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BRCK – the easiest, most reliable way to connect to the internet, anywhere in the world, even when you don’t have electricity.
Here is Their Story
Anyone who has worked in the field — or anyplace far from the world’s most wired urban areas — knows how hard it can be to get connected and stay online. And yet the equipment used to connect in Kenya, or India, or the rest of the developing world is the same as that used in New York and London, even though the conditions are completely different.
At Ushahidi, we face this problem all the time. We realized that what we really needed was a smart, rugged device that could connect to the internet any way it could, hop from one network to another, create a hotspot for multiple devices, while plugged in or running on battery power.
The idea behind BRCK is that all kinds of jobs require steady connectivity, even when infrastructure is spotty due to wireless connections that come and go, intermittent power, or devices that can’t share connections. Seeing this, we set out to redesign connectivity for the world we live in – Africa. As we laid out what such a device would look like — physically robust, able to connect to multiple networks, a hub for all local devices, enough backup power to survive a blackout — We realized that the way the entire world is connecting to the web is changing. We no longer only get online via desktops in our office, we have multiple devices, and we are all constantly on the move. So we designed the BRCK for the changing way we connect to the web around the world, from cafe-hoppers in San Francisco to struggling coders in Nairobi .
The BRCK is like a backup generator for the internet.
It works when the electricity goes out and it works when the internet goes down.
- Portable and easy to set up,
- It supports up to 20 devices,
- WiFi powerful enough to cover multiple rooms,
- 8 Hour battery backup,
- 16 GB harddrive,
- 8 GPIO pins to connect sensors,
- Software infused allows for apps, remote management, and data collection,
- Documented API.
Our motto has always been “if it works in Africa, it will work anywhere.” Our aim is to move the BRCK from its current prototype phase into a field-ready product. We need your help to achieve this goal of taking the prototype to production.
Check them out on Kick Starter:
via BRCK – your backup generator for the internet by Ushahidi — Kickstarter.
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