The heritage of BRCK is that we were born out of Ushahidi, which builds platforms for changing the way information flows in crisis and disasters events globally. It shouldn’t be a surprise then that we think a lot about how BRCK hardware can help extend the ability of disaster response teams around the world.

BRCK+Pi – new design concept for production

1: A Rugged Microserver

With the recent development of the BRCK+Pi, which marries a RaspberryPi + hard drive + 8-hour battery, to the BRCK in a simple package (full specs below), it gave us a chance to think through what could happen beyond just connectivity in tough environments. After all, with this extra computing power it turns the device into a remote microserver, where you can cache content locally and do stuff even when in an offline mode.

In short, the BRCK+Pi allows not just the standard BRCK connectivity, but now also the ability for content and computing in a small, rugged form factor that can be used anywhere.

2: Software for Disaster Response Teams

This allows us to provide a stack of disaster-related software that could be loaded onto the device. The goal being to have a core software stack available on BRCK+Pi devices to humanitarian response organizations globally. The purpose being to help speed recovery after a crisis, making first responder’s lives more efficient and making technology work where it normally doesn’t.

While anyone who makes these tools can put some time into making their tool work on the microserver, I was thinking to list out the full grouping that came out of a discussion on the CrisisMappers network recently, and then prioritize them into foundational tools that could be made into a “package” to download onto your own BRCK+Pi and which would help the broadest set of disaster responders. I asked the following questions:
   

• What ideas do you have that would fit on BRCK+Pi?
• Which problems could this help with?
• Are there any software packages that you’d find valuable in the Crisis Stack?

3: What Goes in the Box?

First pass on this is about a set of basic tools that we can think of as a “core package”. We had an open call with members of the CrisisMappers community where we talked about the types of software needed and use cases for it. The initial tool list looks like this, though the repository is open on Github and can be changed, added to, or just plain branched in the future:

• OSM tiles (Light) – (Ex: Haiti Browser)
• OSM Sync – Make a mark on a map served off the BRCK+Pi and synchronize with OSM API occasionally
• SMSsync – Use the BRCK wireless modem to allow for text messaging, rewritten to be native on the BRCK Device
• LDLN – An inexpensive, distributed local data hub, with mobile apps to address damaged communication infrastructures after natural disasters
• Sahana Eden – A suite of tools designed specifically for organizations during disasters, including organization registry, project tracking, asset tracking and more.
• Cellular Coverage Mapping – Find a tool to report the signal strength measured if connected to cell network to contribute to existing project (see: http://www.ebola-cellular-map.resudox.net/)
• Etherpad Lite – The most basic and simple communications tool we know of
• Image sharing tool – Still to be determined, but could be BitTorent Sync for file management (protocol for local sync, not for normal torrenting activities)

Secondary applications to consider are:

ONA – http://ona.io/
Enketo – https://enketo.org/
FrontlineSMS -http://www.frontlinesms.com/
Ping – http://pingapp.io/
DragonForce – http://www.drakontas.com/
Ushahidi – http://ushahidi.com
WordPress – http://wordpress.org
Flickr or YouTube Sync
Wiki  – Gollum, Dokuwiki or Mediawiki
VPN service

4: Getting Stuff Done & How You Can Help

An idea, once outlined, is good but not enough. Now it’s time to build something. This week the BRCK and Ushahidi teams have been working on getting the basic libraries to run the “core package” onto the device. We’ve also setup a Github repo for Crisis Stack that is open for others to join. Beyond that, the team is getting Etherpad and Ushahidi 2.x working on the device.

Mikel Maron of Open Street Map was on the call and is helping to get the OSM tiles working.
Praneeth Bodduluri of Sahana also joined us and is helping to make Sahana Eden available.
I’m in contact with the LDLN team and we hope to have them also contributing to the core package.

We’re on the way to getting an alpha of Crisis Stack out by mid-February, we need the community in the disaster response space to help to make it happen.

If you’re a software engineer and would like to be involved, check out the repository and get involved with one of the projects that’s being put on the device.

If you’re a first responder, let us know what we is really needed on the device. We’ll need testers on this front as well, of course, but that won’t happen until we get some basic items working on it.

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BRCK+Pi specs

BRCK+Pi – initial working prototype

• IP51 water and dust ingress protection
• Dimensions: 132mm (5.18 inches) by 72mm (2.82 inches) by 45mm (1.77 inches)
• Native Raspberry Pi network connectivity when connected to BRCK
• Input voltage 5 – 18V, 0.1 – 3A charge current.
• Solar compatible charging
• Over voltage and reverse polarity protected inputs
• Dual USB connection to BRCK+Pi for Keyboard or Mouse (500mA)
• Mini-HDMI Video Out
• SDXC support (up to 2TB of SD storage), normally ships with 16GB
• BCM2835 SoC
• 4GB native storage (upgradeable to 500GB with extra cost)
• 512MB RAM
• 3.7V 8,000 mAH battery
• Can be preconfigured with Raspbian, but compatible with any Raspberry Pi distribution.
• Connects to the BRCK by stacking underneath, screws on for security


You can find the BRCK specs here.

We set the price for the BRCK in 2013 in our Kickstarter campaign, well before many changes to the product, upgrades and final delivery of the device a year later. We’ve kept to that initial $199 pricing through the end of 2014 as a commitment to our first customers.

On Feb 1, the retail price for a BRCK will change to $249.99. This new price allows us to include an omnidirectional antenna in every box, as well as the new micro and nano SIM card adapters to make it easier for people who have a hard time finding full-sized data enabled SIM cards. Anyone who buys a BRCK before Feb 1, 2015 will get it for the current $199 on the BRCK store.

The increase in pricing helps by giving us more realistic margins to allow us to invest more into improving the BRCK product.

As a Kenyan company based in Nairobi, we know first-hand the challenges of dealing with power cuts. So we built a router that stays online when the lights go out.

Juliana, when the lights went out, in Tanzania

Our team was down in South Africa, a couple weeks ago, which has some power issues that they’re working through. This means different neighborhoods have their electricity turned off at different times to save energy, also known as load-shedding. It seemed that not too many South Africans have had to deal with this kind of problem, unlike the rest of us in the rest of Africa. They didn’t have a fallback plan for when the power went out.

In-built Power, by Design

Each BRCK has a full 8-hours of power up-time and a smart charge controller that keeps the battery topped up and ready for the unexpected. Designed for seamless failover between Ethernet and 3G, the BRCK can connect to your primary ISP and then automatically switch to a 3G provider when it senses that your internet has been interrupted.

BRCK was designed to survive the rigors of Africa. Here we suffer daily with power outages, brown outs and power surges. From day one we realized we needed to work hard to help smooth this out to make the internet work the way you want it, when you want it.

BRCK has built in 8000mAh of battery, enough to charge your phone or tablet more than twice. This battery provides power to the 3G, WiFi and Ethernet capabilities of the BRCK, which isn’t a small hotspot, but enough to connect 20 device to and running at full speed.

The use of micro-USB cables also allows your device to be charged from your laptop, wall plug, iphone charger, power bank or even another BRCK. We’ve included a USB charging port as well to allow you to charge your phone or tablet from your BRCK.

BRCK’s protected supply is unique in that it will continue to work from 4V right through to 18V from a standard 5V micro-USB connector. And if you go above, below or somehow reverse the wiring BRCK will pause charging, but keep running until the power comes back again. We’ve even optimized the charging circuit to run off raw solar panels without a step up or inverter.

All this charging ruggedness, combined with BRCKs proprietary network switching and fail over means you and your colleagues can keep on doing what you need to do even when the lights go off.

I had a meeting yesterday with some people who had just come to Nairobi from Lagos, Nigeria. They kept mentioning the problem with power outages and how this happened multiple times each day. We’re no strangers to power outages in Nairobi either, so I commiserated with them and then went on to discuss the differences in power outages between these two large African cities.

In Nairobi, when we lose power it’s usually for a few hours, but that can extend to a day or two. My own experience in Lagos was that we lost power many times during the day, but for shorter periods of time.

A power transformer blows up along Juja road in Nairobi

We live in a world of poor infrastructure, with massive growing demand, which means that the cities we live in won’t be able to keep up. This problem is sometimes exacerbated in Africa, in particular, when you move beyond the cities as the distribution is not condensed, making it more expensive to extend our traditional lines of power. (As an aside, thank goodness for micro- and village-level power programs that are starting to pop up, as they can meet this distributed problem with a distributed product).

The power just doesn’t go off and on either, it’s not black and white, there are shades of brown here. Sometimes there is one phase on (brownouts), which means that we’re getting a small trickle of power that some bulbs can give you a nice yellowish glow from, but nothing else will work. Other times we have power spikes, which fry our electronics.

Case in point:
Last year in August, all of the power in Kenya went off, the whole country. Apparently, you have to spool up energy from the different generators to the country at intervals, which slowly ramps up the power to what is needed. Some genius at KPLC (our power supplier) decided to grab the big switch and crank it on for the whole country at once, at which point we had 400v of electricity coursing through our lines for 3-5 minutes.

Zuku, the largest terrestrial, consumer ISP in Nairobi lost 3,000 routers that day.

It was on that day we realized we needed to make sure that the BRCK power could handle 400v.

This is why we design and engineer the BRCK in Kenya. We had been building the power system to be smart enough to handle almost everything thrown at us, including those brownouts and the continual on/off switching of the power line, but we hadn’t considered that crazy of a power spike for that duration.

Reliable internet is directly related to having reliable power

So, the problems of crazy fluctuations of power is one thing, but it isn’t the only issue you have to think about as you build for reliable internet connectivity in a device in Africa. For us, we also have to think of how you charge it and what you charge it from.

When we went up to Norther Kenya on our expedition for the eclipse over Lake Turkana, we had to charge the BRCK off of anything we could find. This included the car cigarette lighter, connection via alligator clips to the car battery directly and solar panels.

Powering the BRCK in Kenya’s northern desert

The BRCK power specification are the following:

• 4-18V power input
• 8,000 mAh LiPo Battery
• MicroUSB and GPIO expander power inputs
BCS 1.2 Compliant Charging input
• Reverse voltage and over voltage surge protection
• Solar input compatible with cell saturation protection

Whether you use the BRCK as your access point in an office, or the BRCK serves as your internet connectivity device for syncing tablets at schools, or you use it as a journalist traveling to out of the way parts of the world, or you use it to send back data from a water pump in a village, we’ve thought of your problem.

Your internet connectivity is not just a matter of finding a signal, it’s also about finding power.

Yesterday we spent the morning taking a few new pictures of the BRCK, since there had been some cosmetic changes to the design (we moved the light on the top, and put the power button on the side). One of the first places we stopped was a school in Kawangware, one of the lower income areas of Nairobi.

Over the past few months, more and more people who deal with schools and education have been reaching out to us. There is a growing demand for connected devices, for administrators, teachers and students.

We intend to see BRCK coupled with tablets and Raspberry Pi solutions in Africa’s classrooms.

Making Digital Education More Efficient

Nivi Mukherjee runs eLimu, a Kenyan organization that designs a tablet-based Android app which helps prepare primary school students to pass their standardized exam to get into secondary school. They’ve been doing fantastic work for the past 3 years, and their program is really getting off the ground.

One issue that Nivi has with the system is that each of the tablets in the school has to have its own SIM card to download the most recent content (daily/weekly). You can imagine how expensive this gets with 50 devices at a time.

This is where Nivi and I sat down to discuss where the BRCK can fit in. We’re trying to see if having a single BRCK in a school like this can help reduce costs. The BRCK can download the data/information (and upload too, if needed), each day at midnight. The next morning, instead of each child with a tablet updating to the local tower, instead they would just connect over WiFi to the BRCK and get the latest content sync.

That’s just one way we think it could be useful, not to mention what can be done by the administrators during the day to get more reliable email and internet connectivity using the device. In fact, as we were leaving the school we asked Peter the headmaster how his tablet education program was going. His response was, “The tablet program works very well, our problem is internet“.

Customize an Ed-Tech Solution

Recently another education-tech focused individual got in touch with us, this time from Uganda, by the name of Johnny Long. He’s trying to figure out a solution that takes hardware like Raspberry Pi, Chromebooks, Arduino and solar, and then mixes them with software from RACHEL, Khan Academy (via Ka-Lite) and GCFLearnFree for schools that have poor infrastructure. It’s a hard problem, made harder by internet connectivity issues.

Because of his incredible depth of knowledge on software development and firmware, we’re ensuring he too gets an early BRCK as well.

The power of the BRCK isn’t just in the redundancy and ruggedness of the device, it’s in the fact that you can customize it to your needs. What’s needed in semi-rural Uganda is not the same as what’s needed in urban Ghana, nor are the needs the same between public and private schools.

For this reason we created the BRCK Cloud with an API so that software developers can customize their own software for the BRCKs that they run. We also provide a GPIO port which allows people to customize with other hardware, like solar, additional ports, more hard drive space and especially items like Raspberry Pi. We know we can’t come up with all of the ways to use and customize the BRCK on our own, and it’s in this industry where we feel a lot of great new ideas will flourish.

Whether you’re doing something for one school or you’re running a massive program such as OneBillion in Malawi and beyond, the custom software and hardware connectivity needs can be met with a BRCK.

I’m looking forward to shipping the first BRCK devices out to people who run these programs in the next few weeks, as they represent something we cherish about deeply about the BRCK. You see, our vision is a world connected, where the last-mile of internet connectivity is as seamless for someone living in Africa as it is in Europe or the US. There’s no where more in need of this than schools.

We’re looking for great people to join the new BRCK team and help us build an amazing technology company here in Nairobi, Kenya. Simply good won’t be enough, if you’re not an overachiever (and can prove it), then do not apply.

Apply for all positions by submitting your CV/Resume and a paragraph on “why you” to BRCK.com/jobs. If you have a portfolio or a body of past work we can see, that plays well in your favor.

Here are the positions we’re looking for:

Senior-level Electrical Engineer
We’re looking for someone who has worked on small electronics, think telcoms, modems, routers, etc. This is not a junior position, so you will be tested extensively on your knowledge. We’ve got some minimums on this one, including; 3 years designing commercial electronic products and 2 years’ experience using industry standard ECAD tools (Schematic capture, Simulation and Layout tools). You also need to have a proven understanding of both analog and digital design requirements and concerns. More information here.

Senior-Level RF Engineer
If you love messing with antenna design and tuning, modems, 3G signals, WiFi routers and think network connectivity is the coolest thing going, then let’s talk. This isn’t a junior position, we need someone with a couple years of real commercialized products and real-world RF design. Most of the time we don’t care what your eduction level is, but this time we do. You need to have a BE, BSc or equivalent degree as a minimum requirement, with a masters or higher degree preferred.

Production Support and Procurement Specialist
The ideal candidate will be a self-starter, with a passion for enabling communication globally. We have very ambitious plans and we are looking for someone that can share our vision, and take the BRCK product to the next level. The position of Production Support and Procurement Specialist is a role that is crucial to BRCK’s continued investment in developing the most reliable devices, at an affordable price point. You will be working with the Engineers and developers at BRCK to deliver the BRCK product and its accessories to the market in a timely fashion.

Senior-level Software Engineer
We’ve got some of the best people in Kenya working on our BRCK Cloud, and we’re looking for a couple more people to join that side of the team. We’re looking for someone who is highly experienced and proficient in Ruby and MySQL, experience with Rails is a plus. If you know Linux internals (Networking on the Linux stack), then we want to talk to you too. At least 3 years experience of software development experience in team-based environments, and know what you’re doing around version control systems – preferably Git.

The BRCK is designed and developed here in Nairobi, Kenya. As you might expect, this is a very different experience than doing it in China, US or EU. While creating physical products is always hard. Doing it in Africa is harder. This is due to the difficulties around rapid prototyping, shipping costs and accessibility of components. However, it’s also the best way to understand the real problems and challenges that the BRCK is here to solve.

Reg Orton, BRCK CTO, is on this short video explaining some of what this means:

BRCK: Designed in Kenya from BRCK on Vimeo.

Some key thoughts on this from our end:

• We are not an off the shelf solution and rebranding
• We are pushing the limits of what is possible to do without
• Retail price point dictates smart design and challenging design
• We want our engineers close to the problem to really understand the requirements. This makes things harder than if we were designing in China
• We are developing a far better product by doing custom design
• Our volumes are lower in this market segment than if we were designing an ordinary router device.
• We are developing a company here, not a fly by night product. We want our v2 and v3 products to be heads above everyone else.
• Doing this allows us to rethink a lot of the assumptions that existing products use.

At the end of 2013 I sat down with Jiitu Abraham of CCTV to talk about the BRCK. I cover why we built it and who we’re seeing the most interest from as users. Here’s the video.

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.