OLPC XO
The OLPC XO is a low cost laptop computer intended to be distributed to children in developing countries around the world, to provide them with access to knowledge, and opportunities to "explore, experiment and express themselves". The XO was developed by Nicholas Negroponte, a co-founder of MIT's Media Lab, and designed by Yves Behar's Fuseproject company. The laptop is manufactured by Quanta Computer and developed by One Laptop per Child, a non-profit 501 organization.
The subnotebooks were designed for sale to government-education systems which then would give each primary school child their own laptop. Pricing was set to start at US$188 in 2006, with a stated goal to reach the $100 mark in 2008 and the 50-dollar mark by 2010. When offered for sale in the Give One Get One campaigns of Q4 2006 and Q4 2007, the laptop was sold at $199.
The rugged, low-power computers use flash memory instead of a hard disk drive, and come with a pre-installed operating system derived from Fedora Linux, with the Sugar graphical user interface. Mobile ad hoc networking via 802.11s Wi-Fi mesh networking, to allow many machines to share Internet access as long as at least one of them could connect to an access point, was initially announced, but quickly abandoned after proving unreliable.
The latest version of the OLPC XO is the XO-4 Touch, which was 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 in Tunis, Tunisia. The device shown was a rough prototype using a standard development board. Negroponte estimated that the screen alone required three more months of development. The first working prototype was demonstrated at the project's Country Task Force Meeting on May 23, 2006.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." Therefore, Linux was chosen.
In 2006, 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. The version of Windows that ran on the XO was Windows XP.
Approximately 400 developer boards were distributed in mid-2006; 875 working prototypes were delivered in late 2006; 2400 Beta-2 machines were distributed at the end of February 2007; full-scale production started November 6, 2007. 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. Quanta plans to offer machines very similar to the XO-1 on the open market.
The One Laptop Per Child project originally stated that a consumer version of the XO laptop was not planned. In 2007, the project established a website, laptopgiving.org, for outright donations and for a "Give 1 Get 1" offer valid from November 12, 2007 until December 31, 2007. For each computer purchased at a cost of $399, an XO is also sent to a child in a developing nation. OLPC again restarted the G1G1 program through Amazon.com in November 2008, but has since stopped as of December 2008 or 2009.
On May 20, 2008, OLPC announced the next generation of XO, OLPC XO-2 which was thereafter cancelled in favor of the tablet-like designed XO-3. In late 2008, the New York City Department of Education began a project to purchase large numbers of XO computers for use by schoolchildren.
The design received the Community category award of the 2007 Index: Award.
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.
Goals
The XO-1 is designed to be low-cost, small, durable, and efficient. It is shipped with a slimmed-down version of Fedora Linux and a custom GUI named Sugar that is intended to help young children collaborate. The XO-1 includes a video camera, a microphone, long-range Wi-Fi, and a hybrid stylus and touchpad. Along with a standard plug-in power supply, human and solar power sources are available, allowing operation far from a commercial power grid. Mary Lou Jepsen has listed the design goals of the device as follows:- Minimal power use, with a design target of 2–3 Watts 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-book function
- Open source and free software provided with the laptop
A built-in hand-crank generator was part of the notebook in the original design; however, it is now an optional clamp-on peripheral.
Hardware
Display
The first-generation OLPC laptops have a novel low-cost liquid crystal display.It has a 1200 × 900 7.5 inch diagonal transflective LCD that uses 0.1 to 1.0 W depending on mode. There are two modes: Reflective monochrome mode for low-power use in sunlight. This mode provides very sharp images for high-quality text and Backlit color mode, with an alternance of red, green and blue pixels.
The XO 1.75 developmental version for XO-3 has an optional touch screen.
The electronic visual display is the costliest component in most laptops. In April 2005, Negroponte hired Mary Lou Jepsen, who was interviewing to join the Media Arts and Sciences faculty at the MIT Media Lab in September 2008, as OLPC Chief Technology Officer. Jepsen developed a new display for the first-generation OLPC laptop, inspired by the design of small LCDs used in portable DVD players, which she estimated would cost about $35. In the OLPC XO-1, the screen is estimated to be the second most costly component, after the central processing unit and chipset.
Jepsen has described the removal of the filters that color the RGB subpixels as the critical design innovation in the new LCD. Instead of using subtractive color filters, the display uses a plastic diffraction grating and lenses on the rear of the LCD to illuminate each pixel. This grating pattern is stamped using the same technology used to make DVDs. The grating splits the light from the white backlight into a spectrum. The red, green, and blue components are diffracted into the correct positions to illuminate the corresponding pixel with R, G or B. This innovation results in a much brighter display for a given amount of backlight illumination: while the color filters in a regular display typically absorb 85% of the light that hits them, this display absorbs little of that light. Most LCD screens at the time used cold cathode fluorescent lamp backlights which were fragile, difficult or impossible to repair, required a high voltage power supply, were relatively power-hungry, and accounted for 50% of the screens' cost. The light-emitting diode backlight in the XO-1 is easily replaceable, rugged, and low-cost.
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 LED backlight, the display shows a color image composed of both RGB and grayscale information. When lit primarily from the front by ambient light, for example from the sun, the display shows a monochromatic image composed of just the grayscale information.
"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, 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. 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 put about 588 × 441 to 882 × 662 pixels in this amount of physical area 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 × 738. A conventional liquid crystal display with the same number of green pixels as the OLPC XO-1 would be 693 × 520. 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 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.