Along this trip, we are really putting the BRCK to the test. We are trying as hard as we can to dog-food this thing in the most extreme environments to see where it falls down and where it stands
up. Here is just a snippet of what we’ve learn’t so far. Some of it reinforces what we know and a lot of it, thankfully, is breaking down our preconceptions.

“Pickin’ up good vibrations”

We did a lot to make BRCK robust, we’ve used thicker than normal circuit boards, everything is tied down with multiple methods and in all directions. Hitting these washboards, thowing the BRCKs in
the truck and just plain misusing it has shown a few things. So far its done well, with all our BRCKs behaving flawlessly, other than one small thing. The microUSB cable keeps walking out! We know
we need to move away from this connector, but we really love it for so many reasons. Its one less cable to lose, one less to carry, and I have 20 spares at home.

450km of this. #brckexpedition

A photo posted by Reg (@regorton) on Nov 11, 2014 at 9:30pm PST

Dust and Water (Fire and Ice?) 

Dust, its part of what defines Africa and part of what makes working in this continent so hard. The dust here is like nothing I’d seen before moving here, and something that is hard to comprehend.
If you look back in the blog, you may see our trip to Turkana. In this trip, we changed a lot about how V1 was made, specifically we moved the power button from the top to the side, and really
improved its weather sealing. Its these small changes that make a huge difference out here in the bundus. Driving from Arusha to Dodoma in Tanzania reinforced that thought. While the BRCK fared quite
well, it always astounds me where dust can get to.

We’ve often run on the theory that if you have a BRCK, you have a smartphone, laptop or some other high value equipment. Unfortunately this trip has shown that’s just not as valid as we hoped. The
BRCK is your often your only connection, your lifesaver, your redundancy. I have a laptop, a phone and iPad and many more, any one of these can get me online. I think the assumption is not true any more.

“Failure is not an option.”

But it will happen. We have to be realistic here. We are working in environments that are tough, dirty, messy and we must. As above, in order to make the device less complex we purposefully used
the thought pattern that ‘the BRCK will do the hard work for you’, but its frustrating to just wait in the dark. I want to know why it’s failing, and I want to help it get online now. We are activly working on improving the offline experience of the BRCK, like said before, its not going to be a traditional router experience, but conversational, something that gives you the information you need to know, but isn’t just for a networking expert to understand. With us on the trip is Mark Kamau, from the iHub UX lab, Mark is going to help us form a better mechanism for explaining why you damned BRCK isn’t working and how you can get it back online.

The Land Rover just 48 hrs before departure

“Right here, right now”

This trip has been taxing, and we are only half way though. Sometimes in these taxing times when you are tired, dehydrated and hungry the last thing I want to have do is fiddle with tech, all I
wnat to do is make sure things are working, send an email home and get to bed. Right now there are 2 speed hiccups with BRCK. Firstly boot time, the BRCK typically boots in less than 45 seconds,
but then latching a network takes time and if something goes wrong then trying to rectify that with antennas, APN settings, checking the charge level all take time. Also, just doing prechecks in
the morning takes time, there are many things to do. Check the oil, check the tyre pressure, GPS batteries, everything bolted down and . Right now, we are working on the offline functionality to
speed this up and give you more information right there. For V2 we are going to address this, additionally, we are investigating display options so that you can see the status of your BRCK even
when its off, getting you all the information you need instantly.

We ended our first day well at an incredible campsite in the middle of Tanzania. We mostly got to bed at a reasonable hour with an agreement to get moving at 6 and wheels rolling by 7. We hit the first but missed the second. It wasn’t that we were wasting time but there is always a bit of effort to get ourselves into high-performance, expedition pace.

The early part of the morning was spent at a proper speed on some of the best roads in Africa. We would hit towns of various sizes every 40-50 kilometers and we learned to recognize the size/status of the town based upon the number of speed bumps and cell towers. On the bikes it was easy to lift up out of the seats and take the speed bumps at a reasonable speed. The truck on the other hand had to slow down. In addition to the impact of the speed bumps, the truck was a target for every police stop. The bikes just waved as we went flying by. We really were in a zone for a couple of hours as we let the kilometers roll by under our wheels.

And then things changed… A lot!

We had a choice this morning to either go the eastern (shorter) route or the western (better) route. Everyone (I literally mean every human we know who has ever even heard of Tanzania) told us to take the western route. We, of course, decided to take the eastern route. They were right. We were wrong.

It started off reasonably ok with a bit of hard packed dirt. Although my bike wasn’t really designed for this kind of stuff, the other vehicles are in their element when the tarmac ends. And then things got worse. The road went from hard pack to fresh-fresh (talcum powder like sand). We would have sections with washboards so bad that our bikes would bounce all over the road. Then we would have sections with huge rocks that did their best to total our vehicles.

Reg had the first incident when he slid the truck in the fresh-fresh and ended up in a ditch. Nothing serious but we found out a few kilometers later that he had bounced the rear spring out of its mounting. We subsequently found out that the spring had rubbed on the sidewall of the tyre. The tyre (and rim) met their end on some very difficult washboard when they disintegrated into many, many pieces. No injury, but it was another delay on an already delayed day.

Although the bikes faired better mechanically (the only issue during the day was a broken box mount on Joel’s KLR), the riders suffered greatly. As we watched the remaining distance to Dodoma very slowly trickle down, our bodies were thrashed royally by the terrain. Sore hands, dust filled eyes, and shattered nerves from the many close calls in the loose dirt. When the dirt wasn’t giving us grief the buses that would fly by at uncontrolled speeds would nearly knock us off the road. We would stop frequently but the breaks were always too short and the pressure for pushing on too great.

We had intended to be in Dodoma by 10am where we were going to pick up Mark Kamau and Juliana Rotich. The plan was that we would then keep going to Iringa and spend the night closer to the Zambian border. As the hours ticked along and the kilometers did not we started to realize that our decision was going to have a significant impact on our overall schedule. Instead of making it past Iringa, we were going to have to fight to just make it to Dodoma. With about 70km to go we stopped at a police check to ask how much farther to the tarmac. The cop answered 20km but we are generally suspicious of time and distance responses from people in rural Africa. He was actually spot on and, 20km later, we rolled our bikes onto beautiful a made tarmac road. We had to hang out for a bit as Reg was dealing with his disintegrated wheel but we all breathed a sigh of relief to be back on the good stuff.

As we flew along towards Dodoma we settled into the reality of needing to adjust our schedule slightly for the remainder of the day. As if we had not had enough punishment for our decision, we suddenly found the tarmac ended and we were once again getting pounded on the loose dirt. We knew that we weren’t far from Dodoma and we were confident that the capital city would have only paved roads.

We were wrong again.

The dirt took us all the way into Dodoma – with pavement showing up once we were in the town proper. We found the rest of our team hanging at the New Dodoma Hotel and we used their wifi to search for accommodations south of the city that would put us on our path towards Zambia. We quickly found out that the New Dodoma Hotel was the only option available and so we relented to real showers and a night in real beds. While we still had daylight we did a full round of mechanical checks and fluid top ups on the vehicles. We reworked our route for the next two days going into Lusaka and we enjoyed a nice meal together as a team.

Although today was not anything like we expected when we woke up this morning, we once again validated why we do these expeditions. It is simply impossible to know what Africa can throw at you until you get out there and experience it for yourself. We are learning a lot about what is required to actually be rugged-enough for Africa. We are seeing how critical reliable technology is in remote and difficult situations. We are improving our ability to persist and succeed in the face of insurmountable odds. Finally, we are learning to adapt to our circumstances and not lose sight of the bigger objectives. These aren’t new lessons for us but they are lessons that we need to be continually reminded of as we attempt to build BRCK into the kind of company that can have the kind of impact that we want on our greater community.

It wasn’t the day that we hoped for but – with all vehicles and riders still in this expedition – it was the kind of day that we will look back on with fond memories. We will tell stories of this day for years to come and, hopefully, somewhere in the dust, oil, sweat, and tears there was the start of an idea that will eventually find its way into a BRCK product. For that one goal, today was well worth it.

(By Erik)

I’m writing this blog post using my Mac, connected to a BRCK which is connected to a satellite internet connection using an Inmarsat iSavi device, somewhere about 100km from Arusha towards Dodoma. Inmarsat gave us this test device, a small unit, made for global travelers, so we could test out what worked and give them feedback on their tools. It also helps us figure out what connecting to the internet looks like when you’re beyond the edge of the mobile phone signal in Africa.

Here’s Reg, using his phone to do the same at our campground this evening:

Reg using the BRCK and iSavi in Tanzania

The Journey

We left at 5:30am from Nairobi to beat the traffic out of the city. With the beautiful new roads, we were at the Namanga border by 8am and cleared by 10am. Before you go on one of these trips, make it easy for yourself and get the following:

• Carnet de Passage for each vehicle (get this via AA)
• COMESA insurance (get via your insurance company, or buy at the border)
• International driver’s license (get via AA)
• Yellow fever card
• Passport

By noon we were in Arusha, and took a chance to see the cafe that Pete Owiti (of Pete’s Coffee in Nairobi) set up with some Tanzanians, called Africafe. If you ever find yourself in Arusha, this is the first place you should go. Great food, good coffee, right in the middle of everything.

Knowing we were only going about 100km more today, we set off around 1pm. We got to a roundabout, and I knew which direction the main road was, so even though Philip mentioned we should go right, I went left to the main road. 45 minutes later we realized my mistake when Philip checked his GPS and realized we were further away than we were supposed to be.

Lesson learned: always listen to your cofounders (especially the one with the GPS).

With many sighs, we turned around and went back to Arusha, where Reg had been smart enough to stay with the Land Rover when he realized we went the wrong way. We quickly split off in the correct direction, aiming to get to the camping spot by 4pm latest.

As we were sitting in traffic in Arusha, Joel says, “Erik, your bike is smoking.” I replied that it was likely just the car I was parked next to. Nope. Sure enough, I was leaking oil… For those of you who don’t ride motorcycles, this is the last thing you want to hear when on the front end of a 4,400km trip. I ride a 2007 Suzuki DR650 – they have some of the most bullet-proof engines, and are perfect for Africa’s roads.

Working on the DR650 in Arusha

Fortune smiled upon us, and we were pointed towards Arusha Art Limited, which turned out to be an amazing garage (the best I’ve ever seen in Africa). Their director, Hemal Sachdev helped us out by helping to troubleshoot what could be wrong, and even fabricating a high-pressure oil hose, with compression fittings on the spot. There was oil everywhere, so we washed it off and kept going.

Lesson learned: there are a lot of people willing to help you in your journey, especially if you ask nicely.

5 km down the road, I was still smoking… Thanks to Hemal’s help, we knew what the problem wasn’t. It was now that we chanced to notice that the problem seemed to be coming from the timing chain setting hole. We realized this could be filled by a normal M5 screw, so got trucking to the campground where we could let the engine cool down and screw it in.

Now, I sit here in Wild Palms Camp, some place we saw on the side of the road near the Tarangiri game reserve. For 10,000 Tanzania Shillings ($6) each, you get a patch of ground to put a tent, there is a banda with table/chairs, and there are even some showers and toilets. Not real camping, but definitely nice after a day on the bike!

(Republished from Erik’s blog)

Two days from now we begin a BRCK overland expedition to South Africa. Like any of our trips, it is meant to be fun and adventurous, while at the same time giving us the opportunity to stress test our product beyond the norm.

In the vein of our past expeditions to Turkana and the Nile, this one is on the edge. We’re taking 3 motorcycles and a Land Rover from Nairobi to Johannesburg in time for Maker Faire Africa on Dec 3-6.

As usual, we’ll have a couple guests, or “shotgun riders” as we call them:

On the way south: Juliana Rotich (Ushahidi, iHub, BRCK), and Mark Kamau (UX Lab lead at iHub).

On the way north: Aaron Marshall (CEO, founder of Over, Africa’s biggest selling IOS app), as well as Matt Schoenholz (head of the Kitchen Studio at Teague which focuses on prototyping and making).

You can keep up with us:

• On the BRCK blog (here), Twitter and Instagram
• On the WhiteAfrican blog, Twitter and Instagram

A Dash South

If you do the math, you’ll realize this is more of a mad dash south in time for the event, covering 4,400km in 9 days. Here’s what the route south looks like, from Kenya through Tanzania, Zambia, Botswana and into South Africa.

Nairobi to South Africa – southern leg

The journey north takes us through Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Malawi, Tanzania and back to Kenya, which we’ll take a little slower.

The People We’ll See & Events We’re At

We do have plans for a day off along the way. We’ll be stopping to visit our friends in the Zambian tech community in Lusaka. The Bongohive has been kind enough to host us, and we’ll be hanging out there, doing BRCK demos for techies and businesses, and I’ll give the keynote that evening for the beginning of Lusaka’s Startup Weekend.

Since I’m a founding organizer for Maker Faire Africa, I’m excited to go back, and this time have a product of our own to show for it. Besides demoing the BRCK and sharing how to build a hardware business in Africa, we’re also going to have some fun hacking on the devices with whoever is around and wants to play with them. We’ll have a couple of our engineers on hand as well.

Gearbox, our new prototyping and making initiative in Kenya, is a supporter of this year’s MFA too, so I’ll be able to speak to that and will have one of the Gearbox team with us at the event.

On the way back North we’re stopping in Harare, Zimbabwe to meet up with the tech community there. We’ll largely spend our time around the Hypercube, though plans are underway to get together with members of multiple tech spaces.

Testing BRCKs and Electronics

There are a couple new things we’re testing on this trip, three of which I’m extremely excited about:

When you add a RaspberryPi, a hard drive and another 8 hours of battery to a BRCK, you get a BRCKpi Microserver

1. BRCKpi – this is our RaspberryPi + BRCK device – it’s an add-on to the BRCK (we call those MRTR, as in “bricks and mortar”). We launched it last month with Mozilla in London, and are targeting it primarily at schools and clinics in Africa. However, we know there are a lot of other use cases for it, and one of those will be as a media server for our images and video on this trip.

Real off-grid, portable internet in Africa.

1. Satcoms – we’ve been thinking a lot about how we can extend the BRCK beyond the edges of the network, so that it’s the one internet device that’s smart enough to pick the right connectivity type depending on what it can sniff around it. To that end, we’ve been having great conversations with Inmarsat and we’re testing out their newest product, the iSavi (not even on the market yet, first one in Africa). Internet speeds are comparable to cellular networks at up to 384 Kbps down, and 240 Kbps up. It’s much smaller and more portable than a BGAN, so we’re excited to pair it up with the BRCK, stress test it and see how it goes off-grid.

Some of the best antennas on the market, made in Africa

1. Antennas – We’ve tested some of Poynting’s antennas before, and they’re some of the best we’ve ever found. This time around we’re testing their mobile units, paired with amplifiers which we built into the vehicle, in order to see if we can create quick, deployable units at the edge of the grid. Of course, Poynting is a South African company too, and as one of our partners, we’re going looking forward to seeing them in-person for the first time in Johannesburg.

You’ve been hearing a lot about our recent trip to Uganda, and we’re not through yet! In addition to working with Hackers for Charity, connecting schools around Jinja, and wirelessly controlling underwater robots, we wanted to explore the IoT side of the BRCK, too.

A number of people we’re working with are keen on using BRCKs to remotely connect sensors and other objects to feed data back over the internet. Some of the uses we get most excited about are around conservation, ranging from tracking vultures to locate poaching kills to remote weather stations in the savannah.

Two projects we know of, Into the Okavango (http://intotheokavango.org) and the Mara Project (http://mara.yale.edu ; http://mamase.unesco-ihe.org), are deploying networks of sensors to monitor entire ecosystems. By tracking water quality throughout the Okavango Delta in Botswana and the Maasai Mara in Kenya, each hopes to improve our understanding of these fragile environments, and by publicly posting the data (as well as pictures of their own expeditions) on their websites, they hope to inspire further appreciation amongst those who may never get a chance to visit these amazing places in person.

When we first started talking about going to Uganda, home to the source of the White Nile flowing out of Lake Victoria, we knew we had to find a way to get out on the river and try our hand at collecting environmental data via the BRCK ourselves. It just so happens that Paul, one of the expedition team members, was a river guide for seven years in Colorado before coming to Kenya, and had found out about an expedition being planned by Pete Meredith down the Karuma to Murchison Falls stretch of the Nile.

This stretch is home to the largest concentrations of hippos and crocodiles anywhere on the Nile, and has been rafted less than 10 times in history, only once commercially. It’s home to some of the biggest, most terrifying whitewater in Uganda – a country known for big, terrifying whitewater. Uganda is also a country that is industrializing fast, with hydroelectric power stations playing a key role in meeting fast growing energy demand.

All these new dams mean that rivers in their natural flow are disappearing quickly. The Bujagali Dam near Jinja covered 388 hectares in reservoir, flooding several miles of pristine whitewater. A new dam under construction near Karuma threatens to seriously affect the wildlife that concentrate downstream, and the Murchison stretch may no longer be runnable after 2018. With almost 85% of Uganda’s population unable to access electricity, the case against building more dams is hardly clear cut, but it does mean the time to learn from, share, and experience some of the most unique ecosystems along the Nile is running out.

As a team of gadget-headed engineers, we figured a good first step would be to have an affordable, reliable platform for collecting and disseminating information about these ecosystems. While the BRCK itself runs on an Arduino compatible microprocessor, we included a blank AVR chip with direct access to the pins through a dedicated GPIO port on the back. In Jinja, our lead RF engineer Jackie quickly soldered up a pH and temperature sensor kit to a GPIO MRTR, and off we went.

After much debate, and despite being a generally adventuresome and outgoing bunch, the Murchison stretch proved to be a bit too much for some of our team, most of whom had never rafted before. (Mention the word “Murchison” around here and even the local guides have to suppress a shudder of anxiety. Pete is still planning an expedition for springtime, for those with a serious bug for adventure and not too tight an attachment to this world – http://www.nalubalerafting.com/expedition.html.)

Instead, we opted to run the 30 or so kilometers of the Nile north of Jinja with Nalubale Rafting. Our goal was to get far enough away from “civilization” to test both the BRCK’s connectivity and the GPIO setup. The first day on the water, we hit five major Class IV/V rapids, including a three-meter tall, nearly vertical drop.

Along the way, we plugged in our MRTR and dipped our sensors into the water. Not being hydrological engineers ourselves, we weren’t quite sure what to do with any data we might collect, but we did learn some valuable design lessons around using the BRCK with the GPIO port (such as the need for a tighter connection between the MRTR case and the BRCK’s body). Ultimately, the hardware worked great, but some work remains on the software side to view our data on the web. We’ll be working on these tweaks and incorporating them, along with a means to visualize data fed through the port, into future updates.

After a hard day of paddling (and no small amount of swimming, only some of which was involuntary) we found ourselves at our campsite overlooking the river. It’s hard to imagine what this place will be like in 10 years. There’s nothing quite like eating dinner around the campfire, away from the constantly connected buzz of the city to make you appreciate the stillness of the wild.

As an expedition tech company, believe me, we get the irony. We still believe sharing these places before they disappear is the best chance we have for preserving them. There are far too many people who will never get to raft the source of the Nile, but we hope we can build a platform through which many more can experience it, if only vicariously.

The BRCK team is back in Nairobi! We’ve just spent six days testing BRCKs in the wild and learning from those who use our products to solve problems they face everyday. We’ve been a bit remiss in providing regular updates as we go. It turns out Jinja, Uganda, is an exciting place, and we were running from sunup ‘til sundown to fit everything in, leaving little time for blogging. We’ve now got hours of footage and records of conversations to go through, and we’ll be filling you in over the next week or two.

Our last update concerned a school on Lingira island in Lake Victoria. Despite having only a small village on the island, the school’s 12 teachers serve over 250 students from neighboring islands, too.

One of the head teachers, Frederick, showed us around – his passion for chemistry was apparent in the way he described the school’s water filtration system (using electrolytic chlorination to disinfect the water) and the solar power system that runs it. He was extremely gracious in sharing his hopes for delivering more practical, hands-on content from the web (he has his physics students building rheostats from scratch, determined to help them build an understanding of technology, even if it’s not readily available locally).

We tested a number of different types of antennas on Lingira and got the school connected. With the help of Hackers for Charity, over the next few weeks the “Living Hope” Secondary School will be building new content from the web into their curriculum, and inspiring their students to ever greater heights of achievement.

Context is Everything

We’ve been working with educators and content providers here in Kenya over the last six months to understand how technology can make their lives easier instead of harder. Why would we need to go all the way to Uganda to do the same, some might ask? Despite being only a 15-hour drive apart, (give or take a couple hours at the border) Jinja and Nairobi offer very different contexts for deploying edtech solutions.

Much of Kenya is very dry, with dust and heat being a major concern for electronics, both things the BRCK is designed to handle. In Uganda, with an average annual rainfall of over 150cm in the highlands (compared to Kenya’s average of 100cm, mostly concentrated near the border), water and humidity are greater concerns. The BRCK performed admirably in these conditions, with no noticeable moisture buildup in the case despite 30°C heat, 96% humidity, boat spray, and even being dropped in the floor of the raft.

(Note – the BRCK is NOT waterproof. Do NOT submerge your BRCK, leave it out in the rain, or expose it to overly wet conditions for long periods of time.)

In addition to different environmental conditions, the teachers we met in Uganda have unique goals and face different constraints. Not being educators ourselves, we built the BRCK as a platform for delivering any kind of content. While our partners at eLimu are working to deliver a custom package that conforms to the Kenyan curriculum via tablets, and Sugata Mitra’s “School in the Cloud” TED prize wish is seeking to provide access to the entirety of the web, Johnny at Hackers for Charity introduced us to Luom and David from Karamoja.org, working in northern Uganda near the border with South Sudan. Because even a 3G connection is difficult to achieve where they work, they are interested in blending online and offline content through the RACHEL platform that delivers offline versions of Wikipedia, Khan Academy, and other content packages.

We didn’t originally think of the BRCK as an offline solution, but the Karamoja.org team are excited enough about the ability to store content on the BRCK and periodically sync it with updates via WiFi from a drone or regular visits from staff to areas with a stronger signal, they made the 10-hour journey from Karamoja to Jinja to tell us what they want the BRCK to do. It was deeply humbling to see their dedication to bringing the same opportunities for learning to the children of rural Uganda that much of the rest of the world take for granted, and it’s these sorts of innovative ideas – that come from locals with years of experience working in their own communities – that drive us to design in Africa, for Africa, and to get the engineering and design team out of the office as much as possible.

Teachers Just Want to Teach

One of the primary reasons Johnny Long founded Hackers for Charity was the realization that technology offered boundless opportunities for learning, but only if teachers know how to use it. The schools in Uganda tend not to have IT departments, so he rallied the hacker community to provide their skill sets to help teachers focus on teaching, and leave the tech to the geeks. He now has a global volunteer network of programmers and hackers working to make technology simpler and easier to use.

One of the educators he introduced us to, Lisa Coggin – who helps run a number of schools north of Jinja – emphasized the need for a push-button solution to online content delivery. Teachers don’t have the time to sort out IP addresses and subnet masks, and even terms such as “dashboard” are not automatically intuitive to those working outside the tech sector. We’ve been pushing hard at BRCK to redesign the way people connect to the internet, and Lisa’s feedback on her experience with the BRCK was invaluable in steering us towards ways to further simplify our interface.

Partners in Connectivity

Ultimately, our trip to Jinja was a resounding success. Our hosts at Hackers for Charity were phenomenally generous, and we can’t thank those who took the time to share their experiences, thoughts, and hopes with us enough. We also took some time to have fun testing a couple other uses of the BRCK involving sensors and remotely operated vehicles, which we’ll get into in our next posts, but more than anything, we’re thrilled to see how excited everyone we met is about the BRCK, and to see the promise of BRCK+ED making a real difference in the future of learning in Africa.

It’s that time of year in Kenya again – the “short rains” are coming, there’s a slight chill in the air, and every now and then, the sky opens up for a brief deluge of water. It’s hard to avoid getting wet during the rainy season here, something we’ve designed the BRCK to handle (in small doses, at least).

It just so happens that one of our key partners, Hackers for Charity – who help schools and nonprofits solve technology related problems so they can get on with their jobs – has some interesting problems they are trying to solve in their work with schools around Jinja, Uganda, at the source of the White Nile and on the shores of the largest body of water in Africa, Lake Victoria. Time for a water-bound expedition, methinks.

Going into the wild to test our products in some of the most remote and challenging environments we can find is a core principle behind how we design in Africa, for Africa; to eat our own dog food, so to speak. Last year we took a trip to the barren shores of Lake Turkana in northern Kenya to live stream one of the best views in the world of a hybrid solar eclipse. Despite having that view blocked by a massive dust storm, the BRCK performed admirably, and we learned a lot about how to design for reliability in extreme weather. You can watch the video here:

This year, we’re taking a slightly different tack. When we started making the BRCK, we found some of the greatest need for affordable, reliable connectivity is in schools. We’ve been pushing hard for solutions in the edtech scene ever since, working with partners such as eLimu, Mozilla, and Sugata Mitra’s “School in the Cloud” TED prize wish to develop projects around innovative caching solutions to cut down the costs for data, a Raspberry Pi MRTR to turn your BRCK into a remote server, and testing connectivity solutions in schools from India to Ghana.

When Johnny Long, the founder of Hackers for Charity, first contacted BRCK back in June, he showed us his own attempts to build a rugged and reliable remote connectivity device. It looked remarkably like some early BRCK prototypes. It was clear we were trying to solve the same problems, and that by working together we could make a dent in the challenges facing students in rural Uganda. We set Johnny up with a BRCK and gave him free reign to hack it however he needed to build the solutions that worked for the schools he and Hackers for Charity supports.

At last, we have the chance to work with him directly. On Sunday, six of us will load up the Land Rover and make the 12-hour journey from Nairobi to Jinja. Johnny has graciously offered to host us at the bed and breakfast he and his wife run while we set about training up the Hackers for Charity staff on the technical aspects of the BRCK, testing antennas and signal amplifiers, and ultimately working to get several local schools online.

One of these schools is on an island in Lake Victoria, an hour and a half journey from Jinja by boat. Seeing an opportunity to kill two birds with one stone, we decided to bring an OpenROV with us. We’re hoping we can work out a way to control the ROV through the Ethernet port on a BRCK, meaning we could “wirelessly” pilot the ROV through the waters of Lake Victoria. Since Ushahidi, our parent company, partnered with OpenROV to create OpenExplorer.com, a platform for sharing the fruits of grassroots exploration with the world, you’ll be able to follow the progress of the entire expedition at:

https://openexplorer.com/expedition/brckexpedition2014

As if this wasn’t enough, Jinja also happens to be at the headwaters of the White Nile, with some of the best high-volume whitewater in the world. A BRCK expedition can’t be all bed and breakfasts, so we looked up Pete Meredith, one of the leading explorers of the Nile (he’s ran it from the furthest source in Rwanda all the way to the Mediterranean), and Nalubale Rafting to help us spend a couple days exploring the river.

In addition to the edtech sphere, some of the primary use cases that are emerging for BRCK’s technology are around conservation. We’ve been talking to people who are monitoring the effects of hippo feces and wildebeest carcasses on water quality in the Maasai Mara and streaming live data on animal sightings and pH levels (and much more) in the Okavango Delta in Botswana. You can read all about the Mara Project and Into the Okavango here and here:

http://mara.yale.edu ; http://mamase.unesco-ihe.org

http://intotheokavango.org

Both of these projects have very kindly shared info about their open-source sensor package designs with us. We’ve put together our own package to test pH and water temperature, and will attempt to stream data from the river as we go. This will be a fantastic learning experience as we further develop IoT use cases for the BRCK, and we hope will prove a valuable source of insights for how we can better enable our conservation partners to inform the wider public about the amazing work they’re doing, and the importance of these fragile ecosystems.

So, with a very full docket, our soldering irons packed, and our heads and hearts full of excitement, the BRCK team is once again setting out into the wild blue yonder. Get ready to follow along – BRCK Expedition 2014 begins tomorrow!

You’ve heard the expression about missing the forest for the trees.  It happens to the best of us.  It even happens to tiny little hardware startups in Kenya.  We have been so focused on the details of getting our product to market that we weren’t able to put the BRCK – new in the box – into the hands of real users and get their feedback on registering and configuring the BRCK.  In all fairness, we only received our first shipment of production BRICKs in Nairobi on Friday – we have been doing all of our development and testing with about 12 overworked, under-appreciated, pre-production units.  I’m not trying to make an excuse for us missing one of our core competencies.  Just praying for a little understanding as we work through the user experience (UX) of interacting with a BRCK.

The initial user reports started trickling in over the last week and half as we have been ramping up our shipping volumes.  Initially the feedback was very positive with comments on the packaging, the quality of the BRCK, even the colors of the charging cable.  However, there were also those occasional but niggling little comments on some frustrations with getting the BRCK setup.  We did get some pretty brutal feedback from our internal family at Ushahidi – who received the initial BRCKs from the production line – but we did somewhat discount their experiences based upon small fixes and patches that we had subsequently pushed into the production process.

We then started receiving some more concerning reports from real customers as our support systems started getting put into service.  Questions about what the lights meant, whether the BRCK was powered on, how to properly insert SIMs/chargers, etc.  Some of the questions were understandable.  Others, however, seemed peculiar given how easy the BRCK is to setup – or so we thought.  You see, most of us have set the BRCK up hundreds of times – personally I’m inching towards 1,000 setups.  We start it up, watch the sequence of lights, allow the BRCK to navigate us to the registration page, enter our information, and wait patiently for the new settings to be applied and the Internet to begin streaming through our browsers.  We test with Ethernet cables, SIM cards, and even WiFi-bridging to our office routers.  Sure we run into issues, but these issues get logged in our bug tracking system, assigned to a resource, fixed, deployed, and retested.  We are professionals; we know how to make robust technology – or so we thought.

We quickly noticed that some of the early adopters had bad experiences setting up their BRCKs, and with a foreboding ounce of humility that we decided we needed to throw a few more factory-fresh BRCKs in front of some of the great tech folks that hang around in Nairobi and record their experiences and observations with unboxing and setting up a BRCK.  We started by heading down one floor to the amazing ladies who run Akirachix.

Judy from Akirachix setting up a BRCK

They’re super smart, super tech-savvy, and passionate about technology from Kenya – especially BRCK.  It was just a little embarrassing when they struggled with even getting the BRCK powered on.  We then brought in one of our key local business partners, Upande, who have been chomping at the bit to get their hands on BRCKs to begin integrating a bunch of sensors and gadgets.  We sat their principal down in our conference room with a running video camera, brought in the entire BRCK team to watch him, and then furiously started scribbling on notepads.  It wasn’t pretty.

Mark from Upande setting up his BRCK

Things that are completely obvious to us were completely unobvious to the user.  The user guide – while well designed – failed to communicate a handful of really key pieces of information that provide context to a user setting up their BRCK.  The amazing lights – which get lots of oohs and aahs – mean absolutely nothing without a clear explanation.  We quickly huddled the team, watched the tapes, reviewed the play-by-play notes, and grumbled as we saw the small but significant omissions in our user experience.  Nothing fatal.  Honestly, nothing that significant.  But, for us and our users, a perceptible distraction from the quality of the hard work that we have put into BRCK over the last 18 months.

Emmanuel and Jeff reworking the setup process

Undeterred in our mission – or our pursuit of excellence – we devised some immediate changes to the registration process that should dramatically simplify the setup experience.  We also designed and had printed a color chart to explain the lights on the BRCK – we are including these in the box going forward and posting them in the mail to everyone who already has BRCKs.

Because the UX is so important we have placed the production and shipping on a brief pause while we sort through these handful of changes.  I know we won’t get everything resolved to your, or our, demanding standards but hopefully we can move the needle in the right direction.

Although these changes will have the biggest impact on customers who haven’t yet received their BRCKs, we did want to outline a few of the critical aspects of setting up a BRCK that have proven to be hurdles in the process for clients who already have their BRCKs:

1)   The Spinning Lights – in short, the outer LEDs are the connectivity indicator and the inner LED is the battery indicator.  The battery light will be on (and flashing) while charging but this does not mean the BRCK is powered on.  Here is a link to our forum post on the meaning of the various colors (http://forums.brck.com/t/a-guide-to-the-light/108/2).

2)   USB Charging Connection – the charging connection for the BRCK is under the same flap as the SIM slot – the farthest slot on the right.  What is tricky is that the cable must be oriented with the USB logo facing down.  This is opposite of many devices and can cause some confusion. The other end of the cable can be plugged into any USB charging source (e.g. laptop, wall charger, another BRCK).

3)   Local vs Cloud Dashboard – there are actually two dashboards that are part of the BRCK.  For most activities, the Cloud Dashboard is the go-to location but it does require connectivity to the Internet to access. You can access the Cloud Dashboard at http://my.brck.com.  The Local Dashboard is provided solely to assist with getting a connection.  You can access the Local Dashboard at http://local.brck.com (also at http://192.168.69.1).  When navigating to the Local Dashboard you may see a spinning BRCK logo that indicates the BRCK is transitioning to a mode where the Local Dashboard can be accessed.  Please be patient, it can sometimes take awhile for the BRCK to make this transition.

BRCK Cloud Dashboard

BRCK Local Dashboard

4) Source of Internet – in order for the BRCK to get registered you will need a working source of Internet.  The easiest way to achieve this is to connect an ethernet cable from your home router.  Another easy way is to insert a pin-unlocked 3G SIM with a data bundle.  If neither of these options are available, the BRCK will reroute you to the Local Dashboard where you can connect via WiFi-bridging or configure a locked SIM.

We’re continuing on user testing today and we have instituted some immediate changes to the registration and setup process that make the process clearer and more intuitive.  For those who have already received BRCKs, free free to get in touch with us at [email protected] and we’re happy to help you with any setup issues along the way.  We are also going to put out an unboxing and setup video this week.  We hope that seeing someone setup a BRCK will be a useful guide for getting your own BRCK registered and configured.

Finally, we know that many of you are eagerly awaiting receipt of your BRCKs.  We are finally make strides at getting our daily production volumes up and we expect to have the backlog cleared within the next 2 – 3 weeks.  We do apologize that this UX issue is going to delay shipping for a couple of days but we believe that it will be worth it if you are able to more fully enjoy your BRCK unboxing and setup experience.

This weekend Reg, Philip and I took off for the Nguruman Escarpment, which is about a four hour drive outside of Nairobi. Our goal was to field test a BRCK with some friends of ours, Philip and Katy Leakey, who live in a tented camp at the top of the Ngurman escarpment, which is on the edge of the network.

Nairobi to Nguruman route, with elevation. Some areas at 31% grades.

The town of Ngurumani sits at the base of the escarpment, and you rise 3,000 feet on a rough dirt road in order to get to their camp. The Leakeys use solar and generator power, and the only way they can get internet is using either spotty 3g dongles, or very expensive (and slow) VSAT services. It’s not ideal, and for a couple who run some amazing businesses with global reach, that grow wealth in their Masai community, it’s a real problem to not be connected to the internet consistently.

The Journey

Early Sunday morning, we set out. I had done this drive in a car before, but wanted to see if I could do it on the motorcycle too, so both Philip and I rode out on bikes while Reg followed in the Land Rover. It’s an incredibly scenic trip, as you go through the dry, Masai country, over the sodium flats of Lake Magadi with their pink and white ponds, and into the back country. The views from the escarpment are majestic, and the air is clean and crisp, unlike Nairobi.

Coming down a steep and rocky hill overlooking Lake Magadi

Reg in the Land Rover at Lake Magadi

Philip crossing a stream

The good news was that we did the ride with no meaningful problems.

The bad news was that I was unprepared for just how difficult the climb up to the top of the escarpment is. In a car it’s tough, but 4 wheels give you some balance, as well as much needed traction when you get to the really steep grades that have a lot of sand beneath you. As if courting disaster, I also had forgotten to change my tires on my motorcycle to knobbies until too late, so was stuck going up in city tires. Not a good idea. There’s a part of the road that gets to 31 percent grade, with S-curves and if you slow down, you’re in trouble.

I ended up stalling out on this one particularly steep portion, and was exhausted trying to keep it upright, and push the bike forward as it dug itself deeper into the sand and gravel. Finally, Reg caught up with me and was able to help push as I got it going again, and we were able to get to the top without any more issues. The way back down was just a controlled slide, as the brakes helped, but you couldn’t actually stop yourself from progressing downwards. One particular S-curve remains engraved in my memory, since that’s where a cobra dropped from a bush next to me. Fortunately it was small, and wanted to get away from me as much as I did from it, so we parted amicably.

The Field Test

We carried with us an assortment of large and small antennas, and we were particularly keen to try out the new ones from Poynting Antenna in South Africa. We also brought the normal BRCK, Sandstorm case and our Wilson antenna amp (booster). Beyond that, we carried our standard medical kit, tools, SIM cards and water.

Using a Yagi from Poynting Antenna

The main antenna we used was the large, 1 meter-long, cast aluminium Yagi antenna by Poynting. It’s big, tough and not easy to pack around with you, but it gets the best gain. We were easily able to reach out and grab the signals from the mobile phone towers about 4-5 kilometers away, and we got 90% or 54dBi.

It turns out that you can get three mobile phone connections from the Leakey’s. Safaricom has a decent signal, but the tower that serves the people in that community has no internet connection, to that was a dud. Orange also has a tower, and supposedly the internet data connection does work on it, but it wasn’t a strong signal and we didn’t have any luck with it. Airtel, on the other hand, had a good signal and had a data connection.

Philip and Reg getting the BRCK working at the Leakey’s camp

Lessons Learned

While we had strong signal, we had two issues that we needed to solve, and only an hour to do it before we had to head back down the hill to make it back to Nairobi before dark.

First, we mainly use Orange and Safaricom internally, and didn’t have an Airtel SIM card with us. Fortunately Katy had one, so we were able to use it. This was an oversight on our part, and we’ll stock a couple of these Airtel SIMs in the future.

Second, the Airtel SIM had no credit on it. Since all of us carry phones that hold micro- or nano-SIMs, we had no way of topping it up either. An easy solution is that we’ll carry a simple phone with us that we can do this with in the future, but we also want to explore how we can enable this same top-up activity using the local (non-cloud) dashboard of the BRCK.

Third, that not all towers work, some give bad information. Just because you get a signal does not mean that you are connected to the internet, even if it says “Edge” or “3G” on your phone.

All-in-all, it was a good excursion, a chance to eat our own dogfood outside the comfort of Nairobi and the iHub. It was a reminder to be more prepared (in both the journey and the field test), and also a great opportunity to see some less well-traveled parts of Kenya.

The BRCKs view of the valley

What does it take to launch an e-learning initiative in remote schools in Kenya?  Last week I packed my bags and drove four hours northwest of Nairobi to Isiolo to find out.  BRCK was invited on this exploratory trip as a potential technology partner by eLimu, an ed-tech company based in Nairobi that is bringing innovative curriculum to schools.

The eLimu application runs on tablet devices is designed to help supplement classroom teaching in all six-subject areas tested by the Kenyan Certificate of Primary Education (KCPE).  With animated characters guiding students through the lessons, children are kept engaged by singing songs, taking quizzes and watching animated explanations about challenging concepts.  It also comes with additional curriculum on peace building, agriculture, civics and human rights.

Each November, Kenyan students take a four-day exam in order to receive their KCPE and receive a high school placement.  When results are announced each year, Isiolo is consistently near the bottom of the rankings, and local politicians started to look at possible solutions.  During their research, they found eLimu.  During beta testing phase, eLimu has seen KCPE test results dramatically increase, and this is exactly why eLimu was invited to Isiolo on behalf of the Deputy Governor of Isiolo County.

I spent two days in Isiolo with eLimu and another technology provider, offering satellite and TV white space Internet solutions, to figure out how to implement a pilot test of eLimu in Isiolo.

So after two days, what did I discover?  BRCK has some major benefits as a technology provider for ed-tech initiatives:

Low start-up costs.  Pilot projects tend to be lean.  To launch a pilot test in three Isiolo schools reaching just over 1,200 students – without considering the cost of data – the start-up cost is just over $4,000 for the BRCKs, antennas and solar chargers.  While it’s extreme, compare that to the approximately $300 million it costs to build, launch and maintain a satellite Internet connection.

Data solutions.  BRCK has secured inexpensive data plans and bundles that are easy to purchase.  Since the tablet content will likely be viewed multiple times, the BRCK can cache the pages through its internal storage features, which requiring less data.

Coordinated monitoring and evaluation.  By registering all of the pilot BRCK devices to the project, a government official could easily log-in to the online BRCK dashboard to see which BRCKs are connected, how long they have been online and if more data needs to be purchased.  Both eLimu and the local government can see real-time information and intervene if needed.

Simplicity.  eLimu cannot introduce technology solutions into schools that are complicated.  Simplicity and ease-of-use are key. Period.

While there are multiple technology solutions to choose from, BRCK has the potential to bring connectivity to projects that can strengthen the future of Kenya’s education system.

 Meghan Lazier is a summer UX fellow with BRCK.  She is currently a graduate student at School of Visual Arts in the MFA Design for Social Innovation program.