Archive/Current Events/2010-11-17

Sugar Digest
1. After a long absence, Turtle Art with Sensors is back! The original fork was written by Arjun Sarwal when he was an intern at OLPC (See http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Turtle_Art_with_Sensors); however, when we migrated Sugar to non-XO platforms, we stopped supporting this fork due to problems with the alsaaudio library. With help from Tony Forster, Turtle Blocks (the mainline version of the project) has a sensor palette with blocks for sound (raw microphone input), volume, and pitch, and on OLPC XO hardware, resistance and voltage sensors.

I used a Hall-effect sensor to build a bicycle odometer in Turtle Art.



Tony has begun writing up a detailed description of the sensor input. Claudia Urrea has documented how to build sensors that work with the XO microphone input. Enjoy.

Also note that the Butiá robot team added Arduino support to a fork of Turtle Art.

2. There is growing interest in using Sugar as part of a computer-science curriculum. I have started to accumulate links to syllabi here:

Activity_Team

In the community
3. I was in Lima last week where I got a chance to discuss some details of the Peru OLPC deployment with Oscar Becerra. We spent much of our time discussing how to better coordinate with community efforts in Peru. Oscar is organizing a meeting -- tentatively scheduled for mid-February -- which will hopefully serve as a vehicle for more cooperation.

4. DIGITAL CITIZENSHIP, an international forum on development and social inclusion through the use of ICT in Uruguay will be held on 29th and 30th November 2010 at the Uruguayan Laboratory of Technology (LATU) in Montevideo, Uruguay.

Tech Talk
5. Aleksey Lim, Bernie Innocenti, et al. have been working on an upgrade to the Sugar Gitorious server. They have been running a test environment, jita.sugarlabs.org, with much success; git.sugarlabs.org will be switched to the new Gitorious code base soon.

Sugar Labs
Gary Martin has generated a SOM from the past few week of discussion on the IAEP mailing list.

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