Open Source Simple Computer for Agriculture in Rural Areas
(OSCAR)

Technical Activities

Besides the workshops and field trips, on the technology front work was progressing in a smooth phase.

Just prior to the second workshop a windows beta version of the OSCAR tool was released. It was made available on the project website, as a free download for those interested. It had a total of 47 weed species in its database and had complete botanical information about 10 weed species found in the Indo-Gangetic plains. The software was developed using Visual Basic and the database was developed in Microsoft Access. The visual front end had three major characters the plant habit, leaves and roots. Each character had a number of character states such as simple, monocotyledon or compound for the specific character of leaves. This beta version was released in accordance with the work plan and also to facilitate an early testing of the drawings used in the software and the architectural design of the software itself on field with farmers and extension workers.

The translation of IDAO to open source was initiated in parallel to other activities like collection of botanical data, bibliographical work and field surveys. Once the beta version of OSCAR for windows was available, the work on translation picked up momentum. As reported in the last report the development environment was standardised with Fedora Core 3 as operating system, C and GTK+ as development languages and MySQL as the backend database server.

The strategy was to start with the porting of OSCAR application in common to both Linux desktop and the Simputer. It was planned to proceed with this common development approach to the extent where the team feels comfortable with development environment and produces a stable version of OSCAR in Linux. Once this is achieved, then it was planned to divide the development effort into two different streams, one towards a complete version of Linux Desktop and the other towards a version for Simputer.

It was also planned to demonstrate an initial pre-release beta version of the open source OSCAR in the third workshop at Wageningen University, The Netherlands. Encore Software Technologies, released the source code for the simputer in the last “Bangalore Linux 2004” in December, 2004. They also released the Software Development Kit for Simputer along with the Simpulator. The Simputer Simulator “Simpulator” which has Linux kernel 2.4.18 was mainly used for development testing. The advantage of using a simpulator is that one need not have a ‘real’ hardware simputer in hand to develop and test the applications designed for it. We ran it on a Fedora Core 3 desktop with Xnest as an interfacing element between the Linux Desktop X server X.org and the simputer X server front-end. The Encore SDK also came with the complete tool chain for application development and testing, which will be put to use in the course of development.

As planned, a pre-release beta version was developed in time for the third workshop at Wageningen University. This release had the main features of the OSCAR application viz. the main screen, associative function buttons to select the habit, phyllotaxy, results and the backend database support was provided by MySQL. The main screen of the application also had options to select between various character states for characters such as the roots (fibrous, tap root and root tubers), leaves (simple, monocotyledon and compound) and habit (grass, tufted, prostrated, erected, creeping and rosette). The advantageous aspect of such a discrete design of application with an independent database backend is that, any future modifications to both Desktop and Simputer versions becomes easier and does not require total rewriting of the application itself.

The development process is in consistent progress with other related areas of activity and will soon culminate in a beta version of the Open Source version of OSCAR.