[geeks] $100 One Laptop Per Child - grist for the mill

[Geoffrey S. Mendelson]

On Sat, Nov 18, 2006 at 09:43:54AM -0800, William Kirkland wrote:
> The difficulty here is that those people have more basic needs which  
> must be addressed before providing inexpensive laptops becomes useful.

Not necessarily. A cheap laptop or even an MP3 player would provide:

1. Instruction. Audiobooks for an MP3 player, eBooks/video for a laptop.

2. Education. I'm not going to even start to discuss it, Educational
   software has been around since the early 1960s.

3. Entertainment. 

4. News.

For example, someone put together a CD-ROM on how to make cheap high yield
hydroponic gardens. With one of these CD's a village can learn to grow
crops cheaply and easily. The one fault of this particular CD-ROM is
that the equipemnt needed is too expensive for handing out on a large
scale and requires electricity. 

I have a pet project in the thinking stage to develop the same equipment
from waste produced in any large city and to not need electricity or
relatively clean water. 

If you read Bryson's book about CARE, you can see that they have plenty
of money for things like seeds, they lack the money and manpower to 
provide the support needed to teach people how to use and maintain them.

One $100 laptop would provide most of the education and support needed
for many of their projects. 

They don't even need to be able to read to use Audio or instructional
videos.

Off the shelf MP3 players cost $25 or less. They can use rechargable
batteries which could be turned in when the player is brought in for
"recharging" the programs on it.

I could easily build a $100 laptop for around $100 with an OLED screen
an ARM processor and semiconductor memory in quantities of 10 million.

If I can get an OLED screen for about $5, which is what they will cost
in a few years, I could cut the price down to about $50.

I think the MIT team is headed in the wrong direction. A crank might be
useful, but I don't think so, NiMH batteries are better, more reliable
and cheaper. If you can get 6 hours a charge out of a battery set, it
would be good enough for a family computer in a village. Each day when the
children go to school, they could bring the laptops and have the
batteries charged while they use them in class.

If there is no school in village, or it does not have a generator,
then a crank would be a good idea. I have a Grundig crank operated radio.
It uses the crank generator to charge a battery, a much better system
than the Bayliss design which used a clockwork mechanism to store the
energy.

A set of NIMH batteries will last about ten months  assuming a charge/discharge
cycle of once a day. The cost of this for an MP3 player would be about
$1 a unit (one AA battery which will last about 10-12 hours). A ARM based
PC with an OLED screen would need about a $10 battery for 10-12 hours
a charge. 

Providing solar panels to charge the unit would be a waste of money.
They would cost more than the laptop.

WiFi is also not needed, it would add about between $10-$15 to the cost and
reduce battery life by almost 30%.

A custom operating system is a mistake too. The units don't need much in
they way of function or security, a stripped down Linux distribution
would do fine with off the shelf software.

There is almost no need to secure the laptops from theft. If someone
steals one, it will end up being used anyway. You just have to provide
enough of them that no one wants to steal them.

Geoff.
-- 
Geoffrey S. Mendelson, Jerusalem, Israel gsm at mendelson.com  N3OWJ/4X1GM
IL Voice: (07)-7424-1667  Fax ONLY: 972-2-648-1443 U.S. Voice: 1-215-821-1838 
Visit my 'blog at http://geoffstechno.livejournal.com/