I love the “moonshot” ideology, a type of thinking that aims to achieve something that is generally believed to be impossible.  I first came across this concept with Google X and their way of thinking about hard problems. Who wouldn’t get inspired by solving a massive challenge using next generation technology? Especially when it’s backed with enough money to see if it will actually work. Of all the projects, I love Loon the most – connectivity by high altitude balloons that use wind patterns intelligently.  It’s just that right mix of insanity and brilliance that epitomizes solving a massive problem by trying something incredibly lateral.

Like many others, I too am driven to use my time on this earth to solve big problems. My mixture of background and experience ideally suits me to do technology work in Africa, and my personality means I end up building new things, new companies, instead of working for others. By the nature of those three things (entrepreneurship + tech + Africa), I tend to be resource constrained when it comes to moonshots. Instead, along with great partners and co-founders, I’ve built organizations that utilize crowd sourcing, foster innovation grounded in the African context, provide funds to tech startups, and create space to collaboratively build and rapidly prototype new technology.

My most recent endeavor has been building BRCK, which is 6 years old, trying to solve for how to create a real onramp to the internet for people who can’t pay for it.

Moonshots and Groundshots

As I look at this odd mixture of companies, I realize that, while I’m a moonshot thinker, I’m a groundshot operator.  I’m trying to solve big problems that impact many people across the world using the last generation’s technology in different ways, and coming up with a new pattern or model for everyone to benefit. In short, I don’t have the resources to build a Loon or StarLink, but what I can do is figure out how to make something that meets ordinary people where they are with what they have, and not just for profit, but also to make the world a slightly better place.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot as we’re dealing with the current coronavirus pandemic. Google’s Loon was first-level approved to work in Kenya last year, and then just this week was given a final green light by the Kenyan government to operate. This is great news, and I’m excited that we have four of their balloons sitting over Kenya right now. I’m also concerned that it’s only going to solve part of the problem.

You see, connectivity is a mixture of signal and devices, AND affordability. Loon solves for the difficulty of signal in rural Africa, where building mobile phone towers has too low of an ROI for the mobile operators to be interested. Devices are getting cheap enough that we’re seeing a deep density of (low-end) smartphones across many countries. However, affordability is a BIG hairy problem, made only bigger as the economic hits start coming during and after this pandemic.

Loon uses the LTE spectrum of Kenya’s Telkom operator, so anyone who has the Telkom SIM card can receive that signal from the balloon and be connected. The problem is that you have to pay the data rates that Telkom charges, which isn’t much by middle-class standards, but most rural people aren’t middle class and their wallets are much more rigid.

That’s the problem we started working to solve in a little room beneath the iHub back in 2014. “How do you get everyone in Africa online if they can’t pay?”

The answer was a bit humbling for us techies to swallow, but it turned out that the business model was as important as the technology – maybe more so. We started grinding on this problem, which culminated in our Moja platform, now operating in Kenya and Rwanda. So far, it has brought 2 million users online for free. The answer was found in us saying, “What if the internet becomes free for consumers everywhere? The internet isn’t free to deliver, so what is the business model for that?” The mental model we were left with meant we had to find other parties to pay, which led us down the B-to-B-to-C model that we currently use and are finding quite successful.

So… What is a Groundshot Then?

I think it’s the glue that connects the amazing wizardry of the moonshot with the grounded business models and older technology found in most people’s pockets.

We’re rapidly expanding our Moja network, and I’m glad to work with our backhaul partners in terrestrial fibre internet and mobile operators. But I’m equally excited to take these moonshots like Loon or StarLink and connect them to real people on the ground in Africa. With a ground game like ours, and air support like theirs, it’s a magical combination.

BRCK has always been committed to innovating in emerging markets. Regardless of what we’ve accomplished in the past, we aren’t going to be complacent about the future. And BRCK Labs is how we plan on ensuring that. 

At BRCK, we understand that the technology paradigms that work in other parts of the world do not necessarily apply in Kenya. The hardware needs to be more rugged with power and data backup. The feature set needs to be tweaked.  The costs likely need to be spread out. The user interaction will be from a different understanding, on a different device, and for different reasons than what is presented at CES in Las Vegas.

And over the last five years, BRCK has developed several products specifically designed for the East African context. This includes the original BRCK V1, Kio Kit, PicoBRCK, Magma (LTE), SupaBRCK, and now the Moja Free WiFi platform. This is an incredible achievement, especially considering that many startups in North America develop on a single product over several years.

The Moja platform continues to gain traction with users and advertisers alike. We are now at over half a million monthly users, and those numbers are climbing steadily. We are currently pushing to double the number of Moja buses and are actively expanding into other countries.

BRCK has just finished restructuring internally to position the business so we can handle this network expansion. And, as the platform matures, we are also asking ourselves, “Okay – what’s next?”

We are BRCK Labs; we make cool shit!

Emerging markets such as Kenya present countless opportunities and the challenge is often around deciding which one to pursue And so, as most of BRCK continues to grow the Moja platform, the BRCK Labs team is now tasked to come up with answers that question and pursue those possibilities.

What is cooler than a complete educational solution in a box, you ask?

Or a ruggedized edge computing router providing free WiFi to average Kenyans?

I admit it – those are going to be hard to beat.

But what about a country-wide weather station network that can help farmers across Kenya understand weather patterns? (Currently, Kenya only has 4 or 5 official weather stations and the data is not public.) Or a sensor that can report from extremely remote locations whether a motorcycle (a possible poacher) has driven by? Smart houses are all the rage in North America, maybe BRCK should pursue a device that adds smarts to shelters in refugee camps and slums.  How about a device that allows people to provide energy PAYG services? Or a device that interconnects solar home systems to create a resilient mesh grid owned by the community? Clinic in-a-box, micro-generator, community-based blockchain micro-insurance, the first African array of micro-satellites – the opportunities are incredible!

It is both a dream come true and a fairly big responsibility to head BRCK Labs.  To be a part of the next disruptive technology that will once again get BRCK on the cover of National Geographic or ranked in Time’s Top 50 Genius Companies.  Five years ago, no one would have ever predicted that BRCK would be rolling out free WiFi and innovative LTE services; who can imagine what technology we will develop in the next five years!

There has been a lot of talk about “inclusive business” since the term was coined by the World Business Council for Sustainable Development in 2005. A business is said to be inclusive when it’s value chains purposefully “include” the needs and wants of low-income people and communities, and the company then implements on a business model built around more than just a profit-based bottom line. Those of us who have been part of building things like Ushahidi, iHub Nairobi, Gearbox, and BRCK are nothing if not inclusive business practitioners. However, the real issue comes down to who gets to decide the “who, when, and where” of what gets included.

Our experience of “making in Africa for Africa” has shown us that local design is by its very nature inclusive. When we design here in Nairobi we are using “from periphery to centre thinking”, and the chances of misreading low-income markets in our product design is greatly reduced. Designers who live and work in Manhattan (no offence to the amazing designers of that great city) must consciously find ways to build processes that include the issues faced by the global poor. In Nairobi one has to try hard not to.

When you design at the periphery – the whole point is that you by necessity “include” the needs and wants of low income people, not just because this is a BoP market in the Prahaladian sense of the term, but because you live and work in the same context as those you seek to serve by making great products and services that people want. At BRCK there is a design team with diverse experiences, including what it is like to live in low income areas and schools. These experiences and context inform the design process and iterative improvements to the products and services provided by the various initiatives.

Forward thinking companies like Intel have been pursuing business models that benefit from local learning. Intel took the BRCK hardware platform known as the Kio Kit and combined it with their innovative software and content, to produce a customised Kio Kit designed specifically for women and youth empowerment projects in Kenya; which are a part of a larger initiative from Intel Corporation to tackle the digital divide. This is what inclusive business is about on the ground.  From this partnership with Intel, we are finding that inclusive business goes hand in hand with appropriate technology and design at the periphery.

*Post by Juliana Rotich & Richard Klopp of BRCK.org,  an initiative to deploy reliable technology to the edges of society. Juliana will be at Skoll World Forum next week discussing how new developments in tech can accelerate change. Do connect with her there or you can reach out to juliana at BRCK dot org to discuss more on how to partner for deploying tech to the edges of society.

The heritage of BRCK is that we were born out of Ushahidi, which builds platforms for changing the way information flows in crisis and disasters events globally. It shouldn’t be a surprise then that we think a lot about how BRCK hardware can help extend the ability of disaster response teams around the world.

BRCK+Pi – new design concept for production

1: A Rugged Microserver

With the recent development of the BRCK+Pi, which marries a RaspberryPi + hard drive + 8-hour battery, to the BRCK in a simple package (full specs below), it gave us a chance to think through what could happen beyond just connectivity in tough environments. After all, with this extra computing power it turns the device into a remote microserver, where you can cache content locally and do stuff even when in an offline mode.

In short, the BRCK+Pi allows not just the standard BRCK connectivity, but now also the ability for content and computing in a small, rugged form factor that can be used anywhere.

2: Software for Disaster Response Teams

This allows us to provide a stack of disaster-related software that could be loaded onto the device. The goal being to have a core software stack available on BRCK+Pi devices to humanitarian response organizations globally. The purpose being to help speed recovery after a crisis, making first responder’s lives more efficient and making technology work where it normally doesn’t.

While anyone who makes these tools can put some time into making their tool work on the microserver, I was thinking to list out the full grouping that came out of a discussion on the CrisisMappers network recently, and then prioritize them into foundational tools that could be made into a “package” to download onto your own BRCK+Pi and which would help the broadest set of disaster responders. I asked the following questions:
   

• What ideas do you have that would fit on BRCK+Pi?
• Which problems could this help with?
• Are there any software packages that you’d find valuable in the Crisis Stack?

3: What Goes in the Box?

First pass on this is about a set of basic tools that we can think of as a “core package”. We had an open call with members of the CrisisMappers community where we talked about the types of software needed and use cases for it. The initial tool list looks like this, though the repository is open on Github and can be changed, added to, or just plain branched in the future:

• OSM tiles (Light) – (Ex: Haiti Browser)
• OSM Sync – Make a mark on a map served off the BRCK+Pi and synchronize with OSM API occasionally
• SMSsync – Use the BRCK wireless modem to allow for text messaging, rewritten to be native on the BRCK Device
• LDLN – An inexpensive, distributed local data hub, with mobile apps to address damaged communication infrastructures after natural disasters
• Sahana Eden – A suite of tools designed specifically for organizations during disasters, including organization registry, project tracking, asset tracking and more.
• Cellular Coverage Mapping – Find a tool to report the signal strength measured if connected to cell network to contribute to existing project (see: http://www.ebola-cellular-map.resudox.net/)
• Etherpad Lite – The most basic and simple communications tool we know of
• Image sharing tool – Still to be determined, but could be BitTorent Sync for file management (protocol for local sync, not for normal torrenting activities)

Secondary applications to consider are:

ONA – http://ona.io/
Enketo – https://enketo.org/
FrontlineSMS -http://www.frontlinesms.com/
Ping – http://pingapp.io/
DragonForce – http://www.drakontas.com/
Ushahidi – http://ushahidi.com
WordPress – http://wordpress.org
Flickr or YouTube Sync
Wiki  – Gollum, Dokuwiki or Mediawiki
VPN service

4: Getting Stuff Done & How You Can Help

An idea, once outlined, is good but not enough. Now it’s time to build something. This week the BRCK and Ushahidi teams have been working on getting the basic libraries to run the “core package” onto the device. We’ve also setup a Github repo for Crisis Stack that is open for others to join. Beyond that, the team is getting Etherpad and Ushahidi 2.x working on the device.

Mikel Maron of Open Street Map was on the call and is helping to get the OSM tiles working.
Praneeth Bodduluri of Sahana also joined us and is helping to make Sahana Eden available.
I’m in contact with the LDLN team and we hope to have them also contributing to the core package.

We’re on the way to getting an alpha of Crisis Stack out by mid-February, we need the community in the disaster response space to help to make it happen.

If you’re a software engineer and would like to be involved, check out the repository and get involved with one of the projects that’s being put on the device.

If you’re a first responder, let us know what we is really needed on the device. We’ll need testers on this front as well, of course, but that won’t happen until we get some basic items working on it.

—————————————————–

BRCK+Pi specs

BRCK+Pi – initial working prototype

• IP51 water and dust ingress protection
• Dimensions: 132mm (5.18 inches) by 72mm (2.82 inches) by 45mm (1.77 inches)
• Native Raspberry Pi network connectivity when connected to BRCK
• Input voltage 5 – 18V, 0.1 – 3A charge current.
• Solar compatible charging
• Over voltage and reverse polarity protected inputs
• Dual USB connection to BRCK+Pi for Keyboard or Mouse (500mA)
• Mini-HDMI Video Out
• SDXC support (up to 2TB of SD storage), normally ships with 16GB
• BCM2835 SoC
• 4GB native storage (upgradeable to 500GB with extra cost)
• 512MB RAM
• 3.7V 8,000 mAH battery
• Can be preconfigured with Raspbian, but compatible with any Raspberry Pi distribution.
• Connects to the BRCK by stacking underneath, screws on for security


You can find the BRCK specs here.

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.

At one end of the BRCK you’ll find a flap with an antenna post hiding underneath it. This is connected to the wireless modem inside of the BRCK and allows you to extend the range of your Edge/3G/4G considerably.

Many times we find that the signal from a mobile tower is a bit weak. Sometimes this is due to distance, other times its due to having too much interference in the way – such as buildings or walls. Either way if there’s a signal out there, you’d like to reach out and touch it.

Omnidirectional vs Unidirectional Antennas

Omnidirectional vs Unidirectional antennas

An unidirectional antenna is useful for fixed installations, where you know where the nearest (or best) tower is. The omnidirectional antenna is better suited for times where you don’t know where the tower is, or you are moving around a lot. There’s a good video on YouTube describing the difference as well.

Omnidirectional
We’ll sometimes plug a omnidirectional antenna into the BRCK. This is when we know the tower isn’t that far away and we’re getting some bars. It boosts it a good bit. You can imagine putting small antenna up on the top of the window, up a tree, running it out the building, etc. It’s easy and fast to do, and you don’t have to do a bunch of measuring or compass-pointing to make it work.

An omnidirectional antenna plugged into the BRCK

Unidirectional
A unidirectional antenna can give you considerably more distance, or range, on your mobile signal. You have to know exactly where the mobile tower is that you’re pointing at, but if you do and can shoot the unidirectional antenna straight at it, then you can reach a lot further – sometimes many kilometers.

Reg using our unidirectional antenna

Amping it
The final piece of the “extending your wireless” range puzzle is an antenna amplifier. This works with both types of antennas, as it sits between the BRCK and the antenna. These great devices help your BRCK pull a signal from even farther away. We’ve been using them in Kenya for the past 6-months, and they were extremely helpful when in difficult areas, like in northern Kenya where the signals were weak and far away.

Reg + Unidirectional antenna + amplifier (the little blue rectangle)

We also are pleased to announce that we have formed a partnership with Wilson Electronics. We’ve tested out their unidirectional and omnidirectional antennas, as well as their wireless antenna amps extensively in Kenya and have found them to be durable (and we did beat them up a lot), and highly functional. When we open the BRCK store online in the next couple weeks, you’ll be able to purchase them at discounted rates.

(Note: Reg does like climbing things)

Yesterday we spent the morning taking a few new pictures of the BRCK, since there had been some cosmetic changes to the design (we moved the light on the top, and put the power button on the side). One of the first places we stopped was a school in Kawangware, one of the lower income areas of Nairobi.

Over the past few months, more and more people who deal with schools and education have been reaching out to us. There is a growing demand for connected devices, for administrators, teachers and students.

We intend to see BRCK coupled with tablets and Raspberry Pi solutions in Africa’s classrooms.

Making Digital Education More Efficient

Nivi Mukherjee runs eLimu, a Kenyan organization that designs a tablet-based Android app which helps prepare primary school students to pass their standardized exam to get into secondary school. They’ve been doing fantastic work for the past 3 years, and their program is really getting off the ground.

One issue that Nivi has with the system is that each of the tablets in the school has to have its own SIM card to download the most recent content (daily/weekly). You can imagine how expensive this gets with 50 devices at a time.

This is where Nivi and I sat down to discuss where the BRCK can fit in. We’re trying to see if having a single BRCK in a school like this can help reduce costs. The BRCK can download the data/information (and upload too, if needed), each day at midnight. The next morning, instead of each child with a tablet updating to the local tower, instead they would just connect over WiFi to the BRCK and get the latest content sync.

That’s just one way we think it could be useful, not to mention what can be done by the administrators during the day to get more reliable email and internet connectivity using the device. In fact, as we were leaving the school we asked Peter the headmaster how his tablet education program was going. His response was, “The tablet program works very well, our problem is internet“.

Customize an Ed-Tech Solution

Recently another education-tech focused individual got in touch with us, this time from Uganda, by the name of Johnny Long. He’s trying to figure out a solution that takes hardware like Raspberry Pi, Chromebooks, Arduino and solar, and then mixes them with software from RACHEL, Khan Academy (via Ka-Lite) and GCFLearnFree for schools that have poor infrastructure. It’s a hard problem, made harder by internet connectivity issues.

Because of his incredible depth of knowledge on software development and firmware, we’re ensuring he too gets an early BRCK as well.

The power of the BRCK isn’t just in the redundancy and ruggedness of the device, it’s in the fact that you can customize it to your needs. What’s needed in semi-rural Uganda is not the same as what’s needed in urban Ghana, nor are the needs the same between public and private schools.

For this reason we created the BRCK Cloud with an API so that software developers can customize their own software for the BRCKs that they run. We also provide a GPIO port which allows people to customize with other hardware, like solar, additional ports, more hard drive space and especially items like Raspberry Pi. We know we can’t come up with all of the ways to use and customize the BRCK on our own, and it’s in this industry where we feel a lot of great new ideas will flourish.

Whether you’re doing something for one school or you’re running a massive program such as OneBillion in Malawi and beyond, the custom software and hardware connectivity needs can be met with a BRCK.

I’m looking forward to shipping the first BRCK devices out to people who run these programs in the next few weeks, as they represent something we cherish about deeply about the BRCK. You see, our vision is a world connected, where the last-mile of internet connectivity is as seamless for someone living in Africa as it is in Europe or the US. There’s no where more in need of this than schools.

(Yesterday’s post: Part 1)

I came home this weekend to find that the water pump that goes from our outside tank to the house was no longer functioning. One of the daily challenges that we deal with in Nairobi is that water is both unreliable and – when available – delivered at very low pressure. At our house we have one pump that goes from the city line to our outside tank and then a separate pump that goes from the outside tank into the tanks that are located in our attic. When we moved into the house both pumps were controlled manually and it was not uncommon to run out of water in one part of the house – usually the showers – when we would forget to turn the pump on. I eventually bought a very nice industrial pressure control valve that would automatically turn on the pump whenever the water level dropped below the cutoff for the float valves. It wasn’t a cheap control valve – in fact it was quite expensive. I chose to invest in an industrial quality unit so that it would withstand the environmental realities of Kenya.

Needless to say, it failed. Not just a little failure, but a complete and total meltdown – literally.

It all started with a very bad storm on Saturday. Our power was out several times and we woke up on Sunday to our fans running very slowly and the lights glowing very dim. I didn’t measure the voltage but I would guess we were running about 100V on a 220V circuit. We spent the morning at church and didn’t get back to the house until later in the afternoon. Everything was back on and we assumed that all was well. It was only on Monday morning when the showers didn’t work that we realized there was an issue. Our pump wasn’t running.

After confirming that power was being supplied, I pulled the control valve off and opened it up. You can see the results in the photos. Complete and unrepairable electrical devastation. The unit was fried. I am guessing that we had a serious power spike at some point in the day and this unit wasn’t sufficiently engineered to handle the results. I don’t know the specs on the components or how well engineered the device was but in reading the ashes I can only surmise that the sizable relay failed and sent 300V+ into the circuit board. Even in the ashes I can tell this is a well built device and I am sure that the EE who designed it was confident that all of the components could withstand normal operating conditions for a 220V industrial appliance – including some standard margin of error. However, that EE likely has never witnessed the realities of power spikes that blow lightbulbs, fry computer power supplies, and generally wreak havoc on any electronics in Africa. I trust that if he had, he would have probably thought differently about his design and the specification of the components for his device.

This experience only reenforces one of our core premises at BRCK: you can’t effectively engineer for the realities of Africa if you don’t experience the realities of Africa. Early in the process of designing the BRCK we identified smart power management as being one of the key features that needed to be incorporated throughout the device. Not just smart in the sense of keeping the onboard LiPo charged but smart in the sense of not turning to ashes when the power company goes off the rails. We know that power in Africa will always be unreliable and of poor quality, why shouldn’t our devices be engineered to handle it?

With Christmas just days away, and with some of us just getting to our holiday shopping, we at team BRCK wanted to help you find that perfect last minute gift for the hardware hacker or adventurer in your life. Most of these items are things we’ve used and depend on, the rest are just cool!

This is an easy one for the makers on your list. I can’t think of a more useful or fun stocking stuffer than Sugru.

Sugru is a strong, colorful, moldable plastic that sticks to almost anything in it’s origional. After it air-cures it’s a firm, lightweight plastic with a foamy feel. All you have to do is open up the foil pouch, roll the putty around a little to get the chemistry going, and then start making. It sets up in about 20 minutes and cures in 24 hours.

We joke (kind of) that the first BRCK protypes were held together almost entirely by Sugru, Kapton Tape, and Love (we didn’t have budget for much else!). We’ve used it for loads repairs on and off the field, and early on we actually used Sugru to make quick and dirty button covers and rubber feet.

Great for someone who’d like to get into hardware hacking but doesn’t know a lot about it yet.

Sparkfun’s Proto-Snap is an intro to Arduino class on a single PCB. Basically it’s an Arduino Pro Mini 328, a USB Programer, buzzer, RGB LED, Push Button, and a little bit of Proto-board all pre-wired onto one PCB about the size of a credit card. This means your budding engineer can focus on learning the Arduino Scripting language with out the frustrations that come with trouble shooting code AND hardware at the same time. Once they feel comfortable with the language, the PCB is perforated, so they can start breaking off the extra components until they have a good, simple AT-MEGA 328 prototyping board with extras for going forward.

We haven’t used this yet, but like Sugru, it seems like one of those things that could become indispensable once you figure out exactly what it can and can’t do. Because it’s a paint the first thing most people will think about is fabric, but i’m really curious about painting circuits onto wood with it. It might also work well as solder-less field repair solution, but we’ll have to test it to find out.

Gold Plated Teensy3.0 with some extra upgrades. That’s really all you need to know.

Teensy3s are like any other animal in the Arduino compatible menagerie with one big exception: they’re powered by a 32bit ARM M4 processor. Comparing a Teensy 3.1 to an 8bit wonder like the Arduino Uno is like comparing a ’98 Geo Metro to the new Ford Fieta ST: yes they’re both useful and tinny, but only one of them goes very, very fast.

Beyond the gold plating, other upgrades to the 3.1 from the original are 4X memory (64K vs 16K), *TRUE analog output*, two A/D Converters, and 5v tolerance on the digital pins (though it still needs 3.3v for everything else) which is super handy if some of your accessories run at 5v. If you know someone who’s been using an Arduino board for a while, this will be a welcome upgrade. The Teensy 3.1 is one of those tools that will never be the bottle neck of your ambition.

We’ve found that many small solar panels quickly show their age in the face of real adventure.

But, not Voltaic Panels.

Voltaic designs their products with aggressive outdoor use and environmental responsibility in mind (less breaks == E Waist!) and as such, their panels are simple to use, light, strong and weather resistant. It also means they can offer a two year warranty. Also they pack more punch than almost anything else in their size class.

Your tech-head adventurer will love Voltaic’s 6 Watt Kit. It’s got a enough juice to charge most portable electronics but isn’t massive or messy (it’s 2013, why have a folding panel kit?). The kit comes with Voltaic’s V15 Battery Pack which is SUPER useful on it’s own for evening charging or even in town as a portable power station for your phone when wall sockets are scarce. I get two full chargers on my iPhone out of the V15 before it’s dead. The construction on the V15 is good as well.

If your out in the bush and you REALLY need to solder something, there’s a chance the thing you need to repair is also your primary source of electricity, which means your iron will have a hard time heating up.

Enter butane soldering irons.

Think of them as cordless soldering irons powered by old fashioned fire instead of electricity. Butain irons are nice for travel because they take up very little space compared soldering stations. Most butane irons also have the added ability to double up as crude heat guns for reflow and heat shrink, or direct flame soldering torches for soft metal work. I like the Weller PyroPen Jr because it fits a sweet-spot between performance and price and all things being equal, Weller tips tend to last longer.