An efficient handheld generator could help bring computing to the world's poor.

The One Laptop per Child association (OLPC) is an ICT4D non-profit organization, created by faculty members of the MIT Media Lab, set up to oversee The Children's Machine project and the construction of the XO-1 "$100 laptop". Both the project and the organization were announced at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland in January 2005.

The goal of the foundation is to provide children around the world with new opportunities to explore, experiment, and express themselves. To that end, OLPC is designing a laptop, educational software, manufacturing base, and distribution system to provide children outside of the first-world with otherwise unavailable technological learning opportunities.

OLPC espouses five core principles:^[6]

1. Child ownership
2. Low ages. The hardware and software are designed for elementary school children aged 6-12.
3. Saturation
4. Connection
5. Free and open source

“	It's an education project, not a laptop project.	”
—Nicholas Negroponte

The $100 dollar laptop will include a 7.5-inch screen, a 500 megahertz processor, 500 megabytes of Flash memory, and wireless broadband for forming impromptu networks with other laptops. It will also be a multimedia workstation, supporting the playing and composing of music, for example.

The new generator will make the laptop much easier to power than it would be with a hand crank, in part, because the users will be able to operate the generator in a variety of ways, including holding the device (the size of two hockey pucks) in one hand and pulling the string with the other, or clamping the generator to a desk, attaching the string to one foot, and using leg power. "We wanted something that could take advantage of other muscle groups in the human body that can put out a lot more energy than the muscles that you get when you're just turning a crank," says Colin Bulthaup, a co-founder of Squid Labs.

To reach the project's goal of one minute of power generation for every ten minutes of laptop use, the generator would need to produce 20 watts (the laptop will require less than two watts in a primary application as an electronic textbook replacement). "With a hand-crank system, if you're gung-ho about it, you can get about five watts out of it. But you get tired after about a minute or so," says Geo Homsy, a partner and designer at Squid Labs. With the new system, generating 20 watts is comfortable, and it's possible to generate 10 watts for "as long as you want," the developers say.

The new generator is also quiet -- one of the key design requirements. "If you imagine an entire school room full of kids using this thing, it needs to be as quiet as possible. Otherwise it will drive everyone insane," Homsy says. 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.

The $100 laptop developers are also working with several firms on an ambitious, related project: developing a long-lasting battery system to be paired with the generator (or to charge off AC power). This battery system will include "custom chemistry, unique electronics, and complex charge and discharge monitoring algorithms to deliver 2,000 battery cycles -- four times more than normal PCs," Foster says. A long charging session in the morning, for instance, would allow kids to use the laptop throughout the day, with the batteries storing enough energy for eight hours of work -- with enough left over for the computer to serve as a wireless mesh network router for another 16 hours.