I loaded the activities I’ve written in the past onto my new G1G1 XO and found that Pointillism probably never worked on any XO but my old one. This is something I probably should have tested.
In addition to actually working, this release has better performance, flips the image horizontally, and lets you save images to the Journal.
Download: Pointillism-2.xo
XO’s are available (and shipping fast) from Amazon (URL is via OLPC) through Give One Get One 2008. As you can see from the map above, G1G1 2007 is already having quite an impact on the world, with tens of thousands of donated XOs being deployed across Ethiopia, Rwanda, Mongolia, and other countries.
Thanks to Sameer Verma for the idea. G1G1 2008 is just around the corner!
SVG Version
OpenCV has issues using the camera on the XO, rising from the way it negotiates color palette settings with the OV7670 v4l2 driver. I haven’t delved deep enough into v4l2 yet to come up with a proper fix for either the driver or OpenCV. However, I have a temporary fix that (probably) works fine but is very ugly.
The easy and dirty solution is to install the opencv, opencv-devel, and opencv-python packages with yum, to download the libhighgui.so.1.0.0 that I compiled, and to copy it to /usr/lib/libhighgui.so.1.0.0. In short:
sudo yum install opencv opencv-devel opencv-python
sudo wget http://eclecti.cc/files/2008/03/libhighguiso100 -O /usr/lib/libhighgui.so.1.0.0
Continue for details on the problem and the actual temporary fix that I did
Ok, here is some working code for face detection using the XO’s webcam. It requires the opencv, opencv-python, and xawtv packages. Xawtv can be skipped if you change it to use gstreamer instead, but gstreamer takes around 3 seconds to initialize the camera, take a picture, and save it. Xawtv, on the other hand, takes about a half second. The face detection algorithm, from OpenCV itself takes anywhere from 0.1 seconds to 3 seconds depending on what parameters you choose. I chose ones that seem to work almost all of the time and take about 0.25 seconds.
I’m working on face detection and tracking using the webcam on the XO. Expect code and pictures soon.
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Sugar is fine and dandy, but its nice to have the option to run something a little less… sweet. Unfortunately, with a 433mhz Geode and 256mb of RAM, its kind of a stretch to run a real desktop environment like Gnome or KDE on an XO, and even XFCE is a bit heavy. Luckily, with low powered UMPCs coming out in abundance, there is a lot of development going on for these kinds of devices. Ubuntu Mobile and Embedded Edition shows a lot of promise, as you get the massive number of packages available for Ubuntu in a distro designed for low power and small screens. So, this is a guide on installing and running Ubuntu Mobile on an SD card on an OLPC XO. Ubuntu Mobile is still very much alpha software and is designed for touchscreens, but it’s generally usable and quite speedy.
