One Laptop Per Child Talks

eWEEK Chief Technology Analyst Jim Rapoza interviewed both OLPC CTO Mary Lou Jepsen and VP Walter Bender in the Tech Rising podcast "The Technology of the OLPC's XO Laptop".

Mary Lou Jepsen gave an overview of the XO BTest-4 technology and Walter Bender explained the capabilities of the Sugar user interface.

The podcast is available for download here and the OLPC Talks-produced transcript is below.

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Jim Rapoza: Welcome to techrising, a weekly pod cast dedicated to emerging technologies, their effect on business, people and the world. I'm Jim Rapoza chief technology analyst of e week. Few technologies in recent years have inspired as much interest or discussion as the one lap top per child effort to provide what has been called the hundred dollar lap top of the developing world.

When first discussed many said it would be impossible to build a laptop for anywhere near that price. Then, as the laptop came closer to reality, many took to criticizing it's capabilities and it's mission to provide computer resources as an educational tool for children around the world. Now, the hundred dollar, actually a hundred and seventy-five dollar lap top, dubbed the XO is going into mass production and it will soon be in the hands of millions of children of the developing world.

However, while much of the focus has been on the price of the laptop, many of the most impressive aspects of the XO are in it's technology. The XO has made some impressive breakthroughs in power management, display technology and collaboration. I recently had the opportunity to spend time with the offices of the OLPC and take a first hand look at the final beta of the XO.

While there, OLPC president Walter (Bender) gave me a demo of the XO sugar software inner face and I also got on the phone with OLPC's CTO Mary Lou Jepsen to talk about the many technology innovations of the XO hardware. To start off, I asked her about the recent beta release, about the many innovations of the XO.

Mary Lou Jepsen: Yes, There are two thousand BTest-4's that we built about three weeks ago in Shanghai that have now been delivered to Cambridge and have completed all their testing and so they will be distributed to a lot of developers and kids actually, to test on. People don't realize they focus on the price, they don't realize that there's a stunning technology inside. Some stuff that you would want in your two thousand dollar lap top.

Jim Rapoza: Right.

Mary Lou Jepsen: That you don't have. Where do you start, the industrial design right, the style of the housing is really much more functional than usual laptops, the display, the power management, the security system, um, the mess network, sugar.

Jim Rapoza: So, with display, the we'll work our way through all of them.

Mary Lou Jepsen: The hardest part was perceived to be designing a display. To make a hundred dollar lap top that meant you had to reduce the cost of the display from, you know, the cost of the display is more than a hundred dollars.

Jim Rapoza: Right.

Mary Lou Jepsen: In the process, they also wanted a better display, something more appropriate for use conditions in the developing world and use conditions everywhere. And so, the power conditions had to be really low. I always wanted a screen that I can read outside.

Jim Rapoza: Yea.

Mary Lou Jepsen: So, I added that to it. What happens, though is; I came up finally I think eight months into it with the idea and then I had to convince the manufacturer but that was really hard. Unlike designing silicon, where you have a bunch of people that design you know ct's and chips and then they send the files to the factory and then they can get the silicon. This doesn't happen in display. There are five companies in the world that control 90% of lcd production and lcd production, the investment now dwarfs silicon.

Jim Rapoza: [laughs]

Mary Lou Jepsen: [laughs] I mean, it's amazing. They never, and I've asked around a lot especially now that the screens been around awhile, for more than a year really. No one knows of any instance when the factories have ever taken an external design. Ever. I was able to come up with a design that could use the standard manufacturing processes so this display is; the average power consumption of the display is about 7 watts and if you adjust it for size, a lot of people compare our size to a 7" diagonal display.

Jim Rapoza: Uh-huh

Mary Lou Jepsen: It's really kind of unfair cause we've got 30% more area because of the aspect ratio it's 7.5x3.4 so it's 30% more area, but even still, even if you compare a 7" sort of panel takes about 3 watts, with the back light on, 1/3 of that power consumption, but with the back light off we draw about 100 milliwatts. That's really cool. Plus, you can read it outside. It's 200 dots per inch. In the screen, what I did is something that's been done in video encoding for a really long time. It has to do with how the human visual system works and you would think people designing displays would really think about the layout of your retina.

Jim Rapoza: [laughs]

Mary Lou Jepsen: And. How we perceive light. How we perceive colored light different from black and white. Luminous vs chrominus. And, it turns out that even in old td stems and tsc pow mpeg.

Jim Rapoza: Yea.

Mary Lou Jepsen: You have about 3 or 4x the resolution in black and white than in color. [laughs]

Jim Rapoza: Yea.

Mary Lou Jepsen: Because, it looks ok and it's a way to deal with the narrow pipe. But, nobody's ever made a display like that. People use this in printing all the time but why not in display? If you do that in display, what you can do is, each pixel in my screen actually does double duty. It's both a black and white pixel. Reflection [??] in reflection.

Jim Rapoza: Yea.

Mary Lou Jepsen: And, it's one color, it's either red or green or blue, that allows light to transmit it. So, there's a whole in the center of the pixel with a color filter over it. The rest of the pixel just is a mirror with no color filter over it. And so, it's always a black and white pixel plus one of these colors. And that turned out to be this better lay out so really kind of a low res. screen with just a conceptual change.

Jim Rapoza: Right.

Mary Lou Jepsen: With lower the power and [??] this 200 dot resolution and you can use it outside. And, the really cool part about it, I say this is the, I've spent 20 years in the display industry, it went from specification to high volume mass producible ready to go in less then six months and that's what I think I am most proud of is that you know, it's ready to go. In display research in high end stuff, a lot of this stuff takes 20 or 30 years and never can get into mass production and that just wasn't good enough to be acceptable for this project.

It has to work and it has to be ready to go. And the other thing about it, we had to redo the driver electronics because the stretch of color is actually diagonal, that's so that you can increase or decrease the resolution in the vertical and horizontal. Usually, there are just the lines if we laid them out in the normal way with, you usually have these vertical stripes, red screen, blue. They look like with a magnifying glass on your screen you'll see these red green blue stripes, but that would only make the resolution increase horizontally. We want to be able to read web pages right?

Jim Rapoza: Yea.

Mary Lou Jepsen. To increase and decrease the resolution in X and Y and so that's key but we had to smooth the pixels to create this diagonal slant to them so had to make, actually also use the ctl interface cause the pixel count is pretty low. It's 1200x900 but when peoples use like in xga displays like 1024x768x3.

Jim Rapoza: Yea.

Mary Lou Jepsen: So, were actually at about even, about a mega pixel total. What the traditional display would do is divide that. They use a transistor for each red, green and blue.

Jim Rapoza: um-hmm

Mary Lou Jepsen: And, together call it a pixel, which is actually the opposite of what you should do because we know that you want to have more luminance information and your using the chrominence. So your actually using 1/3 the black and white information compared to the color information which is actually how we see. And then, there's this final thing that we did and something that we've done for awhile in a former field is we used to put memory in the display so it could have a little frame buffer in it. Well, we couldn't quite do that in the process for flat panel lcd but we could put some memory in the timing controller so that the display could stay on and we turn off the rest of the mother board.

Why do you want to do that? Here's the problem, half the kids of the world don't have electricity at home. Eighty percent of the schools that we're going into don't have electricity. So, we have to really really care about power. I was trying to make a 2 watt laptop. I think that we're getting pretty close to it and the big secret to do that is to turn off stuff that you're not using. A lot of times when you're looking on the screen, your reading.

The cpu isn't actually doing much, neither is the mother board. You might be using you know the wifi, you might be routing something and in that case simply more network but only the mesh and the screen need to be on. So the key was realizing working with amd that we could put the cpu into hibernation in a tenth of a second and bring it back in a tenth of a second. So then, we right the software as such that it allows us to turn on and off the mother board without the user even noticing.

If you're reading something and you don't care as long as the response is instantaneous as long as when you press a key and you connect you get what you want and you don't have to wait. So, that allows us to save an enormous amount of power and that's also needed by the screen cause the screen is on and you can use it.

Jim Rapoza: Yea.

Mary Lou Jepsen: Even though the rest of the thing is off. In e-book mode we consume about a half a watt. Here's the thing, I have been doing, were getting so close to massspection I do all the certifications and green things and wanted to know how green our laptop was. Well, it's very green. It's the greenest laptop ever made and that's not just it's color.

Jim Rapoza: [laughs]

Mary Lou Jepsen: Different standards like energy star; energy stars new requirement is for a laptop that idols at 14 watts. We're like 14 times better than energy star. And the key thing here is we needed a way for human power to work or small solar panels. So, I've got a ten dollar solar panel that will charge a laptop. We've got, string pull systems and crank pull systems and there's more of that coming; a windmill, bike systems that charge, multi battery chargers. There's been this whole ecosystem we've had to develop for power.

Jim Rapoza: Yea

Mary Lou Jepsen: We're going to places that infrastructure so we're delivering also the instrument with the mess networking and keeping the power so low that we can power these things with solar or clean energy or you know the very very minute amounts of generated energy. So, you think about that and would you want those in your laptop, do you want a screen that's semi readable or not?

You know, you probably do. There's a lot of things like, there is led's in there so if led's do burn out and a lot of our countries are the hottest place on earth; India, clocked at 57 degrees Celsius in the desert. So, led's do have a lifetime issue in hot places and they are conceptive of air conditioning. So, I think that in those places the led life bar might only last three years not five.

Jim Rapoza: um-hmm

Mary Lou Jepsen: In that, two screws, two dollars; change the led light bar out. No one does this in used display products. They would rather sell you a whole new hdtv rather than these led screws. [laughter]

Jim Rapoza: [laughter]

Mary Lou Jepsen: Even if the kids lose the screws, I added extra screws underneath cause they always lose screws so there's some extra ones and they can trade them around and use them as they take them apart. They should learn about their laptops. It's actually easy to take apart and fix.

Jim Rapoza: Could you give me a little background of some of the unique capabilities of that sort of differentiate it from standard sort of wifi? Actually, I'm interested technologically how this was implemented, I mean, are you using standard off the shelf wireless components or are there these sort of custom made access points for each other. I'm just sort of interested in what the technological challenges were there.

Mary Lou Jepsen: Well, I guess the challenge is IEEE has the standard is 802.11 F. F was left cause M was gone. But, the standard wasn't yet finished so we had to make it up and in fact IEEE kept going on that standard and now we've merged them and we've actually moved ours over to that. But, it's different in that each laptop becomes the router and forwards packets at 10 hops people say, "oh you won't get any bandwidth" but, we're getting 2 megabits per second at 10 hops.

Jim Rapoza: Ahh

Mary Lou Jepsen: Really, really, high bandwidth connection between the computers; even if you know at some remote village and they only have a trickle to the Internet, you know the network, between them they still have a very high connection so they can do, you know, video teleconference between each other, they've got the cameras and the microphones and you know something more interesting. So, that's really good that you don't have to walk all that.

And you know, with the rabbit ears that we have on it, it basically takes the antenna out of the electronics and we've measured in perfect condition in Australia and the Outback very noted 2.3 kilometer distance between the laptops and they can talk to each other. That's not realistic that this, what if and the perfect condition but we get about 3x the range of a regular wifi antennae in a laptop that has the, you know, the electronic, the screen is usually blocking some of it's reach.

So, that mainly matters for you know distances between kids. And we're also working on, and you even saw that yesterday, on active antennas that you can plug into your laptop or the server to extend the range even further if you live really far and a lot of kids do. One of our law schools in Peru, the kids actually walk 5 or 10 miles on a Monday morning and the sleep in the dormitory in the school and they go home on Friday, walking all the way back. So, you really did need the range.

Jim Rapoza: What's the power issue when it comes to the wireless. I know on my own I-book I notice the power difference when I have the wifi enabled and when I download.

Mary Lou Jepsen: Yes. Absolutely, it's like ten watts. But, what we have, we've got a chip Marvel. Marvel is the only one we could find that has this chip, it's got a little bit of an [??] in it so it can work without the cpu. Right now the draw is about 0.8 but Marvel is resplitting the chip into a 90mm process and [??] 0.4 watts.

That's really amazing. So, mesh mode total is about a half a watt, e-book mode, it's got the screen on and stuff is about a watt and then you turn on the back light it's two watts. So, typical power consumption on all these modes is incredible. Which matters a lot for you, do you want to recharge your laptop battery once a day or once a week or once a month. Once a month would be great. It's funny because I'm in silicon valley right now. Some people are asking about it and I just sort of think "you know get in line you've got about a billion kids in front of you."

Jim Rapoza: Is there anything unique about the battery it's self?

Mary Lou Jepsen: Oh, yea. Sure. The battery; we've got two different chemistries. By mainly at looking at the different battery characteristics we were able to increase the life time to a five year span. Usually batteries are spec'd for 500 charge/recharge cycles.

Jim Rapoza: Right.

Mary Lou Jepsen: We went with safe battery technology. Not the kind that explodes. Not lithium ion. Nickel mount hydride also lithium phosphate; this other battery chemistry that we are using. Which sounds like lithium ion but it isn't. It's lithium pherophosphate. It burns at 100 degrees C. Now, we don't want it to burn at all so it's not going to burn at all. We actually did do burn tests. We put the thing in 350 degree fire. We banged nails through it and we also took testing on it. It's very safe. Also, by monitoring the temperature, the voltage change, the current change very carefully to our [??] we've extended the range of nickel hydride too 2,000 recharges to 5 year battery life. Battery replacement cost is so low, the batteries are less than $10.

Jim Rapoza: Wow.

Mary Lou Jepsen: We've actually been thinking about shipping with an extra battery. our battery is 20 watt hours.

Jim Rapoza: Right.

Mary Lou Jepsen: That's like a 2 watt average power consumption, that's 10 hours; pretty good. Typical is 2-4 watts so it's 5-10 hours which is [pause].

Jim Rapoza: Still pretty good.

Mary Lou Jepsen: Yes, pretty good. Then it's only $10 dollars for the replacement battery which we might end up just shipping with it so that there's two batteries per laptop so that the kid at the end of the day can take the charged battery from the back of the classroom and they head home with a full ready to go charged up system. The other thing is these things are amazingly robust. We've dropped them on concrete floors. I've used them out in the rain for an hour, they're fine. You can spill on them.

Jim Rapoza: What's the technology behind that? Is it the casing that makes it more shock resistant?

Mary Lou Jepsen: It's the bumpers. The green bumpers actually provide some help. The screen is mounted and it's sort of smaller than the outside casing so it sort of helps on the screen. The rest of it, I mean like going with a rubber membrane keyboard, it's really good for little kids. They spill stuff, you can totally submerge the base in water and it works fine. Although, I wouldn't recommend it, you can. What's the difference? We've got about 1/3 the part count of an ordinary laptop. We tried to make it, I mean the ears also cover up the usb port when they are put down so that sand and mud and water can't get in them.

We knew where this was going when we started the design and we wanted to make it as resistant to dust and water and humidity as we could and we knew that little kids would have it and little kids drop stuff so it was part of the design the whole time. It's a little bit chunkier than it maybe needed to be but we think that we're adding a handle and the bumpers basically give it some room just to give careful attention to things like dropping, not trying to make the lightest thinnest most fragile laptop in the world. [laughs] We're trying to make something robust.

Jim Rapoza: Yea. What are some of the specific security features of the XO?

Mary Lou Jepsen: There are [??] passwords so it's almost impossible to steal. It's called bit frost. Looking as we write the application creating a different framework for that so you can say up front what the applications are allowed to exchange and what they are not allowed to exchange and so that's in the groundwork for everything. It's an anti virus thing obviously, it's harder to go in and launch different things because each application or program has only limited capabilities to exchange things that it really needs to exchange.

Everything is sort of read only, although, any kid can apply to administrative access to their laptop. It takes two weeks for them to get that key and that's just to prevent; the time line there is so that a million of these aren't stolen by the army. You have to worry about those issues. So, if anything is reported stolen, the laptop is shut off; it's on the laptop. We know what each laptop is doing closely so we can turn them off. It the thing is stolen even in transit it can't be stolen. There is a separate key, a usb key, that you need to activate sent separately to trusted individuals.

If the trusted individuals are somehow no longer trustworthy by the receiving body then there is a second level where you know when these things are on. Another thing they have is they are supposed to log into the school server at a certain frequency, every few days they log in. If they don't log into the school server they turn off and they can't turn on again. Unless, the usb key is inserted by a trusted individual; a different usb key.

Jim Rapoza: Yea.

Mary Lou Jepsen: There are all these levels. You can't steal this laptop. It's very very hard to steal this laptop. Never say never but there are levels and levels of theft deterrent and virus deterrent in the laptop that without having to know passwords and things.

Jim Rapoza: While at the one laptop per child offices OLPC president Walter Bender walked me through some of the capabilities and applications of the Linux based sugar interface.

Walter Bender: There are two or three things that have changed quite a bit in the recent builds. This is the journal and the journal is the thing that is still new that essentially replaced the file system browser. So, rather than going in [??] had this little shtick going for awhile where he talked about something called e latch. Latch is a way in which people organize information.

There is location, there's alphabetical, there's temporal, there's categorical and there's hierarchical. For whatever reason on the desktop we tended to focus mostly on the hierarchical. It turns out that people like [??] who we have been working down in [??] in Brazil and he's studied with PJ and kids in particular but most of us actually have a very tight connection to temporal organization.

Jim Rapoza: Right. It's a Monday. [laughs]

Walter Bender: The other thing is that we also, you're beginning to see a migration of a lot of the things that we do on the web onto the desktop where you're using tags, you're using search, you're using sort. We're doing a lot of things so we decided you know what, let's just take advantage of what these people have learned and actually build a primarily temporal, ritually tagged representation. So, the kids; it maintains a diary for them automatically of the things they are doing. Then, they can search it, they can sort it.

Jim Rapoza: Is it pulling automatic or is it pulling from web sites. [??]

Walter Bender: Well, it's pulling from what I am doing. I was just it actually has previews, it shows me what it's done, it keeps track of the whole interaction of that session, it has automatic keyword generation. Plus, I can tag it and search and find things later. If sharing activity with other people, it annotates that so I can find out what I was doing with Jim last week and I can find the things that I was doing with Jim last week. It's a way that I can go and revisit so I can come back to, I can come back to resume art, now I am back into doing what I was doing. So, rather than having to relaunch a program or anything like that, that's just part of the journal. So, the journal now is there and it's really one of the primary tools that we think is going to be useful to kids and teachers in general.

Jim Rapoza: Do you think people will actually work more in that than say in the main desktop?

Walter Bender: Time will tell, but I think the journal is actually going to be a primary. I think that the two places that they are really in some sense we've got five different places and one of those places is the actual activity you are engaged in. One of those places is home screen, one of those places is the mesh and then one of those places is the journal. The other one is what we call the buddy view. It turns out that I think where we're heading is that the buddy view is actually just a sort from the mesh view.

It's not really a separate view. So you go from your home to the mesh and then from there you're going to go out to the Internet and see. It might be that when you hit that you're in combination of my space and google. So all the things that you are doing outside the context of the mesh you sort of saw this notion of zoom but you zoom all the way out. Things are much more solid now, the mesh its self at many different levels.

Jim Rapoza: So, this mesh view, it's everybody else who this is connection too, right?

Walter Bender: So, this is me and this is [??]

Jim Rapoza: Yea, I was going to ask you is that contextual. [laughs]

Walter Bender: Everything we've done is sort of based on hover, so there's no double clicks. With the right button you can sort of force the hover if it doesn't come up fast enough. Basically, it's the same thing. Everything is discoverable the longer you hover. If I stayed on there, I get more information.

Jim Rapoza: Is this sort of location aware and is that the one closest to you and is that farther away?

Walter Bender: That's going to be one of the sorts. Right now, it's random. Actually, where we're going it's going to be actually more organized based on what people are doing as opposed to where they are. If I am reading a book, what I can do is I can share it and when I share it, it ends up being here.

Jim Rapoza: OK.

Walter Bender: When it's there, anybody else can then click on it and they are reading the book.

Jim Rapoza: Yep.

Walter Bender: Part of the idea, part of what we've got is on virtually every activity, practically every activity we've got this button which is basically share whatever your doing.

Jim Rapoza: Right. Is there a name for that button?

Walter Bender: We call it the mesh button.

Jim Rapoza: The mesh button. OK.

Walter Bender: So, if the teacher wants everybody to read the first chapter of Moby Dick he or she can just share. So, anything that you are working on you can drop in a chat overlay and use it also for file sharing directly between people. We also have now in the build, this is text chat, we've also got a video chat. This is for example the video camera. What we're doing now is again, everything has a share button and saved to journal automatically. Also, we've adopted a tab interface so that we can sort of stack in things and we can do things like make it full screen.

Jim Rapoza: What's the "eye" doing?

Walter Bender: The eye is the shutter.[pause] Then we can come in here and capture movies too...

Jim Rapoza: What is it saving it?

Walter Bender: It's saving them all.

Jim Rapoza: Does it have any conversion capabilities. Well, most anything can play aug.

Walter Bender: Yea, almost anything can play aug. and we can convert back and forth. The helix player will play basically we're going to distribute open codex but then kids can download proprietary codex if they choose to do that.

Jim Rapoza: Is the application list now is that set or are you looking to add more?

Walter Bender: Well, the application list; what we have sort of basically fixed is the core set of activities that we're going to include. We think that there's three classes of activities we think are important so one of them is activities for exploring of course we're going to have the web browser. We're going to be shipping in the one based firefox but there's also an opera browser that runs for MS and laptop. If someone wants to load it they are more than welcome.

We'll have two different choices again in terms of media players. There will be the helix player and also a version of (xxtodem?) on the laptop that plays all media basically. And then we'll have an e-book reader. There will actually be two different versions of an e-book reader as well. There will be a basic pdf reader based on [??] and there will be a reader that's essentially a wiki that's a new application. Sort of a nice wiki that lives in the complex of the peer environment. Those are the core explorer tools. Then, we've got a bunch of activities; here's a slightly different text box, we've got the journal and the browser, we've got a library that comes in the laptop as well and read and write so reading is the pdf fuel; this is the wiki. We've got a writing program that's based on abi word that's quite rich and quite nice.

It's got the sharing, everything comes with the idea of sharing. Then, we have other types of tools so there's a news reader that's actually part of the exploring thing. We'll be supporting two different chats, a text chat and a video chat. We've got a basic drawing still image capture. Music, and again not just music playing [??]. The other thing is say I am a kid and I really get into it, well you only give me 100 instruments none of them are what you want then you can go into the synthesizer here. One of the core ideas that we are trying to do with sugaring the laptop in general is the idea of no floor no ceiling.

Then, for the kids who really want to get into it, they will be able to get into programming directly in C sound and they will be able to go into the developers console and actually program into C sound which is a scripting language for music that they use in Hollywood for musical special effects. So, they go from busy bodies to [??] laughing

Jim Rapoza: [laughing]

Walter Bender: I've literally seen 2 year olds use this. The same tools they use in Hollywood.

Jim Rapoza: Wow.

Walter Bender: That range of expression is what we're trying to capture throughout. Then we have actually 6 or 7 different...

Jim Rapoza: [laughs] I was going to ask.

Walter Bender: [??] Scratch, [??], logo, python. Actually, if you really want to you can program [??] right in the console. We want to have [??] being expressed with programming.

Jim Rapoza: [??] [laughing]

Walter Bender: Then, we've got just basic tools in terms of math and science. We've got calculators and we're going to have a spreadsheet in there. We actually have a neat thing and I can get this to show you, the microphone port doubles as an analog data port we just built a tool from laptop into an oscilloscope. You can just go out into the field and measure stuff.

Jim Rapoza: That's kinda cool.

Walter Bender: You just directly turn the little scope. So, somebody has built a polling activity so that the kids can make polls of the mesh. Some body has built what's called a mesh board which is essentially peer to peer craigslist application. So, we're providing this core and then the kids and teachers can be loading as many of these packages as they want and part of the idea is that they will be making things. The core reading, writing and arithmetic is all there. If we go into e-toys for a second; e-toys is another thing sort of like scratch.

Jim Rapoza: Yea, I saw some of these.

Walter Bender: E-toys has the mesh. Ok.

Jim Rapoza: Yea.

Walter Bender: There are a number of different things you can do with e-toys on the mesh, if I can find; these are all the people out there right now. I can connect to any of them. Now, here's Ed. Now what I can do is take this e-toys object and drop it right onto his desktop and now he's got it. I can share my desktop with him so that he can be writing and drawing on my desktop with me while I am writing and drawing. We can chat and do voice while we're working on things as well so the idea; we're really taking advantage of the mesh and making this be a classroom thing.

Jim Rapoza: The time for wondering is over. As the XO goes into the hands of millions of children they will finally see what effect it will have on the world. I think the effect it will have on technology is already significant. Thanks for listening to this edition of techrising. To find this and many other pod casts go to [??].com or subscribe through i-tunes or your favorite RSS reader. For techrising, I'm Jim Rapoza.