beams. In addition to the beam splitter, this analog multiplier requires two simple electronic components—photodetectors—to measure the two output beams. Historically, such device names had incrementing-number suffixes based on a poorly-specified "probe order", which tended to change when other devices were plugged and unplugged.

This "devname-to-instance" binding problem can be solved with device tree aliases as follows. For example, serial drivers can look for names matching "serialN", where N is a small integer, associating "ttySN" with the device instance named by serialN s property value a pathname string.

It's suitable for associating a well-known name with a well-known pathname. If you need to create an association dynamically based on some run-time determination, you have to fall back to lower level commands. For a long debugging session, you would probably prefer not to type a bunch of device-tree modification commands over and over.

The commands can go as-is outside of a colon definition i. If you want to use the commands inside a colon definition, you'll run into problems with the "dev" command. The trouble with "dev" is that its argument e. Prefix Forth commands interact surprisingly with the Forth compiler specifically, "dev", when compiled inside a Forth definition, tries to get its argument later, at run-time, instead of when the definition is being compiled.

The only other command above that would need this trick is devalias - which is also prefix instead of postfix. Note that there are other ways to do this without evaluate , but the evaluate technique is just fine for experimentation. You can write commands into a host file with a text editor, then paste the commands to a serial-line ok prompt in a terminal emulator. For longer commands, it runs the risk of overrunning the UART input buffer, which bottlenecks on echoing back the characters as they are being typed.

OFW has a dl command think "download" for this purpose. Or you can use the terminal emulator's "send file in ascii" command to send from a file instead of from a paste buffer. You could store your command sequence in a file on some medium like a USB stick and interpret with the fl shorthand for fload command:. Jump to: navigation , search.