It has been three days since our team set off for Mt Kenya and so far the climb has gone well! The weather station, through the PicoBRCK has been sending back data, which you can view here and you also follow the team’s progress up the mountain via GPS. We will leave the equipment there to provide information on the weather for the next year.

The purpose of this expedition is to test our IoT device and to have some fun along the way. We build rugged and reliable connectivity products for this region, so we may as well throw what we can at them and ensure we live up to our promises. We talked to them this morning and this afternoon. They are a bit cold and sore and otherwise all right. The weather station has been set up and they are coming down! Stay tuned for more updates!

In the mean time, you can follow the progress (of the guys and the weather station) on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

In the next five days (from the time of writing this), a small BRCK team (Kurt, Fenda, Dado, Paul, Jeff and myself) will pull off something incredible that will mark the beginning of a beautiful era of Kenyan Engineering. We will go up Mt. Kenya and install the first ever Kenyan made weather station running on picoBRCK, our IoT prototype made in Africa, by Africa, for Africa. And just to spice things up, our position as we ascend will also be tracked via GPS that is also powered by picoBRCK. Both the weather data and GPS data will be presented on our expeditions page at the following link: http://expedition.brck.com/mtkenya-2016/

picoBRCK prototype boards in assembly

Every time I think about picoBRCK, the nerd in me geeks out with all the possibilities this cool inventions will provide.

So far, we have been able to make picoBRCK monitor wildlife, measure water flow, read weather elements, track GPS coordinates, tell the time, make a call, send text messages and log pictures and files onto an SD card as well as onto a remote server. It doesn’t end there though. BRCK will try and do challenges from our loving family (that’s you). Drop us a line with what you want picoBRCK to do next and we will do a video or a blog with the results and share it with you.

Happy times are ahead of us Africa. I hope you stay tuned to updates of our expedition to Mt. Kenya.

PS: I hope to open source and share with you the firmware to take pictures and store them or send them to a remote server.

Killah.

Across The Milgis

Today marks the last day of our annual expedition. We had a great time, learned a lot and made many new friends. It seems to be over all too soon, especially given that we feel that we were just getting started. With our endless spirit for adventure, we could have gone further into our beautiful country, but there remains work to be done. There will always be rivers to ford, mud to get unstuck from and mountains to climb. One mountain I feel we are well on our way to conquering is the building of relevant, context-specific and useful products, products that addressed poor connectivity, power outages and limited access to up-to-date and affordable digital devices and content.

The yearly expedition is not merely for the fun. We use it to push ourselves out of our city bubble and see the real world where we intend to have our products used. I remember when we got to Kiltamany on the first day, one of the guys we met told us “Karibu Kenya.” We had a good laugh about this and on reflection he was right: those far-flung places are just as much a part of our country as Nairobi. Our intention is not just to build cool things but to build cool things that matter.

The Long Road Ahead

You can do hard things. – BRCK Mantra

Coming Back

And what harder thing is there in technology than to bring the same level of quality affordable and reliable products as there is in more developed countries. Useful relevant solutions do not have to be grand and expensive, nor do cutting-edge technologies only have to exist in high-end consumer products, for example wireless charging.

The people we interacted with have the same ambitions for themselves as we do – to be in touch with the world, to have a voice and to educate their children. We still have a long way to go before we achieve everything we have set out to do. The Kio Kit has had some hiccups and the actual BRCK does require coaxing sometimes to make it work (fewer than when I came on-board, that is). From personal experience, and I may be biased when I say this, we have come a long way since I joined BRCK six months ago.

My biggest take-aways from our recent journey are:

1. Constant Improvement.

Part of our ethos is the striving for better every day, in whatever little way, whether it is taking the extra effort to ensure a BRCK is delivered to a customer who is flying out in a few hours, or our engineers pulling all-nighters to make sure the Kio Kit performs better when it is deployed. The tiny gains make a significant and long-lasting impact and should never be underrated. I remember our CEO Erik giving us hell as we were leaving Ngurunit – we took a little too long in breaking camp and ended up being rained on. We delayed just a bit, barely ten minutes, and our whole journey took much longer than we had anticipated. If we had stayed any longer, we would not have been able to cross the seasonal rivers that were ballooning with each passing second. Small things that do not seem important if not done correctly the first time, roll over and become huge problems that are much more challenging to tackle. A big part of

A big part of constant improvement is always being prepared, taking the time to iron out the small stuff, to sweat the small stuff, and I believe that at BRCK, we are prepared to take on the challenges in connectivity, content delivery and education. We sweat the small stuff, for example, the colour-coded earphones in the Kio Kit to enable kids to put them on more easily.

The left earphone is yellow and the right one is green.

2. Being a champion of your own ideas.

All the blog posts, except this one, were uploaded using a connection from the BRCK. It seems pretty obvious but I had to mention it. If you set out to build a product, then you have to be its first user. The cliché used is eating your own dog food. We put ourselves in a situation where the BRCK would be the best alternative. This became especially apparent when all of us had to catch up with the news and the goings-on online in the evening. Multiple simultaneous users is one of the key features of the BRCK. And I must say, it worked flawlessly out of the box – it got a connection faster and was more stable when more users jumped on it.

Still connected, even in the bush.

3. Demystifying technology.

When you hear the term “digital solution”, an image of a fancy shiny product may come to mind, something that makes use of an often-heard yet obscure technology, or such like. It does not have to be this way. A product can be simple, cost-effective, usable and effective all at the same time. For example, the Kio Kit – simple, rugged tablets (for accessing the content), a BRCK (for storing and updating the content), a wireless charging system (to eliminate cable breakages and reduce the time spent plugging in the tablets at the end of a work day). Voilà! One of the most touching moments of our trip was when we were at Tirrim Primary School in Korr – seeing the faces of the light up as they completed their memory games is a feeling you cannot put into words. Only one word comes close – magical. These kids will be going up against other pupils from much better equipped and funded schools. I firmly believe in the potential of technology to be a leveller in this playing field.

A Child’s Joy

4. Having fun and making a difference, at the same time!

You spend a large portion of your time at a job. You may as well spend it doing good and enjoying yourself in the process. I was talking to one of my colleagues and he mentioned how he found it difficult to explain to people what he does for a living. He loves what he does (and so do we! Jeff is an amazing designer!) and so do all the people who work here. You can have fun doing important work and still make a positive impact. And, when you really think about it, wouldn’t you rather do this?

I am excited to be a part of this wonderful company and to work with the talented people here. We want to change the world and make it a happier, more livable place, a place where the people on the edges of the grid, the oft-neglected regions, have the same opportunities for education and betterment as the people in the towns and cities. I feel that we are on the cusp of achieving this. Join us on this journey.

Jump Up For BRCK!

To check out the 2015 BRCK Expedition, have a look at our social media pages on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook.

Catching up on a few updates at once here, you can read about Day 2 of our trip here.

It’s 6am in Lusaka, Zambia as I write this. The last two days have been a blur as we covered over 1,700 kilometers from Dodoma to Lusaka in what can only be considered as marathon sessions from sunup to just after sundown. Fortunately, both Tanzania and Zambia have some of the best roads we’ve seen, and the motorcycles and car all behaved well with only one slow puncture the whole way. We took small breaks every 100-200km in order to rest and move around a bit, but we’re still quite sore and ready for this day to do no travel.

Parking lot mechanics in Dodoma, Tanzania

Mark, Juliana and Joel setting up the GoPro

A dawn stop on the way out of Dodoma to Iringa, Tanzania

Grabbing lunch somewhere in southern Tanzania

The border crossing from Tanzania into Zambia at Dunduma left a little something to be desired. What felt like it should have taken about 1.5 hours at most, ended up taking 3+ hours, which meant our last 50km into a campsite were done in the dark on the only section of bad road we’ve seen. People did warn us of this, so it wasn’t unexpected. However, the reason wasn’t because of long lines of trucks slowing us down, it was due to inefficiency in the process itself at both immigration and customs.

From here, our days get a little more sane, with a run down through Victoria Falls into Botswana and then finally Johannesburg. As an aside, it turns out that half-way between Nairobi and Jo’burg is almost exactly at a small town called Serenje, Zambia – 2,200km from each.

Time at Bongohive

We pushed so hard to get to Lusaka by now so that we would be here in time for the events at Bongohive, Lusaka’s tech hub, which were all scheduled for today.

1pm – Demo of BRCK (Philip Walton and Reg Orton of the BRCK team)
3pm – Meeting with Startups (Mark Kamauof the iHub UX Lab) – HCD, UX, DT
4:30pm – Meeting with Startups (Erik) – Investment readiness, experiences with Savannah Fund, getting into new markets etc
6pm – Keynote at Startup Weekend Lusaka (Erik and Juliana Rotich)

Lukongo Lindunda is the co-founder of the space, and we’ve known each other for years, since before they got it started back in 2011. I’ve been looking forward to seeing everyone here in the tech space for a while, and I’m interested in hearing what’s brewing in the startup scene.

Some of the startups that I’ve heard about from Zambia include:

• ShopZed.com
• Bantu Babel
• Venivi
• DotCom Zambia, BusTickets
• TeleDoctor
• SCND Genesis

If you’re part of the tech community in Zambia, I hope you can swing by, and we’re all looking forward to seeing you as well.

Lessons From the Trip

Since we’ve started this trip I’ve been thinking a lot about communications, as one would expect with a BRCK expedition, and especially mobile comms. We outfitted the truck with a omni-directional Poynting antenna on the front bumper, hooked up into the car, where we can also connect it to an amplifier if needed. As we drive down the road, we have a pretty good mobile WiFi hotspot, as long as we’re in range of a tower.

The mobile phone kiosk, a mainstay of rural Africa

The last few years have seen a number of countries implement a registration process to buy SIM cards (ostensibly this is for security though it’s not been proven to be useful for anything more than big brother activities by governments). Even buying a SIM card is then a process of identification (usually passport or drivers license), so you have to budget for that 30-60 minutes to get that done, since it’s usually filling out a form by hand.

Registering an MTN SIM card in Zambia

You then purchase credit for the SIM card and load it up – this is the easiest part.

Now you get into the “mystery meat” part of the process, which is how do you turn that airtime you just bought into internet credit? Each network in each country has a different way of doing this, some combination of USSD or SMS to get it going.

A couple things come to mind now when we look at the BRCK.

First, we need a terminal screen in the BRCK interface for us to do all of this from the device itself. Right now we find ourselves popping out the SIM card and using a phone (Mozilla’s 3-SIM phone is amazing for this purpose), and then inserting it back into the BRCK when done.

Second, there needs to be a database of this “airtime to internet data” information that we can all use. I’m not sure how best to get this going, but I know it would be immensely useful when you drop into a new country to have this at your fingertips.

We’re already working on the first issue, of USSD/SMS interface, but it’s complicated, so it’s taking longer than we’d like. This trip is about learning, and we’re already finding a lot of things to do better. Look for more posts on the BRCK blog from the others as well.