The tech behind OLPC
You’ve probably heard of the One Laptop Per Child organization first announced in Davos, Switzerland in 2005, and how the project has made some significant progress towards the $100 per laptop goal, first suggested by Oracle’s Larry Elison. Currently, the organization plans to hit about $140 for the first iteration of the laptop, eventually reaching the $100 mark sometime around 2008. There’s a lot of interesting technology behind the OLPC, with much of the concepts readily applicable to other IT-related industries, which I thought I’d explore today.
Powering the Laptop
A novel new power system was announced recently (and which is expected to be field-tested this October) that does away with the hand-crank system previously developed. The new system, developed by Squid Labs, uses a pull-string and a high-efficiency generator to create enough electricity to power the laptop 10 minutes for every 1 minute of generating that electricity. As this Technology Review article explains,
Typical generators work best at high revolutions per minute, requiring noisy gears to step up the speed. The developers have done away with gears by custom-designing a generator that runs most efficiently at lower RPMs, a move that also makes possible a smaller device.
I immediately see a benefit for IT-related applications, especially for the backup power sources found at many datacenters, and I wonder how well the technology would scale up. Consider the major cost savings that could be realized for datacenters that rely on diesel generators as backup power sources. As fuel costs rise, and the need for backup power systems remains critical, saving money by generating electricity for extended durations on the cheap could be huge. Higher-efficiency generators could save datacenters a lot of money.
Another interesting technology is a more efficient battery system for the laptop that should last up to four times longer than normal PC batteries. It uses custom battery chemistry and intelligent sensor systems to get the better durability. Sounds like great news for the road warriors out there.
Networking
I’m especially intrigued by the wireless mesh network the laptops create automatically, with auto-routing capabilities for Internet access. The WiFi runs 802.11b at a reduced speed (max rate being about 2Mbit/s to save on power), and allows any laptops within range to communicate with each other. Interestingly, if any laptop has an Internet access connection, than all laptops in the same mesh network can share that connection automatically. I can easily envision a secluded community of laptop users, where one individual has a dial-up connection or other similar access, and the entire community of users can gain access to their email and otherwise access the Internet.
There are some interesting parallels between these mesh networks and much of the citywide WiFi projects being announced. Tropos, one company that develops a networking device for cities, creates a similar kind of mesh network for its devices – spanning an entire city or region. The idea is that one or multiple Tropos nodes have access to an Internet connection, and all other nodes can route users through the network to those connections, thus minimizing the number of pipes needed to “unwire” an entire city to barest minimum (and cutting costs, at that).
Technology Benefits
Much of the technology that’s coming out of the OLPC project seems to have applicability to the IT world as well, and I’ll be following the project closely. Actively solving a problem such as this can have great repercussions in many other industries, much of which hadn’t been intended in the first place. I look forward to seeing the OLPC project released, and the many lessons we can learn from it.
