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Tablet Prototype Needs No External Power Supply
timothy writes "I'd like to see computing devices with no need for an external power supply — an e-book reader, a general knock-about PDA, a phone — all kinds of things. But there's a certain heart-strings appeal to such a computer intended as an educational tool for precisely those kind of places where basic infrastructure (like the provision of electricity) is a stumbling block. Perhaps built-in solar makes more sense, in more places, than the hand-cranked power the OLPC project ended up dropping from their laptops-for-kids program."
I'd like to say it was from a PC with no outside power supply, but I can't. I don't think I can get the generator and bicycle rigged up in time.
In this house, we obey the laws of Thermodynamics!
No external power supply they say, well then, either they finally created a perpetual motion machine, or they're getting the energy from some external power supply.
Wouldn't that kind of count as an external power supply?
I'm building one that runs on hydro power, but it's a little big with the swimming pool attached to it.
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
Seiko does something like this with their watches. However, afaik, they use a pendulum to gather the vibrational energy.
This perfectly illustrates why the nerd pedantry is lonely, angry, and ignored. People with lives understand "requires no external power supply" to mean "doesn't have to be plugged in." Instead of accepting this, a few people have decided to ignore the hard work of these people to bring revolutionary educational tools into the hands of poor rural children, and quibble about thermodynamics.
From the top and bottom of my heart, please fuck off. The adults are doing useful things. Leave them to it.
It doesn't make much sense to me to embed mechanical / solar / whatever power sources directly into these sorts of products. This is especially true for mechanical power sources, like a crank. That should be in an extremely ergonomic external form factor that a person can operate comfortably, without risking dropping their laptop / tablet, or accidentally flinging it across the room.
Same with solar. That needs to be in a waterproof form factor that can be left laying on the ground or roof in the rain without being destroyed.
A family with two or more devices could get by with just one solar charger, or better yet, one solar and one mechanical, to give them more charging options.
When I was a kid I had one of those little generators that was rotated by my front tire, which powered a little headlight. Something like that could be used with any bicycle to generate relatively massive amounts of power (compared to a hand crank). A very simple stand (home made or otherwise) to get the back tire up off the floor and they're ready to do some serious charging.
Better known as 318230.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etch_A_Sketch
(1) Poor places often do not have class-ROOMs at all. They teach students outside in the dirt. Literally.
(2) With ultra-low power hardware, e-ink screens, your requirements are lowered. Plus, the idea isn't to be able to power in real time but rather charge then use.
(3) Yes, solar-panels are too expensive to power US-scale standards of living. But still cheaper than building a full-scale coal or nuclear powered plant + infastructure to houses, err I mean SHACKS, just so these people can experience some technology. Though the bicycle powered dynamo concept is pretty good and cheap cheap cheap to build. Bikes are usually not hard to find in third world countries. On the other hand, food and clean water might be less available. Thus using up both to pedal a bike may not be ideal. Of course, the big obvious point here is in a country that can't feed itself why the fuck do they need a ebook reader/computer tablet...
(4) I agree here. It's not cheap to create a product like this out of thin air. But there are some benefits for the trouble:
(1) 100% self contained. Zero infrastructure needed.
(2) No external ports are needed, making a water/dust proof device easier and thus the end result is a more durable piece.
(3) Fringe benefits from the ultra-low-power research needed to build something like this.
(4) Increased production of Small/Efficient solar cells can hopefully drive cost down if the materials aren't in short supply...
I think this is rather typical of the western world. The idea that 3rd world countries do not have any access to electricity is just silly. I've recently been to the heart of Ethiopia to adopt a child and if there's one thing they had plenty of it was electricity. Not a lot of food, or clean water... Gas was $8 a liter and they were living in thatched roof, mud huts. But there was electricity all over the place. The rats nests of electrical wire strung, sometimes, from tree to tree was a testament to this. I have no idea how the entire country hadn't burst into flame already but their electrical grid did fail from time to time... but not nearly as often as you'd expect it to. I have to admit I have a lot of respect for whomever keeps the electricity flowing, they must be a McGuiver style genius.
What they did lack was Linux. Every PC I saw there (and there were very few) had a pirated copy of WinXP on it, with the WGA notice popping up constantly and was filled with Malware. Had their dialup modems been able to connect at any speed greater than 9k I would have fixed it for them but in the end I just gave up.
The best thing about built-in solar and no external supply is that it would force users to regulate their usage time.
Heh, yeah.
Why is it that people think solar power works better in the tropics than elsewhere? Do they think we don't have clouds?
I live and work in a Least Developed Country, and for years now I've watched as, time and again, people take a look at the power generation problem and say, "SOLAR FTW." Then they discover that it rains much of the year, that there are mountains which tend to reduce the hours of direct sunlight, as well as a smattering of rain forest overhead and, to top it all off, we occasionally get hurricanes, which leave the place without power at exactly the time we need it most.
Bottom line: Every location has its own unique power generation challenges. In some places, wind is the answer. In others, micro-hydro. In others a diesel generator and a big battery is the only reasonable answer. For most, it's a mix of several approaches. I have yet to see a single community in the entire country for which solar is the entire answer.
So to technology makers, I can say only this: PUT A FUCKING PLUG IN IT. The solar panel is optional; the plug is not. You don't -you can't- know what form of power generation is going to work. So leave that problem for others to solve. Just make it low-enough-power that it's not going to cost more to run than it is to purchase.
Crumb's Corollary: Never bring a knife to a bun fight.
Perhaps built-in solar makes more sense, in more places, than the hand-cranked power
Perhaps it does, perhaps it does! If, that is, you can build the device such that it can run off of built-in solar. That's the real trick, isn't it.
A simple four-function calculator trivially can run of a little photocell, and this has been true for decades. So why didn't OLPC simply put a little photocell on the XO-1? Because a little cheap photocell doesn't produce anywhere near the needed power needed by an XO-1.
And, the hand-cranked power is a particularly irritating straw man. A long, long, time ago, when OLPC was just an idea, they thought about a hand crank, and even made a mockup of what it might look like. But it was never made. Reasons: 0) some kids live in places with a decent electrical grid, so there is no need to add the cost of a generator to every single laptop; 1) an external generator can be trivially replaced if it breaks, without the laptop itself needing to be repaired; 2) a crank built-in to the laptop adds mechanical cranking strain on the laptop, necessitating the laptop being made sturdy in otherwise-needless ways; and 3) little kids are not known for their arm strength, so a generator that could be operated by leg muscles was deemed better. OLPC announced that a pull-cord generator would be the human powered generator, but as far as I can tell from a few quick Google searches just now, the pull-cord generator is still vapor.
I recently sent my XO-1 to India for use by the Bharti Integrated Rural Development Society
(B.I.R.D.S.) and I looked into a solar array for it. I found one for about $200 that should operate an XO-1 continuously and charge the battery in about an hour. I also found lots of other solar arrays that cost way more than that. So, the most affordable solar array I found cost more than the XO-1. As I understand it, the B.I.R.D.S. school has electrical power only when they run their generator, which is a few hours a day, so my hope is that the XO-1 will be useful just with the generator power. (Conveniently, the power supply on an XO-1 accepts any AC from 100 to 240 Volts, at 50 or 60 Hz, so they should be able to just plug it in with a plug adapter.)
Note that TFA says "...the I-slate is the first of a series of electronic notepads being built around a new class of low-energy-consumption microchips under development...". So, one of the reasons the OLPC XO-1 isn't powered with a little solar array is that it was developed half a decade ago, and the new ultra-low-power chips are, well, new.
Isn't it enough to say "This is a cool new technology and I'm excited about it" rather than talking about how much better it is compared to a half-decade-old technology?
P.S. I put an 8 GB flash card in the SD card slot on the XO-1. On the card I put a copy of Wikipedia for Schools, which takes up about 4 GB; then I put some health and medical books and a bunch of classic fiction books (for students to read when studying English). I updated the OS on the OLPC to the latest build, and installed a typing tutor program (Typing Turtle) from Sugar Labs. I found a public-domain copy of The Elements of Style and a few other free textbooks. Finally, I put a few books on Python Programming. I haven't had any email back from B.I.R.D.S. telling me anything, so I have no idea how it's working out.
I have to say, an XO-1 loading books straight off an SD card is a pretty nice book reading platform! And with the backlight off, to read books in monochrome, battery life should be pretty good. I'm hoping they will find the XO-1 to be useful.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely