It’s funny what causes one to get excited. For some it is the smell of something new. For others the satisfaction of helping someone out. For me, it is the magic of seeing something that we designed come together into a product that is more than the sum of its parts.

In the very early days of BRCK we envisioned this amazing expansion ability. We added USB lines and power connectors. We had some vague ideas of what this might be used for but I don’t think that we could have imagined the device that I am now holding in my hands. This is, simply put, the coolest piece of tech kit that I have yet to experience.

Ok, I hear you saying, but it is your company’s tech so obviously you think it is cool. Sure, I am biased but then it isn’t really the actual device that has me so excited. What really has me excited is the potential of what this device could mean for people across Africa – particularly school children.

Simply put, the BRCK+Pi takes all of the ruggedness, power resilience, and connectivity flexibility of the BRCK and adds incredible application processing capabilities. A BRCK on its own is capable off serving up static content but a BRCK+Pi is capable of rich interactions and locally hosted applications. In our view, this creates the potential for a new computing UX paradigm at the edge of the network. A paradigm where “the” cloud might not be “The” Cloud. Where communities can access the content that is relevant to them without being perpetually connected to the rest of the internet. An opportunity to change the way we think about educating the 400 Million plus school children on the African continent.

This wide reaching potential is what makes the BRCK+Pi such an amazing piece off technology – regardless of who developed it.

I first wanted to write about this new product we are developing when Reg and I actually plugged the two devices together and served up our first web application. It was a cool moment and I really wanted to share it with the world. That was six weeks ago and Reg was frantically preparing to head to Mozfest for the official announcement of BRCK+Pi. As so often happens in a small company with too few resources, I started the post but never finished it.

Fast forward to today, Nov 24, and the BRCK team is sitting at a camp next to the Tarangine park in Tanzania on the first day of our epic overland expedition to South Africa. As we sit around the fire warming sore muscles from a long day of riding, Erik and I are uploading and sharing our images on the BRCK+Pi media server that Kurt built for us. Since we are gluttons for eating our own dog food, we wanted to put this amazingly cool device to proper use as we work our way across 9,000km of southern Africa.

As if sitting in camp and having a fully functioning media server running from an integrated BRCK stack wasn’t enough, we just so happen to be in an area with limited backhaul over the cellular lines. We are fortunate enough to have one of the iSavi devices from Inmarsat to provide satellite backhaul from anywhere on the planet.

So as I am typing this, as we sit by the fading fire under the African stars, we have a BRCK getting connectivity through an iSavi connected to a Pi that is providing our media storage as Erik and I are seamlessly exchanging and uploading media so that we can share our latest BRCK story with the world.

While our current use case may not save the planet, there is no doubt that the lessons we are learning this evening will have a lasting impact on our ability to redefine the ideas of computing at the edge of the network and in emerging markets – especially Africa.

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.

A unique feature of the BRCK is that it can be modded and extended with other hardware through it’s GPIO port (on the bottom of the device). Simply put, this allows you to connect any type of sensor, machine or device to the BRCK. We’ve built this to be as open and usable as possible, so it’s built to be Arduino compatible and we’re publishing all of the information on it.

The BRCK GPIO expansion port

What you do with this is limited to your imagination and ability. Some ideas we’ve had include:

• Sensing (temperature, sound, motion, pressure, light, C02 etc.)
• Geo-logging/GPS
• Waterflow sensors
• Fingerprint scanner
• Weather or soil data
• Extra hard-drive space
• Extra ports
• Extra battery
• Satellite plug-in

I’m sure you’ll come up with more.

Keep in mind that because of the BRCK Cloud, you can also remotely monitor and manage these implementations and gather the data from them back to your own database for analysis, dashboard or other visualizations.

BRCK GPIO pinout diagram

Description

The BRCK 50-pin GPIO expansion is based on the Arduino compatible programmable ATmega32U4 8-bit AVR microprocessor. The microprocessor has a 16MHz crystal oscillator, 32KB of flash memory, 2.5KB of SRAM and 1KB of EEPROM.

The expansion pins include 19 general purpose input/output (PWM outputs, analog and digital pins), a USB port and hardware serial ports which support I2C UART and SPI communication modes. In addition, there is a power input port (4-18V) and two 5V power outputs (one via USB) with maximum supply current of 500mA.

The desired hardware expansion can be connected to the relevant expansion pins and an Arduino sketch for the application can be uploaded directly through the BRCK cloud.

AVAILABLE FEATURES

• Arduino-compatible Programmable 8-bit AVR Expansion Controller
• 32 KB flash memory, 2.5KB SRAM, 1KB EEPROM
• Programming of flash, EEPROM, fuses and lock bits through JTAG interface
• Standardized 50-pin connector with open-hardware pin-out
• 19 General Purpose I/O pins (A/D pins, PWM outputs, etc.)
• Two 5V 500mA power outputs
• Real Time Clock
• 4-18V power input port
• 16MHz clock speed
• USB-host port
• I2C, UART and SPI communication modes supported

The GPIO port is a 50-position female Samtec connector, ERF8 which mates with a 50-position male Samtec connector ERM8. Figure 1 is a pin-out diagram of the female connector that terminates the BRCK GPIO Expansion.

Figure 1: GPIO pinout diagram

Table 1: GPIO-ATmega32U4 pin mapping

Figure 2: ATmega32U4 Microcontroller pinout diagram

For detailed information about the microprocessor, see the ATmega32U4 Datasheet

We also make BRCK GPIO Expansion Boards which are compatible with Arduino Shields. The boards have header pin and screw terminal connectors for all the I/O and power input/output pins in addition to a USB (power and data) connector.

Table 2: GPIO Absolute Maximum Ratings

Figure 3: BRCK Block Diagram

We’ll have a more extensive datasheet available in the coming weeks, where we’ll also start testing out some different modifications to the BRCK using our own GPIO expansion board (more on that soon).