I got my first motorcycle when I was 16 and started to ride the streets of Nairobi.  Fortunately, we had fewer cars on the road back in the early ‘90s. I started to understand the way to see and think when dealing with the odd assortment of experiences you face on Kenyan streets.  Today, I still ride my piki piki (“motorcycle” in Kiswahili) to work each day, and I’ve also been fortunate enough to take it to some far flung parts of the continent. During my daily commute, I started thinking about the business lessons I’ve learned from riding my motorcycle in Nairobi.  Each week, I talk to the 100-person strong BRCK team and decided I wanted to share these lessons with them. Here they are.

1. When going at speed, focus. Filter out everything else.

This, like many of the lessons, are not just for Nairobi rides but for everyone who is on a bike.  The first point here is to stay hyper-focused, and not let your mind wander.  The second is to learn to “see” everything so that you have situational awareness, but only watch what’s important.  

The business analogy is the same. When we’re really hitting our stride, or when things are moving faster than we can control (hello Coronavirus), then it’s incredibly important for me to know what I’m focusing on and not to try to do everything.  The same holds true for every person in the company; have a tight understanding of what you need to spend your time on so that we don’t waste energy, resources, and time on things that aren’t going to move the needle for the business. 

2. Deal with what you have, not what you wish you had.

I remember riding down one of Nairobi’s new bypasses – two lanes each way, with a divider in the middle – going around a long corner and finding a car driving the wrong way down the road directly towards me.  This isn’t abnormal. Shoot, I’ve got stories of U-turns on three-lane highways, pedestrians doing odd things, cows suddenly appearing (or camels, or sheep, or goats – you get the idea).  It’s part of what you have to learn to deal with. 

Running a company is much the same.  You’re pleasantly building your platform, doing sales or marketing, talking to investors, creating a solution for your primary user, and then something happens that you’re not expecting. 

I happened to be in San Francisco when the US banned travel from Europe. I was on my way to another tech CEO’s house for dinner.  When I arrived, we looked at each other and stated that raising capital just got 100% harder than it had been just a few minutes before.  You still have to find the capital to grow your company, but now you have to do it in a different way.  The truck hurtling down the road in the opposite direction just waylaid your plans. You either bail and find yourself in a ditch by the side of the road, or you swerve and find a new path, madly holding on to the handlebars and keeping the bike upright. 

3. It’s not about speed, but efficiency.

When people see you riding a motorcycle in Nairobi they think you’re driving fast. Sometimes you do when on the big highways, but mostly you’re just putt-putting along in first gear as everyone else is stuck in standstill traffic.  Riding a motorcycle in Kenya isn’t about speed, that’s what gets you in trouble (revisit my last point to see why), it’s about efficiency of consistent movement.  When everyone else is stopped, I can keep going.  My commute each day in a car would be approximately one hour each way, on a motorcycle it’s 20 minutes. 

There are times running a company where you are in a speed moment. We’ll find an opportunity with our customers that we need to act on now to clinch a win.  That’s great, and when those happen we have to sprint to get there.  No company can survive doing that all the time, though. So instead, we design for efficiency – for making sure we have constant forward movement and not being bothered that we can’t go fast all of the time. 

I think about how we rolled out our Moja Network across Kenya’s public transportation system over the last two years.  The first few months, when things were on a tight deadline and we were dealing with all kinds of issues, it was an all-hands-on-deck sprint.  Then we were able to gear down, continue growing the network, put in standard operating procedures, and build processes.  This network team today does an amazing job of being efficient and effective without tiring themselves out in a constant speed battle.   

4. Don’t get comfortable.

I remember jumping onto my motorcycle, and taking a friend for a lift down Ngong Road just outside my office.  One lane wasn’t moving at all, and the other oncoming lane was completely empty (back when it was just two single lanes).  As we’re moving along slowly passing a bus, a guy blindly walks out in front of the bus directly into our path.  I slam the breaks and swerve away from him.  He double-takes, his eyes get as big as saucers, and he jumps forward…!  By this time I’m riding forward up onto my tank as I hit the brakes hard, and my passenger is shoving me forward too. The pedestrian smacks my handlebars and my wheel goes sideways – the bike leans over and drops (my passenger and I were on our feet and didn’t go down with it) – then the pedestrian leaps up and sprints away.  Nothing broken on the bike or person, but we’d just gone from comfortable to shock in about two seconds.

At BRCK we created the Kio Kit, which I still think is the best and most holistic solution for bringing digital education to places that have never had it.  It was truly innovative and we were happy and comfortable with just how good it was.  While we basked in that, we crashed into the slow turnaround time for decisions in the education sector.  We had this great product, but the sales funnel was so long, and the cost of holding inventory was so high, that we just couldn’t make it work.  After two years of pushing it, and getting independent longitudinal studies of how it improved learning outcomes, we had to put the Kio Kit aside and focus on something else. 

5. You can’t complain about the rain.

This is a short and simple one.  If you buy a motorcycle, you know it will rain and you’ll get wet.  Don’t buy a motorcycle and then complain when it rains, like it’s some great surprise to you. 

In business we know there are going to be things that are uncomfortable to deal with.  You’ll have to fire people.  A new feature won’t quite do what you thought it would do.  A partner lets you down, or a company you relied on just isn’t there any longer.  This is business, this is entrepreneurship.  Don’t complain about it, you know it will happen. Instead, get to work and find a way to deal with it.  However, like a motorcycle in the rain, you can plan.  Get insurance, save cash for that rainy day – in other words, carry your company’s equivalent of a rain jacket. 

These lessons from riding a motorcycle often came to mind during my commute. I kept forgetting them by the time I reached my destination, so I  soon found myself pulling over onto the side of the road to scribble them down. As an innovator and an entrepreneur, things can feel uncertain even in the most ordinary seasons. It’s important to make sure we remember what we’ve learned along the way. 

Future thinking is a challenging exercise even in the most stable of times.  What is going to be important to society in 10 years? Imagine being the gig-economy visioneers like Uber and Airbnb getting sneered at back in 2010.  On the scary side, think of what it must be like to be an oil-dependent economy today in this new world of too much oil, drastically reduced travel, and widespread acceptance of electric cars.  What other commodities or services that we take for granted are no longer going to be valuable on the global markets 10 years from now? 

In uncertain times like these, the challenge is even more perilous.  Who knows whether Uber or Airbnb will even survive to the end of this year?  What other giants of industry will succumb to the virus that has affected our economy as much as our health?

But in times of great instability also come great opportunities. 

Some of the famous companies that saw new possibilities and started businesses in the midst of global recessions include GE, GM, IBM, Disney, HP, Hyatt, Trader Joe’s, and Microsoft.  

For those of you who have video game addicted kids like I do, the venerable Electronic Arts (look for the EA logo on their games) started in the early 1980s during the recession that followed the ‘79 oil crisis.  Trip Hawkins was an incredibly astute futurist for envisioning that video games would move from arcades into homes.  The year he formed EA saw the arcade video game industry — think coin-operated Pac-Man machines — peak at $8B and begin its rapid decline into a novelty.  The home video game market has now grown into a $120B industry and is thriving in the time of COVID.

So what does future thinking look like for a small connectivity company in Nairobi, Kenya? 

On one hand, we are seeing an increase in demand for connectivity now that people are either out of work or in lockdown.  Unfortunately, our network is currently primarily located on public transportation and in public spaces.  Neither of these are ideal areas for connectivity when social distancing is strictly enforced.  There is a lot of thinking about how we might extend the reach of our signal beyond public spaces into more homes and shops.  Some of these thoughts are pretty tactical, like adding more access points; others are applying more creative uses of technology, such as mesh networking – we are BRCK after all.

But the real future thinking happens when we start to look at the possible new products and services that we can enable from our connectivity platform.  The issues for yesterday were getting access to digital content and entertainment; the issues for tomorrow are going to be food security, education, and jobs.  We have to shift our focus from being just an enabler of connectivity to being an enabler of informal retail, a rail line for supply chains, and a touch point for tele-medicine.  These are some of the most obvious extensions of Moja and they get closer to the heart of the challenge in our presently chaotic world.  We have to be able to ask ourselves “how do we help a duka owner sell more bags of unga (flour)?” or “how do we help an unemployed woman learn the job skills she needs to be globally competitive?”.

There is a weightiness to these questions that were always an underlying rhythm to our work at BRCK, but now they have become the melody, the verse, and the chorus.  

The great thing about the way that we think at BRCK is that we are a connectivity company that does not consider connectivity our end product.  It is just the byproduct of our effort to ensure every African has access to participate in the 21st-century digital economy.  

We always viewed Moja as an onramp for our users to access the digital products and services of both the local and global economies.  While that underlying view hasn’t changed, we are in the process of rethinking how we can extend our value to players in various ecosystems that need to access and interact with our population, even when they are thousands of miles away.  Much like Trip Hawkins saw a seemingly unbelievable future that kids would one day sit at home and have access to thousands of video games, we see a future where every African — and ultimately everyone on earth — is able to be remotely connected to the economy, their government, their doctor, their teacher, and their local vegetable vendor without having to decide if they should spend their limited financial resources on internet bundles or food.  

Future thinking may be a challenging exercise but it is an absolute life-sustaining necessity. 

The world we knew yesterday will not be the world that our kids know tomorrow.  Things that were important before will be suddenly overshadowed by things that were previously taken for granted.  Those of us who find a path through this devastation need to do everything we can to help fill in the gap for those products and services that won’t survive.  I don’t know for certain if BRCK will survive to the end of the year but I believe that we will.  I also believe that we can make a deeper and broader impact into the lives of our users in Kenya, Rwanda, and beyond. 

If your business — whether supply chain, retail, health care, education, or anything else — depends upon connectivity to reach your users, please contact us and let’s see how we can work together to rebuild our economy and achieve sustainable resiliency in our community.

BRCK’s field team plays an essential role in keeping Moja WiFi up and running and our customers happy and online. On most days, we’re spread out across different cities and towns, providing maintenance to our equipment in matatus and at fixed sites. We are continuously problem solving as unexpected challenges arise. We are used to workdays full of variety, personal interactions, and enjoy the buzz and energy in the field. It keeps us fit, energetic, and cheerful. But working in the field during Coronavirus means that things have looked a little different lately. 

The field team prior to the restrictions.

COVID-19 in Kenya

Kenya announced its first case of COVID-19 on 12th March, several months after the beginning of the outbreak in China. We had to first internalise the whole situation and strategize a way forward for field operations. Being on the frontlines, where our daily routines involve interacting with people, there were quite a few things to consider.

Before the pandemic, our operations included daily visits to fixed and mobile spots, with one-on-one interactions with drivers, agents, and users. Field techs would move freely in town, fixing and maintaining WiFi devices. At lunch hour, we would meet up at our favourite joint while planning out the rest of the day. This free movement gave us the flexibility to repair equipment and address issues as they arose. Overnight, this had to change immediately to prevent the possible spread of the virus. 

Safety Measures

At this point, in line with government regulations, field operations are continuing – but with some significant changes. To flatten the curve, we are taking the following measures:

• Practising social distancing. To avoid the use of public transport, one person picks each tech from their homes and also practises caution while in the vehicle. When off duty, we stay at home. We avoid crowded areas and only operate in designated areas with minimal interference where we can observe social distancing. On the mobile network, we no longer move to bus stops and stages. Instead, we contact the individual drivers and meet at identified parking areas that are not crowded.
  

• Cleaning frequently touched surfaces and objects.  We use disinfectants to clean hand tools and equipment used on site. Prior to touching any agent-owned or site infrastructure, we spray or wipe down using a disinfectant. Regularly washing our overalls and dust coats, we make sure our work vehicles are kept clean and well ventilated. We regularly clean the commonly touched surfaces with a disinfectant.

• Practising hand hygiene by thoroughly washing hands using soap and water and/or using a hand sanitizer regularly, especially after maintenance at a site or a matatu.  
• Wearing protective gear such as gloves, face masks, and safety glasses.
  
• Using good judgement. This includes avoiding the sharing of phones or other work tools and equipment, reminding others on the precautions to flatten the curve, and observing the government curfew.

Impacts of the Pandemic

With the outbreak of the pandemic came unexpected challenges. With reduced numbers of commuters in and out of town, some matatus have been parked, making accessing for maintenance difficult. The government has also placed restrictions limiting our movements, particularly for night maintenance. 

On the fixed network, we have to factor in the 7 pm curfew when we plan assignments and travel routines. Planning tech visits also needs more coordination with agents, as some of their operating hours are now irregular and unpredictable. Additionally, since the government has imposed a 50% limit to passengers in private vehicles, the field guys have to work in shifts because our vehicles cannot carry the maximum number of people required for the job in a day.

Some Silver Lining

With the pandemic also came some positive trends. On the maintenance front, field engineers find it easier to maintain equipment, as clients and drivers are more cooperative. The WiFi fights boredom during this time of social distancing and there is less interference by people during servicing. Users have continued to interact with the network, even though the mobile network activity has reduced due to less travel. Video conferencing has also brought a new experience to the field team, as technicians from Kigali, Mombasa, and Kisumu are now able to participate in our weekly company-wide team meetings.

Looking Ahead

The coming weeks and months will continue to bring new situations. We will need to think creatively and adapt to changing circumstances. With the majority of our work out in public spaces, our highest priority is ensuring we continue to work safely. As people spend more time indoors, we believe the requirements and demands on the fixed network will grow, so we must do what we can now to fill the gaps and tap into new opportunities. The COVID-19 situation requires us to provide a reliable and consistent service, pay attention to our customers’ needs, and use our network to address some crucial gaps in the neediest communities. In these times of unpredictability and fear of the unknown, especially for those with fewer resources at hand, Moja plays a massive role to reduce the barriers to connectivity and affordability and making an impact to peoples lives. 

As we continue working in the field during Coronavirus, our hope is that a vaccine is found very soon and the economic situation returns to normal. Until then, we will do our part to stop the spread of the virus while we continue expanding our network. 

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.

I struggle to be like Erik and get my images edited and up on Instagram in the middle of chaos.  I come from the days of big cameras, film, darkrooms, and long periods between clicking the shutter and realising a final image.  I like to think about my pictures.  I’m never happy with them and I often return to Lightroom and edit them again and again until I at least don’t not like them.  This process does not lend itself to the instant forms of social media that we enjoy today.  While I continue to work on my publishing speed, I figured I might as well try my hand at a more contemplative photo essay following our journey on Expedition Pemba.

[foogallery id=”4034″]

2016 proved to be a busy year at BRCK, after we announced our funding round. We started off by getting into our new office, upgrading from the small room we’d used for the previous two years.

There was a blur of events, with some of us speaking at WEF, TED, ITU, and many others. A number of visitors came through, the biggest being Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg.

We had the good fortune to win a number of awards by the year’s close as well:

• Fast Company’s 2016 Innovation by Design Awards
• Sustainia Top 100 2016
• AfricaCom: Best Pan-African Initiative 2016
• ITU: Global SME Award 2016
• African Entrepreneurship Award 2016 Finalist

The real work we do is focused on what our customers need, and we figure that out in two ways. First, we spend a lot of time with them. Second, is we do quite a bit of internal testing, as can be seen from the expedition to Mt. Kenya, testing out some new sensor connectivity products.

Some of this work is done just because it’s good to do, as Juliana and Rufus continued to support the Africa Cancer Foundation work, going all over the country to bring connectivity in their efforts to help with cancer screening.

We get very close and spend a lot of time with the people using our products. The Kio Kit, our education solution has been doing well, but we always strive to make it better. Mark, Alex and Nivi lead much of this work as they visited schools, spending time with teachers and students from Malawi to Tanzania, as well as here in Kenya with our trip to Samburu, spending 7 days with Kiltamany Primary School and working with one of our partners, Liquid Telecom to speed up their overall network (see video below).

Liquid Telecom delivers internet to pupils at remote Kenya primary school from Liquid Telecom Group on Vimeo.

Other partnerships have continued to grow. Intel has become a great partner, where we work with both their chip and education teams on multiple products and projects. The same applies to our local partners in Upande, who we’ve teamed up to do quite a bit of intense water sensor work in a county in Kenya. New partners this year include; Swissport, Illuminum Greenhouses, Norwegian Refugee Council, Close the Gap International, BookAid, and Paygo Energy.

Stuff we make

Kio Kit now in 11 countries
We started shipping the Kio Kit in the beginning of the year. After getting the kits out to a few customers in some pretty hard to reach areas, we realized we needed to harden the case to manage the rough transport that is required to get it to its destination. The hardware and software teams continued to improve both, culminating in what we feel is the best holistic education solution on the market.

Kio Kit to be used to scale up a rapid response to educational needs in emergencies. In partnership with the Norwegian Refugee Council, youth and out of school children in Dadaab refugee camp will use the Kio Kit to improve their literacy and reading skills in English and Somali.

Our customers agree. Not only have they been back for repeat orders, but we’ve shipped Kio Kits to 11 countries around the world – stretching from the Solomon Islands to Mexico, and of course here in East and Southern Africa.

BRCK v1 goes end of life
As we get ready for the next generation of BRCK hardware, we decided to stop orders on the old BRCK hardware. Since the end of 2015 the team has been pushing hard on the next generation core device, using all of the lessons we’ve learned from both the original BRCK and the Kio Kit. The new BRCK will be an enterprise-grade device, more details in the new year.

R&D – continuing the innovation cycle
It turns out that there are a number of companies across Africa who badly need an IoT solution that works in our environment. Something reliable and inexpensive that can connect information from their valuable equipment and assets to the people who make decisions.

The original BRCK box states, “connectivity for people and things”, and what we found out is that the BRCK v1 might technically be able to do some IoT work, but it wasn’t the right device for it. 2016 has seen us go through the early stages of our new PicoBRCK device, an answer to the rugged IoT needs across Africa’s enterprises. While still in development, we expect a final product in 2017.

2017: The Year Ahead

Expect two new products this year from BRCK, as mentioned above. A lot of the hard work put in by the hardware, software, and design teams in 2016 will bear fruit this year as we get to final productization and are able to scale out for customer orders. Much of the effort from the BRCK team will be spent on finalizing and shipping these products, while also supporting and growing the base for Kio Kit.

On the business side of the house, we’re ramping up our supply chain to manage the increasing demand for all products. We’ll continue to extend beyond Kenya into other interesting markets, which always includes East African countries, and many Southern African ones as well. We also have a few surprises up our sleeves which we can’t talk about in public quite yet. 🙂

A huge thank you to our partners who we’re doing so much work with, and of course our families who are such a great support in the ups-and-downs of a young company’s life. A big thanks to our friends at Ushahidi, the iHub, Gearbox and Akirachix who make life in the Nairobi tech ecosystem such a wonderful experience. My biggest thank you goes out to the BRCK team, the ones who you don’t see on stage and who sometimes clock crazy hours to solve problems, run spreadsheets, create new designs, think up new ideas, and who code, solder and respond to our customers day in and day out.

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]

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…?)

(By Erik)

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

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

Reg using the BRCK and iSavi in Tanzania

The Journey

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Working on the DR650 in Arusha

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

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

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

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

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.