This last week I was part of a BRCK expedition team that traveled from Nairobi through the Chyulu Hills, and oversea to the small island of Pemba in the northern part of Zanzibar. On the way, we installed some of our equipment, including:

• A point-to-point link running Moja WiFi, providing free internet access for Kenya Wildlife Services rangers who protect the rhino population.
• A weather station at a lighthouse on Pemba island, running off of our PicoBRCK device.
• A special SupaBRCK running Moja, educational content in a school on Kokota island, as well as training and use of the Kio Kit at the same location.
• A SupaBRCK Moja installed at the port of Shimoni in a store near the market.

One thing I’ve learned on BRCK expeditions is that there is no “normal” experience from one to the next. This one we had to be used to water everywhere, we lost or broke two phones and severely damaged a third, all vehicles behaved themselves (miracle!), and we had the Good All Over team with us that made it feel like a reality TV show.

We do these expeditions for two primary reasons: to have a fun adventure as a team, and to test our products far out in the field.

We do have a lot of fun, you can see that in the Instagram, Twitter, and blog posts. However, a requirement is that they also be challenging, providing a certain amount of physical and mental difficulty. We plan them this way for us to test ourselves, strengthen our internal team bonds, and stress out our equipment. It works, so we keep doing it year after year.

Creative solutions come from time with users

While we were out on this trip, there was a good Economist article published that references BRCK and what we’re doing. It’s important to remember that so few companies are actually out in the field trying to find solutions for people who aren’t financially wealthy. Logically this makes sense. Unless you’re a development company or a charity organization, you have to make money and if the numbers don’t work, then they don’t work.

The ITU calculates that in poor countries the average cost in 2016 of the smallest mobile-internet package was equal to 14% of the average national income per person, putting it out of most people’s reach.

One of the benefits of the BRCK leadership team playing such a direct role in these expeditions is that we are installing, testing, fixing, and using the equipment right alongside the users of it. We’re doing the messy work, but also having to explain how our platform works to the people we’re leaving it with. This is what leads us to creative solutions for both the technical and business problems that we find. It could be a better way to waterproof our gear, or it comes in a deeper understanding of how important it is to focus on our model of FREE public WiFi as we realize that these people will not be able to pay.

Just because the companies that came before us were unable to find a way to serve the needs of the people with small incomes doesn’t mean that there isn’t a way forward. It just means that we need to be more creative. Nothing builds creativity like sweating over a connection in rural Africa with your colleagues and the users breathing down your neck. 😉

BRCK has been known for developing products for the edge of the network and very remote regions of the world. Lately our products have been pushing even what we as BRCKers consider the edge.

One of our biggest themes is the “if it works in Africa, it can work anywhere.” And that was never more apparent to us than when we recently found ourselves on a very small outboard motor boat hopping from one Solomon Island to another. The size of craft did not warrant being in this ocean infamously called the ironbottom sound. “Ironbottom Sound” is the name given by Allied sailors to Savo Sound, the stretch of water at the southern end of The Slot between Guadalcanal, Savo Island, and Florida Island of the Solomon Islands, because of the dozens of ships and planes that sank there during the Battle of Guadalcanal in 1942-43.

We were on our way there because the Savo Island School in 2016 is also the new home for a Kio Kit. Our most remote school in Kenya has been in the Kalama Conservancy and in an interesting play on words, the school in Savo is named Kalaka school.

Upon safe passage through to the island,  we were greeted by an amazing group of teachers and students alike. Savo island is beautiful, volcanic hot springs and rivers, palm farming and with a population of approximately 2000 people, the Kalaka school offers Primary, Secondary and Vocational training.

With no electricity and connectivity, getting access to research and technology for education through the Kio Kit becomes a major boost to the community and the future.

As we did the teacher training, it was apparent that our visit to the areas our products are used informs us on how to make a world class product but also localized enough to bring value at the regional level. For example; Content is a major aspect of the Kio Kit and education in general. Part of our commitment in the Kio Kit is to help communities grow. That being said, the growing pains of one community can differ widely from another. The Kio Kits in Africa have very good content on issues like cholera and sanitation, while the South Pacific Islanders were asking for more information on tsunami preparedness and diabetes awareness. While in Kalama we build for dusty conditions, in Kalaka we have to consider humidity and sea salt. Galvanization is now a new discussion in our UX and engineering departments. Going local helps us address local issues.

On this trip we also did visit a 2nd grade classroom in Canberra ACT region Australia, the contrast in classroom technology a mere 3 hours away from Savo island is mind boggling. But it is because of this that we are putting our best foot forward, in Africa, Asia, the Pacific, the Americas and beyond. Together we can narrow the gap in digital education, research and libraries around the world.

As we move forward, we also would like to recognize the amazing partnerships that we have on the ground and in the region without which this new frontier for BRCK would not be possible.

We’re receiving increased interest from Education focused organizations to use the BRCK to enable access to their content both online and offline.

One of the partners we’re working with is Studi Academy in Tanzania. Studi is passionate about changing how students in secondary schools in developing countries learn. They provide an online platform for students to engage with localized content adapted to local syllabus and language through educational animations & challenging quizzes, games to add fun and competitiveness and a structure that supports students to pass their critical exams.

Dar es Salaam city center

School “advertising” in Mbagala area, outside Dar es Salaam

One of the schools Studi is working with is St. Anthony’s school, a secondary school on the outskirts of Dar es Salaam. They are using BRCKs to connect their computer labs to the internet, and more importantly to Studi’s content. The Head of Computer labs, is responsible for ensuring students can access Studi content easily.

We visited the school to see their experience first hand. Their BRCKs  have been working great though the mobile signal is intermittent. We ran some tests and  recommended that they get a unidirectional antenna as they have a cell-tower quite close to where the computer labs are located.

BRCKs connected to mobile internet from SIM cards

We also visited Acacia Secondary School, 30km from Dar es Salaam. Their school is 8km from the main road, sitting on a beautiful 55 acre piece of land. Before they receive BRCKs from Studi, it was important for us to run some tests to see what the best use case for their students  would be. For internet connectivity, we suggested that in addition to BRCKs, they should get an amplifier and an omnidirectional antenna. We also recommended that they cache content locally on the BRCK, as it has expandable storage capacity, giving the students a better experience than if they were trying to interact with the content online.

Acacia School buildings are 8km from this entrance

With many insights gained on how we can support our partners working in remote educational institutions, we continue to be excited about the potential to provide hardware and software tools to enable online and offline learning.

Are you running an educational institution or making education focused investments ? Talk to us – [email protected]

The Rhino Charge is an annual off-roading competition in Kenya where racers are required to visit a number of checkpoints while traveling the shortest possible distance across difficult, trackless terrain, where speed is not a necessity although you have to complete the race before 5:30pm. You can see some of our coverage from last year and how we helped the Rhino Charge HQ get internet here.

Due to the ruggedness and remoteness of the event, the BRCK team sponsors a car and we use this opportunity to go test our connectivity in the wild (plus, it’s just a fun thing to do). This year the event took us north past the equator, 100 miles past Isiolo and 40 miles into the semi-desert region of Kalepo (Namunyak Conservancy) in Samburu, Northern Kenya. The drive there is beautiful but the distance and heat can take a toll on the vehicles. For those who follow our blog, we are sorry to disappoint, there will be no vehicular breakdown drama on this trip. The Landrover performed like a champ partly due to the relentless efforts of Reg to make sure the car was properly serviced and ready for the task.

BRCK CTO Reg Orton at the Rhino Charge 2015

The drive into the conservancy is amazing. When we got there we found a very upbeat crowd with everyone looking forward to a great race. There were two ways to connect to the internet, the first and closest to the race headquarters was Liquid Telecom’s satellite backhaul connectivity. They had an impressive show of technology and branding however as is often the case with connectivity at events the system kept getting choked due to the volumes of people trying to get on at the same time. The second provider was a special Safaricom tower 200 meters away from the headquarters that had Edge (2g) connectivity. We drove there and it was very interesting to see how many locals and event staff were huddled under a tree next to the tower surfing the internet.

A mobile phone signal where there wasn’t one before

Back at the campsite, the connectivity was even slower and no sooner had we turned on the BRCK did someone shout, “there is a WiFi signal here and it is very strong!” After dinner and around the campfire, we started discussions around the previous year Rhino Charge event, to up the ante, I told everyone that they can use the BRCK to watch the highlights from 2014 race.

We had pre-loaded the BRCK with a number of videos, including last year’s Rhino Charge as well as some other offroad racing videos. Several people jumped on and were amazed at the speed and quality of our remote data offering. One person asked whether the Rhino charge was the toughest race and we were able to watch different videos with the conversation talking about the difference between rhino charge and Superkarpata a European offroad 3 day challenge through a dozen countries.

Race day came on Sunday. We were up bright and early to visit the checkpoints as we chased BRCK vehicle (the #18 Range Rover) to provide moral support. Several hours after the race started we made our way to the “gauntlet”, where they put 3 checkpoints close to each other for spectator enjoyment. As we waited for the next car, a bunch of guys asked us why BRCK was here and the connectivity was slow and I run back to our truck and came back with several BRCK devices and the complaining guys were soon glued to their phones streaming content from our WiFi connection. Big win for team BRCK.

We soon relocated to the last checkpoint to welcome our truck at the finish line. We had our BRCK out so that we could follow the GPS coordinates of #18 and our connection was much faster than the available options at the checkpoint.

We were soon getting twitter updates of the race progress, other cars on fire, evacuations and finishers. 67 meters to the end of the race, our #18 car which was out of brakes, broken engine mounts, lost wheel nuts, the starter caught on fire, frying the whole electrical system and that was the end of the race.

To add to the excitement, just as we were getting this news on our car, car #64 finished the race just as the whole bottom end lit up on fire… two bottles of fire extinguishers later, they officially punched in their completion ticket. Crazy times indeed!

It was so nice to see all the competitors leaving it all on the field. I however was aware of the lack of native Kenyan spectators at the event. We should be aware that statistics have proven that conservation of any kind in any continent cannot be achieved by a select segment of the population. I hope that the Rhino Charge does more to get local spectators back to the race next year. See you again in 2016.

As a Kenyan company based in Nairobi, we know first-hand the challenges of dealing with power cuts. So we built a router that stays online when the lights go out.

Juliana, when the lights went out, in Tanzania

Our team was down in South Africa, a couple weeks ago, which has some power issues that they’re working through. This means different neighborhoods have their electricity turned off at different times to save energy, also known as load-shedding. It seemed that not too many South Africans have had to deal with this kind of problem, unlike the rest of us in the rest of Africa. They didn’t have a fallback plan for when the power went out.

In-built Power, by Design

Each BRCK has a full 8-hours of power up-time and a smart charge controller that keeps the battery topped up and ready for the unexpected. Designed for seamless failover between Ethernet and 3G, the BRCK can connect to your primary ISP and then automatically switch to a 3G provider when it senses that your internet has been interrupted.

BRCK was designed to survive the rigors of Africa. Here we suffer daily with power outages, brown outs and power surges. From day one we realized we needed to work hard to help smooth this out to make the internet work the way you want it, when you want it.

BRCK has built in 8000mAh of battery, enough to charge your phone or tablet more than twice. This battery provides power to the 3G, WiFi and Ethernet capabilities of the BRCK, which isn’t a small hotspot, but enough to connect 20 device to and running at full speed.

The use of micro-USB cables also allows your device to be charged from your laptop, wall plug, iphone charger, power bank or even another BRCK. We’ve included a USB charging port as well to allow you to charge your phone or tablet from your BRCK.

BRCK’s protected supply is unique in that it will continue to work from 4V right through to 18V from a standard 5V micro-USB connector. And if you go above, below or somehow reverse the wiring BRCK will pause charging, but keep running until the power comes back again. We’ve even optimized the charging circuit to run off raw solar panels without a step up or inverter.

All this charging ruggedness, combined with BRCKs proprietary network switching and fail over means you and your colleagues can keep on doing what you need to do even when the lights go off.

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…?)

Thanks goodness for BRCK. 

Unfortunately this will be my last expedition post this trip. I’ve had to leave the guys early to make a dash north to sort out some business. If it weren’t for BRCK I’d still be in Livingstone. When the news came that I had to come back to Nairobi, we knew we had 40 minutes to get flights. The BRCK was fired up, with in a minute we were online, and 4 of us rapidly trying to find the fasted route north. Its times like this that the utility of BRCK really shines!

Earlier in the day the BRCK became a lifesaver as well. On the road from Lusaka to Livingstone, a short 563km journey, the Land Rover developed a nasty fuel system problem with the fuel lines filling with air every 20km or so, stalling the truck mid drive. Stopping every 20km to bleed the fuel system makes for a LONG trip (14 hours I believe!). Out came the BRCK, and everyone who wasn’t driving was delving into Land Rover forums the world over trying to work out what the problem was, then trying twitter, facebook and instagram asking for help. Eventually diagnosing the problem as a faulty lift pump. Another quick Google search for a replacement lift pump in Livingstone and we were on the way again.

Trying to get help with a buggered 300TDi fuel system

Power issues again. 

We are an expedition company, and as such, our vehicles are kitted out more than most. We’ve got a 1500W 110V inverter wired in to the battery, 4 x 5A Cigarette jacks, and dual 12V batteries powering all the kit we have on the road. The biggest problem? Finding cables! Every time we have to charge a GoPro, power the Satellite internet or charge the motorbike headset, a mad scramble ensues trying to find the adapter, cable, or correct power BRCK. This is why we love the microUSB. As from Part I, we know its not perfect, but now we are torn. What should we use!

Knowing your limits

Getting the BRCK online in Tanzania and Zambia has been really easy, in fact, other than getting SIM’s and working out the crazy commands, the BRCK’s have been working flawlessly. One area that has popped up constantly is ‘how good is my signal now’. Driving from village to village the signal fluctuates quite a bit. We are working now to streamline the process of finding out how your BRCK is doing now.

Back in Nairobi we are working feverishly to take what the team and I have learnt to get some updates ready for the trip north on Saturday.

Working on new wireframes with information from the expedition south

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.

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.