With all the hubbub about the team’s epic three week dash to South Africa and back, some may have forgotten that only a month and a half ago, the other half of the team were cruising Lake Victoria and the Nile in Uganda. The video edit is done, though, so we’re bringing it back!

We started off with a plan to work with Johnny Long of Hackers for Charity to connect schools around Jinja to the internet and learn from local educators how we can build technology that meets their needs:

http://brck.com/2014/11/brck-expedition-2014-exploring-edtech-on-the-water/#.VJP-mACU

We wound up visiting the Living Hope Secondary School on Lingira Island in Lake Victoria:

http://brck.com/2014/11/brcked-expedition-connecting-lingira-secondary-school/#.VJP–ACU

http://brck.com/2014/11/brcked-expedition-part-two/#.VJP-8ACU

On the boat ride back, we broke out our OpenROV underwater exploration robot:

http://brck.com/2014/11/going-deep-with-openrov/#.VJP_JACU

Finally, we took a raft trip down the White Nile to play with antennas and sensors, to see how the Internet of Things could help conservation efforts in threatened ecosystems:

http://brck.com/2014/11/how-the-internet-of-things-can-help-save-our-rivers/#.VJP_TACU

You can see all that and more (read: zany BRCK team adventures) in the video above. It’s been a heck of a year for us here in Nairobi, and we can’t wait to see what 2015 brings! (Did someone say they need a weather station on Mt. Kenya…?)

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.

Over the past three months we have received a huge amount of interest from educators about the BRCK. This has been a real eye opener for us. Because of this we planned an expedition to visit Johnny Long, a long time member of the BRCK community, who runs Hackers For Charity in Jinja, Uganda. He supports local charities and schools with technical support, tools, and trainings. About a year ago he hacked together a bunch of connectivity equipment in a pelican case to get a few schools he works with online. After significant effort he came across BRCK and had a eureka moment. He reached out and has been a huge inspiration to us, and an incredibly helpful community member.

The real take away from our time with Johnny is that there is a massive need to get information, that educational content, into the hands of teachers and students at the edge of the network. Most of these places have a signal for an hour a day or so, at best. So the key is to deliver content locally offline, and then have it update and sync to the greater web during those moments of connectivity. The BRCK can improve that quality of connectivity and increase the amount of time they are online, but with content directly on the BRCK, it can even deliver offline educational content such as school books, Wikipedia, and Khan Academy videos even when there is no connection.

Johnny took us out to a school he works with on Lingira island, which is about 1.5 hour boat ride into Lake Victoria. Some of the teachers at the school had reception on their phones, but the school itself had no connectivity. We spent the day working on getting the school set up. We tested out antennae and different mobile carriers. The latest version of BRCK software worked like a champ.

The most important part was the time we spent with the teachers. This direct user research was invaluable. The teachers have to spend huge amounts of money on textbooks and transporting them to the school. They are out of date and when new ones come out, they can’t procure or afford them. They know how that an internet connection gives affordable access to the entirety of the modern world, a virtual Library of Alexandria.

Access to information is an equalizer. Access to information in its purist form is fuel for education. It shortens the gap between the haves and the have nots, and gives people real opportunity.

(Posted from the banks of the Nile, via a BRCK.)

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!

So, you want to hack your BRCK, eh? Good for you! There are all sorts of goodies inside that you can use to do everything from monitor remote sensors to boil water (with a couple infinite loops thrown in your code, of course).

If you want to take your BRCK apart, just be aware of two things:

1. You WILL void your warranty. We strongly encourage innovative uses of our hardware, but we can’t be blamed for what happens. This is fun stuff, but if you break your BRCK, we won’t replace it.
2. Be very careful removing the modem. The flex cable underneath it can break if you work too quickly.

Happy hacking!

BRCK How To: Tear Down from BRCK on Vimeo.

Those of you that have been following our blog for a while know that a number of our partners work in the education technology sphere. Today, we went back to a school in Kawangware that we first visited in April with eLimu, a Kenyan edtech startup that introduced a tablet program to help primary school students prepare for their exams.

(Read the original post at: http://brck.com/2014/04/our-problem-is-internet-on-brcks-in-schools/#.VBbj3UtGzwI)

When asked how the tablets were working back in April, the school’s headmaster Peter told us, “The tablet program works very well, our problem is internet.” The school had a WiFi router/modem installed in the office, where a reasonably high-speed cable connection was available, but they were unable to get the signal in the classrooms. To use the tablets, students had to gather outside near the small office to get a strong enough connection. When the weather was bad or the sun was too bright, the tablets couldn’t be used.

Several days ago, Peter’s school got a BRCK. By running an Ethernet cable from their modem to the BRCK, they now have internet access in three classrooms. They can use the tablets when it is raining, when the sun is hot and bright, or even when the power goes out thanks to the BRCK’s battery and 3G failover. Today, the students were watching a video about the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya in the 1950s.

In Africa, it often seems that relatively small things derail big plans. Tablets can’t be used due to the sun’s glare, routers are rendered useless by voltage spikes and power outages. By addressing some of these small issues, we hope the BRCK can play a part in bringing bigger plans to fruition. We’ll bring you further updates from Peter’s school as they continue to try out new ways of learning from the worldwide web.

— — —

Want to get involved? BRCK and eLimu are looking to scale up by connecting 50 schools to the internet and providing them with tablets for learning. We also want to develop a caching system on the BRCK that could cut the cost of providing the same content to multiple tablets from ~$3 per student to less than $0.10.

We’re looking for someone who can help fund this project, so if that’s you, let us know!

Welcome to a new series of videos called BRCK: How To’s!

We’re kicking things off with a step-by-step walkthrough of the first thing you’ll want to do when you get your BRCK: register it. Learn everything from what the lights mean to how to handle some commonly encountered issues. Enjoy, and see below for a description of the registration process!

BRCK How To: Registration from BRCK on Vimeo.

Registration process:

To setup your BRCK for the first time, plug it in and turn it on. The lights will tell you what it is doing.

The center light tells you your power status:

• Red < 10%.
• Yellow < 40%.
• Green < 95%.
• Blue < 100%.
• Pulsing indicates that your BRCK is charging.

The outer lights indicate your connection status:

• Spinning means the BRCK is searching for a connection.
• Solid outer lights mean your BRCK has established a connection. The outer ring will pulse at a rate that indicates your connection speed.
• Orange is for the BRCK’s internal startup process.
• Purple is for Ethernet connections.
• Green is for WiFi bridging.
• Blue is for 3G.

Visit my.brck.com/help for a helpful guide to the color scheme.

To register your BRCK, it needs to be connected to the Internet. After you turn it on, do one of the following:

• Plug in an Ethernet cable from another modem or router.
• Insert a data enabled SIM card.
• Or use the local dashboard to configure a WiFi bridge (more on this below).

Go to your WiFi list and look for your BRCK. It will appear as “BRCK_somelongstringofnumbers”.

Connect to it, open your browser and go to my.brck.com.

If you have an Ethernet or SIM connection, you will be taken to the registration page and can skip the next step.

If you do NOT have an Ethernet or SIM connection, you will be redirected to the local dashboard where you can configure a WiFi bridge:

• Click “View” under WiFi.
• Select your network.
• Enter your password.
• Click join.
• Wait patiently while your BRCK configures these changes (this can take several minutes).

Once you are directed to the registration page, click “Sign up”.

• Enter your name, email, and choose a password.
• Click “Create account”.
• Once your BRCK has finished applying these changes, click “Go to your dashboard”.

You will be taken to the cloud dashboard for your BRCK, where you can see statistics regarding your power status, data usage, and devices connected to your BRCK.

Click on “Preferences” in the left pane to change your connection configuration.

• To change the name of the WiFi network your BRCK broadcasts, click in the box under “WiFi Name”.
• Enter a new name, set a password, and click “Save”.
• You may see an error message at this point. This happens because once you’ve changed the name of your BRCK’s WiFi network, your computer will lose connection to it and the cloud dashboard.

To reconnect to your BRCK’s new WiFi network:

• Open your WiFi list.
• Your BRCK’s new WiFi name should appear shortly.
• Connect to it, et voila!

Congratulations, your BRCK is now registered! You can access the Internet, the cloud dashboard, and configure your BRCK from anywhere in the world.