120 hours

The last 120 hours have been an incredibly intense time. We saw beautiful vistas of Kenya from 17000ft, we hiked under a silent canopy at stars in the middle of the night and we ran the picoBRCKs through all sorts of real life IOT situations.
Over the next few days the Mt Kenya BRCK team will be writing about various aspects of the trip from their perspectives. But let me introduce the team first so when you read their posts you have an idea where they are coming from. Here they are from left to right:

Killah is one of the electrical engineers at BRCK. He put in countless hours before this trip getting ready not only for the expedition but also keeping numerous other projects going. He developed some fairly original code for the weather station and also helped assemble all the hardware.

Fender is one of our user experience analysts. He is completely comfortable in all sorts of situations and is self taught with regards to not only the underlying code of a website but also understanding how a user might interact with that site. When I left him tonight in the hospital (yes, you’ll read more about that in the future) he was reading a book about human centered design.

Steve is one of our field technicians. He is extremely exuberant and friendly; making sure to greet everyone in the office every morning. He has the ideal personality for introducing technology to people who may not fully understand what the internet is.

Jeff is a long time friend of almost 20 years who has been up Mt Kenya 15 times ore more. He took up the job of organizing all the logistics and food for this trip as well as acting as our guide.

Paul Birkelo you may know from previous BRCK expeditions. He spends most of his time with Gearbox but was ideal on this trip because of his mountaineering experience as well as his media knowledge.

I, Kurt, am the lead electrical engineer at BRCK. I have climbed Mt Kenya numerous times and have been talking about a Mt Kenya BRCK expedition for over a year and a half.  Right now I am very relieved that this expedition is over since it was a huge undertaking not only before but obviously during the trip. And yet here I am, just 24 hours off the mountain and I’ve already discussed a follow up expedition with a friend who, unbeknownst to me, tried to put a weather station on Mt Kenya this past December.