Pedal-Powered OLPC Being Tested In Afghanistan

OLPC’s Give One Get One initiative has delivered around 11,000 XO-1 laptops to Afghanistan schools alone. But power is a problem when you get off the grid, so the team there has had to think outside the box.

They’ve developed this prototype human powered machine that can charge an XO-1 laptop while in use, and it’s easy enough for most 3rd graders to pedal. The OLPC Freeplay hand crank is connected to pedals underneath, and no backup battery is required.

Their hope is to shrink the idea down, and deploy it to the many rural areas that don’t have electricity. Nice work…I wonder how much peddling it would take to read Gizmodo?