One Laptop Per Child Talks

In October 2006, Mark J. Foster, Vice President, Engineering and Chief Architect of One Laptop Per Child and a leading computer portables expert,presented OLPC technology at the Stanford EE Computer Systems Colloquium.

Due to its length, the transcript of his speech was divided into three parts. Below is Part 1 of Mr. Foster's speech. Please continue to Part 2 and Part 3 for the full transcript.

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Announcer: All right. We'll get started now. This is EE380. The Electrical Engineering Department's, Computer Systems Curriculum. Our speaker today is Mark Foster From One Laptop Per Child, a non-profit organization.

Before we get started with the instructional speaker, is anyone here that's taking this class for credit that was not here last week? OK, So if you'd like to take the course for a one unit credit, all you need to do is watch all ten lectures, and when you watched last week's lecture online, the first five minutes of class, I reviewed the class procedures and have you take the class for credit. So just go ahead and watch that, and if you have any extra questions, you can send e-mail. OK? Thank you.

So, how many of you have heard of One Laptop Per Child? OK that's amazing, that's almost everyone in the whole room. Mark, does that surprise you?

Mark Foster: It does surprise me, I'm afraid, but the numbers keep growing.

Announcer: So how many of you have heard of it before today's class, if you hadn't known the abstract? OK, good, so the numbers are still the same. Just for those of you who aren't familiar with it, let me give you a bit of background on One Laptop Per Child. Since it is a fairly new organization. The association is a non-profit organization in the US that's setup to oversee the children’s machine project. And what they're trying to do is to provide laptops to children in developing countries at a very low cost and sell them to the governments of these countries.

It was first announced at the world economic forum in Switzerland in January 2005. And the Chairman of One Laptop Per Child is Nicholas Negroponte, and their CTO is Mary Lou Jepsen. Mark Foster, who is talking today, is their Vice President of Engineering and the chief architect of the systems. One laptop gained a lot of attention after Nicholas Negroponte and Kofeanon [sp] presented the working prototype of the CM1, which is the Children's Machine One at the world summit at the information society in Tunisia, and that was in November last year. So, just under a year ago.

Now, Mark. Let me give you an idea of Mark Foster's background. He has an MBA from Notre Dame, and he's actually talked to EE380 before. He spoke about SHARK, which was a networking computer. So if you're interested, you could actually find that talk in the archives, if you enjoy his talk today. He's led different projects in portable computing at Apple, at Deck, and at Zenith. He created the first notebook with Ethernet, which was the Z-note. The first true sub notebook, which was the Z-lite. And the thinnest notebook in the world at the time, which was the Hi-Note Ultra.

Tags: Dual Mode Screen | Electrical Engineering | Gnome Clock | Mark J. Foster | OLPC Technology | One Laptop Per Child | Physical Environment | Stanford EE Computer Systems Colloquium |

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In October 2006, Mark J. Foster, Vice President, Engineering and Chief Architect of One Laptop Per Child and a leading computer portables expert, presented OLPC technology at the Stanford EE Computer Systems Colloquium. Specifically, EE380. The Electrical Engineering Department's, Computer Systems Curriculum

Due to its length, the transcript of his speech was divided into three parts. Below is Part 2 of Mr. Foster's speech. Please continue to Part 1 and Part 3 for the full transcript.

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Mark: Mechanical design. Again, I warn you. This is not just computer architecture in this case. If you really want to solve a real world problem, you can't just restrict yourself to the pc board, because dropping a pc board in the middle of Guiana, is not going to help. You need to give them a product. Something you can hold, something you can carry, something that's strong, You've got to solve real world problems, and that's why I have to talk about mechanical design if you really want to understand the product that we're trying to accomplish.

So first, absolutely safety first, of course reduction of hazardous substances, yes yes yes, even though that's not a requirement, of course we're going to do it, it's obvious. We tried to make the thing, it's rounded, friendly, easy for kids to hold, it's got a very convenient handle on it. But, moisture, dust, dirt resistant is an interesting challenge, it's really hard. Thermals get interesting too. Even if you have a low power CPU, when you can't pump air through the box, tricky, lots of work required to solve that one, even with low power levels. But again it's important, because you need to see the kids. A lot of them live in huts, on dirt floors, and this is not a clean environment, and it's not a matter of teaching them to take care of it, the environment itself doesn't support them, so you've got to do something about that, and we are.

[question from audience] So there's no airflow at all, whatsoever?

Mark: There may be a tiny amount, but there is almost none at the moment, let me put it that way. We're working on thermal solutions as we speak. I can't tell you what the final solution will be, but it will certainly be nothing like traditional systems. Grabbing this thing, and this is blowing hot air all over the place [laptop on table].

A very extra rigid shell that we call mainframe internally. It's an internal structure that helps reinforce the outer chassis unlike a normal notebook. There's actually in fact, a plastic wall that sits between the LCD and the motherboard. The way the system is sitting right now in that top right here, the motherboard actually sits on the top and the LCD is on the bottom [sectional picture of the machine]. They're sandwiched together, so it's unlike other notebooks in that way as well. There's almost nothing in the base except the keyboard, touchpad, and battery pack. And why do we do that, because it increases reliability.

When things move and twitch, and you've got to run wires through hinges and connectors, reliability goes down. And so, by doing this one single board with the LCD right underneath it, we substantially improve MTBF (mean time between failure). We improve the reliability of the box, that's what it's for. Another little trick is we are doing 3D connector reinforcements. What we're doing there is actually internally on the plastics, one of the most common failure mechanisms on portables is your connectors. All these things that are sticking out that you are plugging stuff in and out of. And they break.

They start getting loose, and they get looser, and they eventually break and you got to get the thing repaired. So again, if you're sitting in the middle of the Sahara, you can just bump down to the nearest computer repair store and ask someone to fix it. And we don't want them to break to begin with. So we're actually building plastic around the connectors, to constrain them, to hold them in position, to provide much more strength, because again, what we're trying to do is deliver a system that will actually work in the real world for a long time. And then bumpers, these are an interesting story, I better keep it short for the day.

Tags: Hazardous Substances | Laptop Physical Design | Mark J. Foster | Monocolor Capability | OLPC | Polythyrene |

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In October 2006, Mark J. Foster, Vice President, Engineering and Chief Architect of One Laptop Per Child and a leading computer portables expert, presented OLPC technology at the Stanford EE Computer Systems Colloquium. Specifically, EE380. The Electrical Engineering Department's, Computer Systems Curriculum

Due to its length, the transcript of his speech was divided into three parts. Below is Part 3 of Mr. Foster's speech. Please continue to Part 1 and Part 2 for the full transcript.

---

Mark: Now, we're going to shift gears a little bit. As we're putting this system together, I want to talk about some of the stuff that happens in the real world, and what I'm going to do is talk about a pair of ASICs that I didn't know I was going to create or have to create. Instead we're going to talk about as we're marching through the program, we have these various things happen, and they led to the creation of ASICs and this happened twice, and I'll discuss this process and both of these with you and let you see what it's really like working on systems like this. So first thing is, we needed a faster storage interface.

As it turns out, the GX2's nand flash controller, our primary storage that we store everything, is too slow. We wanted it to be fast, and so, that's tough, because it's highly integrated within the Southbridge chip that comes with the CPU. The second thing is, at the end of march was my first countries meeting, when we had all the countries representative in the room, and we went through and described the machine and the one question that really jumped out was, how can we do some storage expansion? We want to have the ability to get more content.

And our first answer was absolutely and still is the wireless mesh. The combination of the school's server having storage that's easily accessible from your machine, provides a convenient repository. And we're providing tools in fact for backup and other means of managing your content. But at the same time, what if you're not in range of that school server? They wanted some ability to get more storage.

And the final thing is, the camera. No, we did not originally have a camera. But as they went through their UI thing, the UI experiments, they learned something that I thought was very compelling. Imagine the situation, you're illiterate. You can talk, but you can't read or write. This may be because you're three, or it may be because you haven't been properly educated. Whatever the reason, and now suddenly the OLPC machines arrives.

And the scenario is, as you open up that notebook, it guides you through the process of setting it up, taking your picture, and because the wireless mesh automatically configures itself, the first experience you have when you open up this machine, are the pictures of your friends, in your village starting to appear around you. And it was really like why don't we stop arguing about the cost when I got that through my head. We had to do it cheaply though. How do you do this inexpensively? This is hard because this is not an inexpensive option. We created a little device we call CAFE. Camera and flash enabler. It's a bus-mastering PC interface, high performance NAND flash controller, it also adds a secure digital slot and it has the camera interface. And interestingly enough, this part is in SVGA form right now, all three of the sub-systems are running, and this happened in about ten weeks.

Very very fast, and one of the reasons, because we've got some great partners who believe in the project, who presented this to them, they kind of went gulp, and they made it a priority, and they made it happen. And again, that list of sponsors, I want to thank them profoundly, they let us do things that a lot of companies can't do, we certainly can hit schedules that a lot of companies can't hit. And that part is going to be here in ASIC form in December.

This one was even worse. The very first week that I joined OLPC, I saw Mary Lou's panel, and realized wait a minute. How do I talk to those pixels which are in different locations? In other words, if the first pixel on the first scan line is red, and the first pixel on the next scan line is green, and the first pixel on the next scan line is blue, oh my gosh. Now you start thinking about those image perimeters, to blip onto the screen or trying to do video, ouch, tough, tricky. That pixel pattern I showed you with the colored stripes, is physical. That's the way the pixels are laid out. So that was tough.

Tags: Camera And Flash Enabler | DCON | Low Voltage Differential Signaling | Mark J. Foster | Nand Flash Controller | PC Interface | TANSTAAFL |

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