TimeLapse is computer software for the Sugar Learning Platform used to gather periodic data (sound and images).  It is the first software activity developed by Sugar Labs DC and runs on the OLPC XO-1 laptop. The idea for TimeLapse grew out of the exciting, eclectic, interdisciplinary meeting of scientists, computer programmers, pedagogues, and hardware hobbyists originally brought together by the OLPC Learning Club DC.

Dr. Frank Linton, who has an observation bee hive in his house, was interested in studying the relationship between the sound made by the hive and the health and well being of the bees inside.  He wondered if he could use his XO laptop to gather periodic sound sampling from the hive.  This real world need became the seed for the development of TimeLapse.

Over the past two years, with Dr. Linton acting as customer, Jeff Elkner, and a group of young programmers from Sugar Labs, DC have made steady improvements to TimeLapse.  The current release is the first one that is installable through the Browse Activity in Sugar, making TimeLapse easily available to Sugar users all over the world.

Come celebrate the accomplishment of these talented young programmers.  Bring your XO and try out TimeLapse for yourself.

Update: TimeLapse is now available for download on the Sugar  Labs activities site.

Note time change!!!
When: Saturday, January 16th, 2010, 1 pm to 4 pm
Arlington Career Center
816 South Walter Reed Drive,
Arlington, VA 22204
(Contact Page, Map, Aerial Photo, Bus Info)

Walter Bender of Sugar Labs will join in by video conference from Cambridge, MA.

We’ll also raffle off an original copy of the new XtraOrdinary 2010 SD card!

Update: The slide presentation and links mentioned during the meeting are now on the wiki.

For October, we’re back at Gallaudet University to look at a new software product for the XO-1 and an update of Sugar.

What: Family XO Mesh Meetup
When: Saturday, October 17th, 2009, 10 am to 1pm
Where: Gallaudet University [map, aerial photo], Student Academic Center,
**NOTE ROOM CHANGE: We are UPSTAIRS from the old meeting rooms in the basement on the first floor [floorplan], in computer lab SAC 1212, Washington, D.C. 20002

We have a copy of Ondisk’s XtraOrdinary operating system which is an SD card that boots the Debian flavor of Linux. There have been other SD-based adaptations of Linux for the XO, but this is the most comprehensive to date and easily obtainable via mail order. Though all the software on the SD card is free open source, Ondisk charges $40 to cover the cost of the SD card and duplication. With this card installed, the XO becomes an adult-friendly netbook with software such as a version of Firefox, Open Office, the GIMP photo editor, Skype, Pidgin universal chat, Totem multimedia player and much more.

We will demo the product and describe some of the minor quirks discovered to date. We’re impressed with this effort and it’s a valuable contribution to the XO consumer community, especially for those who do not have time or expertise to configure Linux software.

The latest 0.86 build of Sugar will also be reviewed. I will also bring news from my trip this week to the Media Lab and OLPC Headquarters.

Please let us know in advance if you have any OLPC-related hardware or software support needs.

What: Family XO Mesh Meetup
When: Saturday, February 21st, 2009, 10 am to 1pm
Where: Gallaudet University [map], Student Union Building, Lower Level [floorplan], Flexible Room L040 and L041, Washington, D.C. 20002
**Please check back a day or two before the meeting in case of a room change.

This month, we will demonstrate a very early (alpha) version of “Sugar on a Stick” running from a USB flash drive on the new Intel Classmate 3 laptop (sold as the CTL 2go Convertible Classmate PC).

Sugar on a Stick, or SoaS, is Sugar Labs‘ strategy for making it possible to run the Sugar learning environment on any computer from an inserted USB flash drive without needing to alter the native system. SoaS also provides extra space for storing user’s files. The vision is that teachers can easily try out Sugar without alarming their tech adminstrators and children can carry Sugar and their working files with them wherever they go.

With the OLPC Association’s recent pushing of all development of Sugar to the community and Sugar Labs, work on SoaS is gaining some momentum. The current version of SoaS is really just a proof of concept with a select few Activities installed, some of which are not working. SoaS, which now runs on top of a version of Fedora 10, also doesn’t have network capability and is missing other hardware support such as the ability to use the built-in webcam. Sugar Labs is looking for interested parties to join the development effort, and the Learning Club hopes to help with testing, if not more, in the coming months.

The Classmate 3, pictured at above left next to the OLPC XO-1, just came on the market a few weeks ago, and the unit we’re demonstrating is a production unit purchased from the CTL web site. We’ll do a side-by-side hardware comparison of the Classmate 3 with the XO-1. The Classmate 3, which takes inspiration from the XO’s form factor, is the latest in the line of Intel’s children’s laptops that has essentially been in direct competition with OLPC in the developing world. The arrival of Sugar on the Classmate 3 perhaps symbolizes for today how market forces have assimilated and evolved the early ideas of Nicholas Negroponte and the original OLPC team.

In other news, we enjoyed doing the Content Jam last month (photos) and got five of the 13 or so NASA Etoys activities reviewed. We’re still collating our comments, which will be submitted to the author as he plans to more fully adapt the activities for the XO. The Sqeakland Foundation showcased our Jam in their January newsletter. Randy Caton, the author of the activities, plans to attend our March 21st meeting. We’re hoping he can present some of his insights on working with Etoys and the XO.

This month, we’re doing a Bug Jam after the meeting at 1:30 in another room on the Gallaudet campus. The Bug Jam group will perform some systematic testing on the newest release of Sugar 8.2.1. All are welcome to join in and help.

Jeff Elkner, who hosts our meetings at the Arlington Career Center, has organized a group of mentors and students to continue developing activities to run on Sugar such as the Audio Capture Activity used on a live beehive. Jeff’s development efforts may be the most serious to date in the Washington, D.C. area and those of you who have expressed some interest in helping with activity development, please talk to Jeff at the meeting or contact me at curiouslee [at] gmail [dot] com.

We will continue meeting on third Saturdays monthly alternating between Gallaudet and the Arlington Career Center with possible detours to Nortel Networks. Locations haven’t been confirmed yet, but the next three third Saturdays are:

Saturday, March 21, 10am - 1pm, Location TBD
Saturday, April 18, 10am - 1pm, Location TBD
Saturday, May 16, 10am - 1pm, Location TBD

The photo illustration for this post is from a set of photos taken while testing Sugar on the Classmate 3.

Location change! This month we are deviating from our plan and meeting at Nortel Networks again where we have a more convenient environment for doing software updates to the XO laptops.

What: Family XO Mesh Meetup
When: Saturday, October 18th, 2008, 10 am to 1 pm
Where: Nortel Networks, 101 Constitution Avenue, Washington, DC 20001 [Map]

As the title of this post suggests, we’re going to show things related to open source software and hardware. First, we’ll pass around the very first copies of OLPC XO Laptop and Sugar User Interface printed manuals! My copies are pictured above. They look an feel fabulous. These print-on-demand books can be ordered from Lulu.com or you can download the PDFs for free to print yourself or read on a computer screen. The manuals are the result of a team of volunteers working with the FLOSS Manuals project. FLOSS stands for “free, libre, open source software.” The FLOSS web site offers an ever growing collection of community authored manuals for various popular open source packages. More than just PDFs to download, the web site lets you build your own custom PDFs by selecting only the chapters you want. Each chapter is written in a self-contained style. Adam Holt, who called in to the last meeting from OLPC Headquarters spoke at length about the recent book sprint event in Austin during which the majority of the content of the two OLPC manuals was authored. I know many of our club members have been pining for good documentation in printed form. Be happy now! Even better, if you don’t think a FLOSS manual covers a topic you need, you can jump in and add content to benefit others.

The bulk of our meeting time will be devoted to helping anyone who wants to upgrade to the new Sugar 8.2.0 update. I’ve been using it for a while, and it makes my XO feel like a brand new laptop with speed and usability improvements as well as a raft of bug fixes. As always, there’s a small gotcha: this new release is best installed clean on your XO wiping out everything on it in the process. If you have files in your Journal you wish to keep, they should be dragged to a USB drive. Customizations such as Adobe Flash, Firefox, Opera, Java, web radio, video players will be lost. We will likely be able to help reinstall some of these customizations, so please let us know in advance (curiouslee [at] gmail.com) so we can be prepared and do post to the discussion forum. This new update is the one that will be shipped with the upcoming Give One Get One 2008 program now being offered via Amazon at http://www.amazon.com/xo.

One very pleasant surprise in this new Sugar update is that the Scratch Sensor board now works with Scratch! Scratch was demonstrated a few meetings ago by Richard Bullington-McGuire. It’s essentially a way to program animations and games using pieces of software code that snap together like Lego bricks. The sensor board, now marketed as the PicoBoard for USD$50, plugs into the XO’s USB port to provide light, sound, resistance, push button, and slider inputs to the Scratch environment. One club member suggested an alarm system for a child’s bedroom could be created with Scratch and the sensor board. I hope to demo this at the meeting.

Do try to check back here a day or two before the meeting in case there are any updates. I am only planning to send one email update. Not on our email list? Go here.

Here’s a nice video of our February meeting produced by the students involved with Nortel’s LearnIT project. LearnIT has started a page about us on their learning resources web site.

And if you didn’t catch it on OLPC News, Wayan shot a sweet clip of 6-year-old meeting regular Marayd demonstrating XO Speak.

Updated 2/20 - Note the location change from Arlington, VA to Nortel Networks in D.C. New information is below in BOLD starting with the Nortel street address.

I hear echoes of the Verizon Wireless commercials when I see all the people at our meetups trying to mesh. It’s the new primal urge of XO owners. Now it’s time to channel those urges into fun and productive activity!

Hot on the heels of our last meeting, Kevin Cole and Jeff Elkner are interested in hosting monthly XO meetups / development sprints. They are thinking of meeting the 4th Saturday of each month, and alternating the location between the Arlington Career Center and Gallaudet University (see map).

While still in the planning stage, the first one has already been scheduled for this month. The idea is to bring together three groups of people to work on the following things:

• Kids and parents who want to meet other kids and parents and do cool things together with their XOs.
• Software developers wanted to work on software for the XO.
• Educational materials developers wanting to collaborate on the development of educational materials for the XO.

Having these three groups co-locate will create all kinds of synergistic possibilities. Let the games begin!

What: Family XO Mesh Meetup

When: Saturday, February 23rd, 2008, 10 am to 1 pm

Where: Nortel Networks, 101 Constitution Avenue, Washington, DC 20001

A team is setting up an OLPC school server (which will make meshing much easier) and coordinating with the OLPC Support team to help install system updates, activate developer’s keys on anyone’s XO and generally troubleshoot technical issues.

The meeting will start with a few minutes of introductions by the leaders of the table activities. Then we will break into groups for about 30 minutes for discussion. We’ll pause for quick reportouts from each group on tips, discoveries, aspirations, frustrations, etc. Then we’ll all mesh some more until 1 pm.

Nortel Networks is a secure office complex so we will have to assign someone to let people in between 9:45am-10am. The building is walking distance from the Union Station and Judiciary Square Metro Stations.

Click here for a map. Also, our wiki page is seeing some activity now.

The green squiggles in my illustration are from a camera toss photo by Dan Simpson licensed under CC 2.0.