Aleutia's Blog:

The weekend was a busy one. From Friday evening to Sunday afternoon, a few hours each day was spent with some students and professors conducting a challenge revolving around energy data which was collected from SteamaCo data collecting agency.

Day 1 consisted of a meet and greet, and an explanation of the challenges in hand. 3 were positioned to us:

1. How can we create more value for energy users from data collected?

2. How can data on energy consumption be made valuable to the users?

3. How can IoT (internet of things) offer value?

Challenge 2 suited me best as it drew me in.

having some points down and understanding the question we digested the challenge into; How to visualise the data to show relation to their use and consumption - thus increase value to user and provider.

Day 2

As a team we decided it was ideal to make info graphics - visually displaying data or information AND providing some sort of visual or haptic feedback to the user.

This came down to developing concepts for ‘products’ which could be used in the field.

Day 3

After working on building prototypes for the products we had decided to explore, the remaining hrs in the day was presentations. Here you see Lucas presenting our trump card type card game which provides users in a household a deck of cards representing their appliances IoT data and also some useful myth busters - size does not represent power draw.

We made a flag to share the status of the battery with the community which are using it, Top level being full-high capacity and then when its low, signifies the system is at a high load, perhaps a warning system to show the system could fail if no action is taken.

These ‘puzzle pieces’ or toy blocks would represent the power consumption rate of an appliance through physical volume.

Monday to Wednesday consisted of looking into a some inverter and voltage regulators for a small battery+inverter unit concept, seems there are many options but what the demand of the unit is, is the main question for me.

A friend sent me over an image of the battery and inverter which was installed in his house for a backup power system. 

This was about $1200 USD for 4.8kWh. Question becomes, how can we match that with the incorporation of Li-ion batteries? Size will decrease naturally, however there will also be an increase in price. The balance between output of the inverter - and its cost + the capacity of battery - and its cost...how this will turn out?

Yesterday was spent on the phone with various Smoothtel people looking to utilise the SolarEnabler for their projects. Some for a offgrid radio sites, some for a newly built building. 

Today started off with a visit to the PowerGen workshop, where they manufacture and assemble their mini grid units for off grid communities.

After the meeting, I returned to freshen up to attended  Nairobi Energy Data Challenge. The University of Edinburgh and the Energy Data for All, providing 3 challenges of how the data collected from off grid mini grid energy systems can be used and to increase value to the users. It should span over the weekend and hope to find some interesting points to discuss and develop to increase the value of the data for the user, as opposed to value for the provider.

This days activities were limited to working on the PC to do renderings and develop concept designs for the cradle of the T4.

video shows how rendering of the solar enabler with graphics for a client interested in the system. Its like tetris!

The day started, worked on the 3D model and think of cradle and the phone components for the T4 – some challenges were faced specifically with the cradle as it needed house the electronics – switch, mic and speaker. 

To be able to make this slim, visually suited for the main body and light weight proves to place you in a tight spot. As it’s going to have to be in 2 halves as injection moulding is the route we take, so must have a split line somewhere, question is where?

After sketching some ideas and variants of the 2 halves splitting, I took myself to Yaya centre to get my MPESA unlocked and top it up in order to send money over to the SIM inside the MSF unit. The que, as usual was long. Service here is not about speed or agility, and the infrastructure of the systems they use are not the best suited for speed either.

Setup at the MSF office with Solar Enabler on the side. Met Timothy Orie from MSF’s displacement unit in Nairobi. Talked about his plan for it and some questions he had.

Continued on to meet PowerGen who came to the MSF office to see the demo unit there.

After a day meeting great people at the office, returned to the house to work on my makeshift workstartion.

The man behind is fixing a heater switch for the shower heater...WITHOUT switching off the circuits. Wouldnt advise it.

Hello!

Welcome to my life as a designer in Nairobi, with Aleutia

I am here today, 4 weeks into my stay in Nairobi and I have seen and experienced the love this city has to give, the welcoming and kind people are talkative and curious. There is a feeling a community here, it’s a small city – in a small world. You wouldn’t be wrong to expect to run into someone you knew from a different lifetime, I did.

Once you start to settle into the area, the people you circulate around based on your social or work occasion, you tend to run into them often, building on the community feel. Networking here feels more natural than ‘business’, the curiosity to learn about the project someone is involved in.

Often people will look to introduce you to people they know who have similar interests explore the serendipity to ensue, business and pleasure.

Visually, when comparing London and Nairobi the textures are different, dusty-dirt roads with broken pavements covered in red mud, boda-bodas scatter and weave between cars - which are motorbike drivers who deliver packages and appliances such as fridges – similar to that in Vietnam, and also used as the common taxi driver, as the traffic here is organised chaos. Here the motorbikes have the advantage and can bet you will arrive there before your car counterpart, even though you may be covered in dust.

No one and everyone has right of way, speed of travel is usually slow and the distance to comfort between vehicles are butt clenching. Not to mention the tall speed bumps designed to rip your exhaust out if you have more than 4 people in the car!

Photo Credit: prasan.naik via Compfight cc

Creating Unique Student Profiles for our Solar Classrooms to track Equity

(Google Widget pie charts for our remote monitoring dashboard. Pictures from our first Solar Classroom in Kenya 2011. Our new blue Anodised aluminium and copper T1 Server - just 7 Watts).

GPRS Monitoring of Classrooms to improve outcomes. 

We’re going to register every student by age/grade/gender and then monitor through GPRS in our Linux server each session so we can see how many minutes girls vs boys get access to the computers, which ages and grades and how long each week and then we are going to start tracking scores and what content students prefer.  That way for a few $/month on a 2G connection we can constantly show how the computers are being used, introduce adaptive to learning and continually work improve outcomes. All in near real time. 

The first Aleutia Solar Classroom in a Box I installed was in Naivasha, Kenya, a beautiful area a few hours from Nairobi where nearly all of Europe’s roses come from, and on the cusp of the Rift Valley, birthplace of humanity.

Our First Solar Classroom - Formative Experience in Kenya

We’d been making our computers for years but we’d started to get our head around solar and this kit was a prototype. Charge controller and inverter pre-mounted to plywood tabletop with breakers and fuses, all to be mounted to a wall. The founder of our new local partner, Martin Muckle of Stonehouse had mounted our computers and some low power 19” monitors into white plywood cabinets, which could be locked at night and disguised as part of the room with maps and periodic table posters tacked to them.

We spent the whole day and then the next day. Frames were welded (with a rented generator) and put on a rather thin roof to host the solar panels whilst we put these cabinets to the walls of this new “built for us” cinderblock classroom, feeding through the network cable, turning everything on and then training the teachers. It was formative and the challenges informed our evolution of the Solar Classroom in a Box to make it more kit like and eventually, with that same partner Stonehouse, to provide the structure itself. No more site surveys, or rented generators for welding frames. Standardised floor plan.

And now we return to Kenya. Following Safaricom Foundation’s landmark ambition to bring one of these per county, with Aleutia supplying computers and Storehouse the structures, we’re looking at how we can use monitor these sites. 

Enabling GPRS Low Bandwidth, Low Cost Monitoring of the classroom server: how many minutes boys vs girls use computers and which grades and what kind of scores?

We’ll install a 2G/GPRS Modem and SIM Card into each T1 (our server) and then in Linux be able to SSH in. 

By creating a simple offline form running in a Firefox web browser, we can register every student by age, grade and gender (and avoid names to keep anonymous). When they login they can save their own files, set their own desktop background (all hosted on the 512GB SSD in the server). That session is captured on the server. That way we can upload the information daily (could be real time but internet flaky) and visualise it. 

Intel Education Service Corps will be sending 7 volunteers to Kenya in November and helping with this efford. 

Thoughts on IDF: 43 Years Later Brian Krzanich validates Intel’s vision of  transforming the world by empowering Makers. 

In early 1972, a time of mainframes and emerging desk-sized mini computers, Intel’s co-founder Bob Noyce showed the original microprocessor, an Intel 4004 to a family gathering and said, “This is going to change the world. It’s going to revolutionize your home. In your own home you’ll all have computers. You will have access to all sorts of information. You won’t need money any more. Everything will happen electronically.”

We now live in a world of ubiquitous computing, connected devices in the home, and (in some markets) operate in essentially a cashless economy. He made his vision happen. 

I both spoke and exhibited at IDF last week on our work in Africa and how we are re-inventing the PC and though Intel Optane (an enormous breakthrough of essentially merging RAM and NAND) featured in the CEO keynote, the passion was very much on IoT, drones, robots and wearables. 

Much of the session was on use-cases of SD-card sized Edison (an underutilised platform still finding its feet), the new pin-sized Curie (watches and wearables) and Realsense (3D depth Camera - a Kinect in a gumstick form factor). These tools are a way of embedding true compute power (not just a microcontroller) into devices and echoed Bob Noyce’s early ideas on how microprocessors would change our lives. 

Cure is another return to form. Intel released a digital watch called Microma in ‘74, quickly losing a fortune to competition from Japanese volume manufacturers like Casio and Seiko, killing the project and swearing off consumer products for years.  Curie as a brain for others (I suppose Tag Heuer given their announcement of Google/Intel partnership a few months ago) seems a far better approach. 

Solar Classroom Made in Kenya

(Photos courtesy of Stonehouse Kenya: http://www.stonehouse.co.ke/) 

The first of our 47 prefabricated classrooms to go up in Kenya. This one in Kiambu county at a cost of <$20,000 with 10 stand-alone fanless Aleutia computers and a teacher’s PC/server with 512GB SSD loaded with offline Wikipedia (180GB with photos) and Khan Academy. These pre-fabricated classrooms are done in conjunction with Stonehouse Ltd, who are managing the infrastructure of the project. 

Each pre-fabricated classroom measures 20 x 10 feet with 8 foot walls and assembled by TechnoConstruct in Nairobi using FrameCad technology. The building is created in software and then machinery (about $300,000) produces Light Steel Frame pieces, complete with etched numbers. 

These panels form a flat pack kit (think IKEA) that can be transported in a pickup or cattle truck rather than a more expensive flat-bed truck.

Aleutia Solar Classroom being installed in rural Kenya. 

Rather than customise a shipping container (which becomes an oven inside), we used folded steel and created jobs in Nairobi rather than import from China. 

This way we can deliver on a cheaper truck (livestock truck rather than a flatbed container truck) and install onsite without a crane. 

Aleutia’s provided hundreds of solar classrooms across Sub Saharan Africa but each one has required expensive site surveys and planning and retrofitting solar panels on thin corrugated tin roofs often requires reinforcing the ceiling or removing a tree that’s blocking the sun. Interiors are nearly always drab with chipped concrete walls and floors. 

So for the past 2 years we’ve been working on a way to provide not just the computers and the solar equipment but the structure itself. To provide a solution for transforming education that could truly scale - a standardised classroom, loaded on a truck, installed in less than 48 hours onsite and with a modern interior. 

Aleutias DigitalCube Presenting to FAB (Thunderbirds are Go Mr Tracey!)

Tuesday 21st April saw us making a presentation to FAB (Federation of Awarding Bodies), the organisation that represents UK Accredited Awarding Organisations that provide Vocational qualifications in the UK and abroad. The presentation was made to the International division which looks at how UK vocational qualifications are taken and provided outside of the UK borders. Mark, our Business Development Manager, has worked for 14 years previously with a company providing these type of organisations with software that gives them the ability to securely provide these qualifications via computer in a way that meets their stringent security requirements and procedures, so is well versed in how the process works.

Aleutia was invited to present after a similar presentation Mark gave at an industry conference, The E- Assessment Question, last month in London where he spoke about the work Aleutia has been doing for years with Schools in Africa.

The problems for UK Awarding Organisations in providing Quals in Africa have been two-fold really…. Firstly ensuring the integrity of the exam taking process. This is now nicely sorted where students, tutors and invigilators have no idea of the exam paper being taken until it appears securely on screen, preventing anyone ‘cheating’, using e assessment platforms. The second issue has been the unreliability of the hardware being used coupled with the intermittent provision of electricity and back-up systems, again nicely sorted with Aleutias mission critical machine reliability and our Solar provision ensuring it all runs as it should.

Mark was fired up to showcase not only the well proven Aleutia Solar Classroom in a Box , but also the new offering, designed for UNICEF as a next generation to their already successful Digital Drum, the DigiCube which we realised could be utilised not only for providing students with computer access in community centers and learning centers but is a perfect solution as an Exam Room in a Box! (well cube really… )

Each cube has 4 screens, input for mouse and keyboard, batteries inside which run the cube for 8 hours and is charged from mains or Solar. For exam purposes, it can be set up in less than 5 minutes and complies with all of the rules and regulations that UK AO’s must ensure that exam rooms/situations must comply with.

Previously, the main way of taking high stakes quals abroad has been to organise a session at the local British Council offices, very time consuming, complicated and obviously expensive. Aleutias DigiCube could mean a serious paradigm shift in the way UK quals are taken outside of our borders….. It hits all the buttons...  Bring it on!

We've deployed nearly 300 of our Solar Classroom solutions in Kenya, Uganda (128), Ghana, Sierra Leone, Nigeria, and Zambia. Though it's always been a kit and it's always fit on a pallet, we've had a weakness when it came to the battery. It's just not very attractive to have an exposed battery with cables clipped on leading to the charge controller and so you end up having to build a cabinet or a closet and that's more expensive professional installation costs and carries ongoing risks - in Ghana, we had mice getting into our wooden cabinets and gnawing at wires. 

Today we're releasing a new Classroom in a Box solution that can be self-installed or put in place by a handy-man instead of an electrician. All the key cabling is built into a Pelican 1440 case, which is sealed, IP67 Waterproof and can be padlocked at night. It has wheels and so can be moved by any teacher and can in fact be taken offsite at night to prevent battery theft. 

Inside is a GPS tracker that sends its location by SMS and can display on Google Maps using Aleutia's forthcoming TrackIT android app. 

You can program Geofencing so you are only alerted when it moves offsite. The massive battery inside keeps the hidden tracking device going for months and even if the main battery is dead we have a separate Lithium ion battery with about a week of battery life. So police or security can track down the stolen system. 

Inside is a 120Ah Sonnenschein GEL battery, the Gold Standard of deep cycle solar batteries. Not only will it last more cycles but we can run it down to 40% (instead of stopping at 50%) so you effectively get 860 Watt hours which will keep a classroom of 10 Aleutia computers and a server (plus 11 monitors) running for about 6 hours (and all day if solar connected). There's a MPPT 40A Charge Controller so we can use lower cost commodity High Voltage panels such as these Sharp Polycrystalline panels (Poly performs better in high temperatures.

We've designed a faceplate with multiple outputs (including 19V for projectors) and a display that shows the battery level and other key indicators. 

That solar system then feeds to our preferred configuration which is 10 student computers and a server that hosts content and works as the teacher's PC. There's no Single Point of Failure since each student PC is a complete system and not a thin client - the server just keeps offline Wikipedia, TED Talks and Khan Academy Lite (70GB). 

Finally we have the same card printer we are using in Nigerian clinics that can be used to register students and create ID cards. We're now developing Aleutia computers that will have integrated (or at least USB) NFC card readers so the student can tap their card and it will instantly log in with all the students files, folders, etc in front of them - no needing to remember passwords.

Following a two day workshop with Plan International, Aleutia's taken the solar battery back we initially developed and remade into something portable, ergonomic and amazing. 

Because the system will be transported largely on foot (or bicycle) we didn't want a teacher to have carry a 14kg box and a bulky 11kg folding solar panel. Large backpacks from camping companies weren't wide enough at the base. 

We imported this Pelican backpack with a sealed plastic waterproof compartment in the base from the US, where's it's used for moving camera lens and remade into a Portable Power Station with:

36Ah AGM Battery 12V. 432 Watts - about 230 Watts usable 

10A Charge Controller - takes up to 120 watts of solar in. Low Voltage Disconnect (LVD) so we can set the batter to cut at 40% and keep the lifecycle much higher. 

LCD display for Battery State

Panel with 19V output, 12V output and fast charging USB Ports. 

Folding 60W Panel, LED Projector (700 Lumens)

Blows everything else on the market out of the water in terms of Watt hours and extremely easy to carry. 

After several weeks of email, we had a large NGO partner visit Aleutia's HQ to prototype a ICT4D solution that we just hadn't been able to find on the market: an affordable, solar battery back with enough battery life to run not just USB-charged phones but real devices, in this case a projector. Our aim was something that could go in a backpack, and combined with a 500 lumen DC powered projector and tripod bring education videos to rural primary schools and children's centres in Uganda. 

There are thousands of Lithium battery packs on eBay and Amazon and a few with crummy solar panels but they don't provide enough power performance. We looked at GoalZero's Yeti 400:

http://www.goalzero.com/p/165/goal-zero-yeti-400-solar-generator/22:3/

But it featured an inverter (an unreliable Modified Sine Wave one at that) which isn't ideal - too likely for people to plug in power tools or fans and run the battery down. And the battery inside was AGM when we wanted to use a higher quality GEL and a charge controller with LVD (Low Voltage Disconnect) so we could set the battery to stop at 40% and not be worn out. In short, we needed control of the components.

24 hours later we'd tested various bluetooth speakers for audio output (need 90+ decibles when rain is thundering on a tin roof), designed a new faceplate and built a system around a Pelican case: waterproof, 14kg with a EP Solar Charge Controller and extensively detailed display and output for 19V (projector), 12V (additional appliances), and 2 x 2A USB ports for rapidly charging the android phone we're using (Sony Compact Xperia Z with MHL support for the projector). Charges directly from a folding solar panel we've sourced or can charge from mains, and can be locked at night. 

Now we're upgrading it to backpack solution for even better ergonomics.

Digital Drum will provide access to world-class learning materials

 Aleutia leverages technology expertise to design and prototype Digital Drum

London, 27th August 2014: Aleutia, the UK’s only specialist in designing and manufacturing fanless, energy efficient, fit-for-purpose PCs, has today announced a deal with the UNICEF Innovation Centre to design and prototype a Digital Drum for UNICEF’s Digital Kiosks.

These Kiosks are bridging the digital divide by offering youths in rural Africa the opportunity to develop basic digital literacy skills. Each Kiosk currently has three wall-mounted computers, but over the last year UNICEF has been working with Design without Borders in Norway to develop the next generation Digital Kiosk – the new “Digital Drum”.

 Each Digital Drum will consist of three computers on a round table, one public screen and speakers for a large audience. It will be a solar powered system and will be equipped with the latest free multimedia content, providing educational materials to rural Africa - at youth centres, schools, community libraries, business centres, and other community locations. 

With 8 years on-the-ground experience, Aleutia will provide valuable insight to installing solar solutions and the technology needed to run computers in the harsh, and often challenging, environment of Africa.   

The initial six month deal will see Aleutia improve the overall design of the Digital Drum, reducing manufacturing and installation cost. The design will be open sourced, making the blue prints publically available. This provides Aleutia with the unique opportunity to be a technical research pioneer for access to education in challenging environments.

Aleutia’s unique fanless technology will reduce power consumption and will increase the operability and durability of each Digital Drum.

“We’ve developed a ground breaking all-in-one PC that uses less than 10Watts power consumption.” said Mike Rosenberg, Founder of Aleutia “Working with UNICEF we’ll develop a low cost solar platform, that not only builds manufacturing capacity, but also provides ICT access to those that need it most.”

“More and more jobs and educational opportunities in today’s connected world require a basic understanding of how to use a computer, basic word processing, and the internet; and youth who do not have these skills will have a difficult time bridging this “digital divide”, says Stefan Bock, Coordinator of the UNICEF Innovation Lab in Uganda. “The open-source design collaboration is bringing together UNICEF´s expertise, knowledge of the specific needs and already established access to partners with Aleutia´s professional experience in high-quality product design and development.”

Image source: Design without Borders

Completely waterproof with the reliability of a ‘no moving parts’ design

Groundbreaking silent and rugged server built for high temperatures

London, 15th August 2014: Aleutia, the UK’s only specialist in designing and manufacturing fanless, energy efficient, fit-for-purpose PCs, has today announced the launch of their new M200 fanless rack-mount server.

The M200 is a breakthrough technology; combining enterprise-grade performance for the first time with a sealed, waterproof, fanless design that can work in high temperatures.

Built for marine and challenging environments, the M200 is a fanless 2U (only 3.5” height) industrial server that provides enterprise performance and is able to run directly on 9 - 32V DC. This means that ships no longer require a space consuming AC UPS as the M200 can run directly on the ship’s 24V system and remote customers can operate from solar DC batteries. As with all Aleutia products it can also run on AC.

The M200 is sealed (making it waterproof - IP66), passively cooled, silent, and does not require any air conditioning - it can operate at full load at ambient temperatures of up to 45°C. This makes the M200 ideal for businesses, schools, and recording studios, where silence is golden and there is no longer the need for a separate air-conditioned server room.

The Quad Core 2.7GHz Intel® Xeon® E3 processor and 32GB 1600MHz ECC RAM combined with 8 x 2.5” Hot Swap SSDs and 4 Gigabit LAN ports ensures high performance computing in any environment.

A Hardware RAID solution provides Dual independent RAID 0,1,5,10 modes allowing data protection during boot, write-back caching and protection in event of power loss independent of the OS across all 8 drives. To ensure peak performance at very high temperatures, batteries for the RAID card have been replaced with a Supercap Module.

“By creating a server that is both silent and does not require any air-conditioning, we’ve moved servers from expensive data centres or dedicated server rooms into the office or any environment ”, said Mike Rosenberg, Founder of Aleutia. “We have already deployed this system to Finmeccanica, a huge defence company, who are using it on cruise ships.”

For more information about the new M200 server, visit http://www.aleutia.com/products/m200-fanless-server