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

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

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

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

Context is Everything

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

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

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

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

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

Teachers Just Want to Teach

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

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

Partners in Connectivity

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

https://openexplorer.com/expedition/brckexpedition2014

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

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

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

http://intotheokavango.org

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

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

Since we last updated you a month ago, a lot of great things have been happening.

Reg and Erik are on their way to Austin, speaking at SXSW on Friday. If you’re in town, do come by and talk to us. We’ll have some BRCKs with us and will show you how it’s going. You can also ask any questions and geek out with us on what you can do from the software and hardware sides to extend the BRCK core functionality.

Though Austin is always a fun place to be for SXSW, this isn’t the only reason we’re there. While the BRCK is designed and engineered in Kenya, the final assembly and manufacturing is done in the US – in Austin, TX. We’ve started our production orders, production boards are being flashed, and we’re doing regulatory testing now as well, trying to get that all accomplished quickly so we can get your BRCKs to you as fast as possible.

Some other goodies:

The BRCK Eclipse Expedition A couple months ago you might remember that the BRCK team was chasing a rare hybrid eclipse in Northern Kenya, to the shores of Lake Turkana. If you missed out on following our adventure, you can read about it on Erik’s Blog. Here’s the video of that trip:

BRCK Eclipse Expedition to Lake Turkana from BRCK on Vimeo.

Boxes and Dashboard Sneak Peek

Jeff Maina joined the team in February and we’re excited to have someone of his design skills on the team. Here’s a sneak peek of the box and the dashboard.

Jeff holding the BRCK packaging (note: the final will be cardboard colored, not white).

Both Jeff and Emmanuel have been crunching out a bunch of pixels and code, so that everything from the initial setup process to the dashboard work. It’s all completely responsive design, so that you can access it via your browser on a phone, tablet or computer.

The Sandstorm (@SandstormKenya) team in Kenya is making the special pouches for the BRCK backers who came in at over $300. The original design was cool, but they just came back to us this week with an even more amazing and rugged case made of canvas, leather and brass. It feels like we moved from a Landrover to a Range Rover with it!

But, when does the BRCK ship!?

This is the date we’ve been hunting as much as you. It’s been a longer road than we though, due mostly to component manufacturing issues and having to redesign things at the last minute. While we could have pushed out a basic BRCK earlier, it would not have been something that you (nor we) would have been happy with. Assuming all of the final issues lined up around components, assembly and regulatory issues, the BRCK should ship in April. We’re bending all of our time, energy, sweat and tears towards making that happen. Thank you for your patience!

Erik Hersman, for the BRCK team

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.

I gave a talk at PopTech this year on the BRCK and what I think it means for last mile connectivity in Africa. I believe that digitally connecting people and information is the great challenge of ours.

Here’s the talk itself:

Erik Hersman: BRCK breakthrough from PopTech on Vimeo.

Here’s my post on the talk itself, in its entirety:

A few weeks ago the #Kenya365 final instameet happened, we had finished the full year of Kenyan instagramming and it was a chance to get everyone together. Mutua Matheka suggested we go to the Kenya Railways Museum, a place I hadn’t been since I was in school. I took my daughters with me, and we had a great time exploring the old trains and marveling at the engineering feats required to create what they did over 100 years ago.

As I was getting ready for my talk at PopTech I started thinking about how those engineers of yesteryear connected the world. Since man had first tamed the horse, we had never moved as quickly or as consistently as when the railroad was created. It was a true changing of the world.

A map of global railway lines

There were many incredible obstacles for the pioneering engineers of that time to overcome.

Kenya’s railway museum reminds of us this rich history of overcoming obstacles with the story of Lt. Col. John Henry Patterson who at the ripe age of 31 was commissioned by the British East Africa Company to help extend the East Africa Railway (EAR) through the Tsavo region on the way from Mombasa to Uganda. It was at the Tsavo river that the unfolding of the great “Man Eaters of Tsavo” lion story unfolds, where two extremely large male lions stopped the railroad’s progress for the better part of a year. Official railway records state 28 died, though 140+ is a more accurate number as it constitutes the non-railway employees taken as well. No matter what the thousands of Indians and African workers did, they couldn’t stop the lions from jumping the thorn bushes, entering tents and braving the fires. Too many nights friends and co-workers were dragged screaming and eaten within hearing distance. It was enough that the workers started to flee in their hundreds.

Now for Col. Patterson, being a stalwart Man of Empire, this was a true crisis. His arrival had coincided with the attacks, so he was to blame by many. He was being disgraced and by any means necessary, he had to get the job done. Fortunately he had served a number of years in India and was an accomplished tiger hunter. 9 months later, Patterson bags both lions in the span of three weeks, changing his story from one of scapegoat and failure to one of a hero. Of course the book he wrote about it didn’t hurt his reputation either – and many of us know this story from the 1996 movie where Val Kilmer plays Col. Patterson in “The Ghost and the Darkness”.

Col. Patterson and one of the man eaters of Tsavo lions

If these pioneers were alive today, what would be their frontier?

Physically connecting people and things was the great challenge of their time. Digitally connecting people and information is the great challenge of ours.

They drove this iron backbone into every continent. It is no coincidence that our new backbones run alongside these same rails and roads. The world over, the engineers of our day are building this internet connectivity through fiberoptic cable into every continent, and Africa is no different.

A map of the railway lines in Africa

A map of the internet terrestrial fiber optic cables in Africa

(Once again, we all owe a debt to Steve Song for his maps of Internet in Africa, with this terrestrial cable map. A more detailed PDF.)

Terrestrial Internet Backbones and the Obstacles of Today

We have our own obstacles today. For, though we build the internet backbone into Africa, what happens when the rail ends? We have a problem where the infrastructure doesn’t match the connectivity equipment; meaning burnt out servers and routers due to power surges and brown-outs. This caused us to ask, “why are we using the routers and modems designed for London and New York when we live in Nairobi and New Delhi?”

With the BRCK, we’re extending the rail lines of connectivity to the edges of the network.

BRCK provides true last mile connection for Africa and other emerging markets. We designed it for our own needs, in Nairobi. It’s a rugged and simple WiFi device, made for our challenging environment where all of the redundancies of the device for both power and internet connectivity equate to productivity. It connects both people and sensors.

We envision it being used him homes and offices around the continent, by travelers, workers and community health workers in rural areas and by organizations managing everything from water flow sensor to remote power station management on the edges of the grid.

While all of the big technology companies go after “the next big thing”, where they endeavor to stretch the edges of what’s possible with technology, most of the world sits unable to take advantage of the older technology. High-end and brilliant technology is being transplanted from the US and EU to Africa – it is the best technology in the world, it just doesn’t work were we live.

It has become clear that no one else is taking this problem seriously. It’s time for us, as African technologists, to stand up and solve our own problems. To grasp the opportunities. We might even find that the addressable market is much larger and lucrative than our Western counterparts are aware of.

It’s the end of making do with things designed for other people, from other places with other needs. We’re entering a time where good enough is no longer good enough. The BRCK is just one of many new products that are designed for us, by us and meets our needs.

What’s next for BRCK?

We’re raising a round of investment now for BRCK, you can find out more on Angel List at Angel.co/BRCK. The IP is held by Ushahidi, and the BRCK has spun out as an independent commercial entity in a way that if it does well, so does Ushahidi. We have a strong business strategy, and a fantastic team with which to execute it.

This coming week we are traveling to the far edges of the network as we chase the November 3rd solar eclipse. The BRCK will be stress tested to it’s very limit, for ruggedness, connectivity and reach. If we get the VSat (BGan) connection we’re looking for, then we might be able to live stream the solar eclipse on Nov 3rd from the edges of Lake Turkana to the rest of the world.

6am rolled around and we all jumped up, hungry, but rested. Sunrise was amazing. A beautiful color that shed some light on where we actually were. As I type this, there is a warthog about 20m away to my left, while both greater and lesser flamingos, along with some kind of wild goose, feed 20m away in front in Lake Turkana.

Sibiloi is distant and harsh. It’s a forgotten mixture of austere beauty, heat, wind and silence – that though it isn’t welcoming, is still a joy to be at.

I can think of no reason why 200-300 people would come here, except for the rare hybrid eclipse that we’re about to see tonight.

We swore we had driven through trees, but there were none around, not within 10 miles. This should be an object lesson in the illusions that one sees when riding and driving after so many hours on the road at night. It also became apparent that we’d have to lose any sense of privacy when it came time to find a restroom. It’s a good thing that this is not a mixed group. 🙂

All morning we’ve been working on getting a couple things tested:

1. Internet, we’ve got a BGAN terminal for satellite data connectivity provided to us by Indigo Telecom in Nairobi. They rent them out to people everywhere in the region, and have been great to work with. That’s working nicely, and hopefully we’ll get the eclipse livestreamed at brk.com/eclipse.

2. Mobile phone signal, Wilson has provided us with some long range amplification antennas. We tested them in Kurungu, where we turned a weak Edge signal from Safaricom that couldn’t transmit any data into a very strong Edge connection that was usable. They gave us a couple to test out, and we’ll do so again on the road back to Loiyangalane, from the a hill about 20-30km away. We don’t have a good line of sight from where we are to the tower in Loiyangalane from Sibiloi, so can’t get a signal here.

3. Camera setup for the Eclipse. What we’ll be streaming with is a Frankenstein-like beast, that’s cobbled together from a web cam, toilet paper roll and a Schneider large format lens, all held together by gaffer tape. It’s really amazing, the fact that the team has such a mix of camera and digital know-how to pull this off by Jon and Philip, was great to watch.

4. Power for the computers and BGAN. There’s a lot of “hack it together” knowledge on the team, and between Reg and Philip they were able to jimmy rig some solar to car battery to inverter to hacked together power plug. some people will tell you that this is “real field constructed power distribution” – we all know it’s a jua kali rig job.

While all that is being set up, it’s great to see the BRCKs humming along quite nicely. The BRCK flag now waves above the Land Rover at Camp Jawbone (named after the zebra jawbone we found when setting up camp last night).

Now we’re waiting for 5pm to get the livestream rolling. Crossing our fingers now for a cloudless sky tonight.

Update: It’s 5 minutes to the eclipse, we just had a massive sand storm and rain storm pass through. barely getting connection and a lot of clouds. Probably can’t stream, so will try to upload images.

This morning finds the BRCK team in Nanyuki, only about 3-4 hours outside of Nairobi. The same place we were supposed to be having breakfast yesterday, not today. A rather inauspicious start happened about 30 kilometers into the trip when the Land Rover decided it was going to have some cooling problems.

After two hours of working on solutions, we realized that this Land Rover just wasn’t going to make it. Too bad, as it had two tanks and better range than most. Fortunately, Fady Rostom (of Ark/Bonk) is traveling with us. He offered up his Land Rover 110, and we quickly got in touch with a mechanic in Nairobi who put a roof rack on his vehicle in about 30 minutes.

1pm found us with all equipment unloaded near Thika town, on the side of the road. 5 tires were changed from one Land Rover to the other, and we repacked the new vehicle. Finally, we were on our way (again)!

In hindsight, what was extremely disappointing at the time ended up happening about the best time we’d like to have seen a problem like that develop – in the beginning of the trip near the big city, where we could still make a change.

We got into Nanyuki in the evening, after a nice cold rain hit us, much to the chagrin of those of us on motorcycles with only mesh jackets on. Taylor had his full rain gear (who we had been making fun of earlier due to the heat), and while we froze he rode in relative comfort. Dinner was at Barnies, and then a shack that makes and sells the best cheeses that we’ve ever found in Kenya, called Silent Valley Cheese. 6 kilos of cheese later we found a house owned by a friend to sleep at for the night.

This changes the stages of our trip, and now we’re very glad that we built in a buffer day for the drive up to Lake Turkana. We’ll still arrive the day before the eclipse (Oct 2), but in the evening instead of the morning. Our route now entails an early morning offing from Nanyuki, final fill up of fuel in Isiolo, then off road around Laisamis towards Ngurunit and on to Kurungu and Soth Horr for the night.

This next section along the edge of the Matthews mountain range is one of the most scenic places in Kenya. We’ll stop along the way for some pictures, and then get into Kurungu in time to test the Wilson amplification antennas. The point of these amp antennas is to extend the range one can be from the mobile phone tower to get internet connectivity. We’ve used one before in Lamu, now we’re trying it in the bush, and with the BRCK.

We keep saying that the BRCK Engineering team is working feverishly to meet our kickstarter deadlines and today we get to show you what some of the fuss has been about.

This is a 3D print of the final design for the BRCK’s case, careful observers will note that it’s a bit taller and the port covers don’t come all the way to the base anymore. 3D printing is an amazing tool in modern product development and it’s super fun, but it’s not perfect. The process is a constant compromise between speed, durability, and accuracy. You never get to have all three, but on the other hand, nothing else gives you the same feedback in such little time.

Most of our prints in this process have been done at Incept3D on an Objet printer. Objet prints are fairly brittle: a little too much force and they snap or even shatter. Not the sort of situation one typically thinks of when your making a device made in and for Africa. But the upside is, if you can make a rugged and durable case from an Objet Printer, then your final case will be that much the stronger for it!

You’ll notice the vertical ribbing on the inside of the main case comes up and actually locks into the top plate making it almost function as a solid block. We’re especially proud of some of the little features like that.

Now that we’ve gotten to a point were we can throw brittle prints around the room with little concern, we’re just about ready to cut our injection mold tools and make the real things!