How the World Really Works review: The tech that underpins society
In such a complex world, no one can be expected to understand everything. But for energy expert Vaclav Smil, there are limits. In his view, it is inexcusable that most of us don’t know
the first thing about the basic workings of modern life and the technologies that keep us all alive. It’s not all rocket science, he says. “Appreciating how wheat is grown or steel is made... are not the same as asking... somebody to comprehend femtochemistry.”...[more]
Why Hardware Funds, Accelerators & Makerspaces Matter. A @TechCabal profile of Film Anatomie
“When it doesn’t come out right, they blame the editors.”
Chuks Oteke had had enough of the complaints about his work. In 2012, he set up his video production studio where he provided visual effects and video editing services, but every now and then he received complaints from clients who were dissatisfied with his work. To them, Oteke was the problem but to him, the problem was the raw video cuts he got from his clients...[more]
Hardware Garage, Nigeria will help you grow your Hardware Startup
The Hardware Garage is a centre for local content promotion in Nigeria. A private driven entity where product ideas or prototypes are turned into commercially viable products/company.
We are a team of passionate engineers, educators, entrepreneurs, business managers and investors who believe in the abundant human capital in Africa. We are driven by the historical successes of local content creation and are turning selling and sellable ideas or products in Nigeria into locally produced goods. By this, we are not only saving forex, we are also creating more jobs for Nigerians and breeding a stronger human capital for the future.
Lessons learned in the Nigerian hardware space – The story of Grit Systems by @David_Biyi https://www.hardwarethings.org/features/grit-was-not-enough
In September 2016, I was invited for a technical assessment at GRIT Systems as part of the hiring process for a hardware engineering role. This assessment lasted eight hours but I did not need that long to make a decision on whether I was going to join the team, should an offer be made. I made that decision during the lunch break. At lunch I met a future colleague who had strong opinions about 3D printing. Over our meals of rice and chicken stew, we had a fascinating discussion about additive manufacturing techniques. He made very good points and I was enchanted by the fact that GRIT had brilliant engineers who were heterodox in their thinking and approach. I was completely sold on the company...[more]
RAB-Microfluidics founded by Rotimi Alabi develops a Microfluidics based Laboratory-on-a-Chip
RAB-Microfluidics, a Scottish R&D firm was built out of the University of Aberdeen. It was chosen for the TechX Pioneers accelerator programme run by OGTC in Aberdeen in 2018. Now, it has hit the headlines as the company has bagged fresh investment...[more]
The Future of Biotechnology: Confluence of Next-Generation Experiment, Software, and Hardware for Deciphering and Rewriting Biological Systems by Logan Collins
Less than 250 years after the conclusion of the Enlightenment, we have reached a point in human history where science has given us seemingly mystical abilities. We interact across thousands of kilometers nigh-instantaneously, we hold millions of libraries of knowledge in the palms of our hands, and hosts of shining buildings tower into the sky. Despite popular conceptions of doom and gloom, we are healthier, more peaceful, and less impoverished than ever before (Pinker, 2018). Our medicines can perform miracles such as making the blind see (Kumar et al., 2016; Lu et al., 2020), repairing damaged organs (Attanasio et al., 2016; Fioretta et al., 2018), and eradicating smallpox and rinderpest (Njeumi et al., 2012; Willis, 1997). When reflecting on all that is possible today, Arthur C. Clarke’s famous statement that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic” takes on more truth now than ever. But the next revolution, the revolution where we decipher biological complexity and rewrite biology itself for the better, has only just begun...[more]
AirSynQ Nigeria provider of long-duration solar-powered automated aerial surveillance services for the Oil & Gas Industry via @Techpointdotng
...Tayo Sadique and his team of software and hardware engineers do not think this should continue. To this end, AirSynQ was founded in August 2019. “We offer long-duration solar-powered automated aerial surveillance services especially to oil and gas companies to predict and prevent pipeline vandalism by detecting threats in real-time,” says Sadique, CEO, AirSynQ....[more]
African scientists leverage open hardware – @nature
A 2018 article in the journal HardwareX details “an open source hardware setup to measure locomotor activity in rodents”. It has a simple design. But for developer Victor Kumbol, then a neuroscience master’s student at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology in Kumasi, Ghana, that device, called Actifield, has had an outsized impact...[more]
Film Anatomie Nigeria | Manufacturer of Filmmaking Equipment receives funding from Platform Capital @ThePlatformCap
Filmmaking Manufacturer. we make camera sliders, cranes, jib, dolly, robotics for film and drones...[more]we are glad to announce our partnership with Africa's foremost Technology driven investment firm @theplatformcapital....
Posted by Film Anatomie on Thursday, May 21, 2020
How Shenzhen is fueling Ethiopia’s burgeoning startup scene "Designed in #Ethiopia " https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_3z9Rc5joVE
As Shenzhen companies look to Africa for new consumer markets, African entrepreneurs are turning to Shenzhen for manufacturing partners to turn their ideas into reality. In this episode of Because China, Quartz travels to Addis Ababa to learn about how the movers and shakers in Ethiopia’s burgeoning tech startup scene are tapping into the open source manufacturing ecosystem of China’s most entrepreneurial city.
"Development and Optimization of a Smart System for Biogas Production Using Animal Waste" #Nigeria #IOT #Arduino #Biogas cc @EmekaOkoye
This work studies the development of a waste-to-energy conversion system using the anaerobic digestion of animal waste to produce biogas for cooking, generation of electrical energy and organic fertilizers for households and on farms. The materials employed include galvanized steel sheets which is used for the fabrication of the digester and gasometer body because of its high resistance to biological corrosion, pipes and fittings for the control of the flow of materials, fibre glass for maintaining a constant temperature of the system, a sparkles electric motor which is used to drive the mixer and a 220 V air compressor which is used for compressing the produced biogas into the gasometer. The plant is designed using Solidworks and a monitoring unit is incorporated into the system comprising of an Arduino Uno Microcontroller which is connected to a pressure sensor, pH sensor and a temperature sensor in order to monitor the process parameters of the developed biogas plant. The results obtained validate the direct relationship between organic loading rate and biogas production. It also show the interaction between temperature and pressure, temperature and pH, pH and pressure. The simulation results obtained were statistically analysed to obtain a suitable model for the prediction of biogas yield as a function of the four independent variables. The work provides a suitable means for biogas production with smart and continuous monitoring system.
Oyi-1 smartphone #Nigeria for web access via satellite
The BeepTool’s Oyi-1 affordable smartphone makes smartphone technology accessible to everyone in Nigeria and Africa. Secure, reliable, and affordable — Oyi-1 provides practical solutions to life’s everyday problems. Oyi-1 is an affordable smartphone for the rural and poor Nigerians and Africans to access digital services such as finance, telehealthcare, Agriculture, communication and educational services etc.Tekedia reports:
BeepTool makes small satellites with its partners. With its Oyi-I smartphone, you can access the web using a mobile application in areas its satellites cover. The satellites are engineered to serve largely small geographical areas and well optimized...[more]
Take a peek a the CloudX Hardware Makers Community in #Nigeria http://www.cloudx.ng
The CloudX Makers Community(CMC) is a platform built on a collection of emerging technologies which are used to modify and repurpose exisiting hardware to produce something new.
Africa’s 1st dedicated hardware fund? SA SME Fund commits $7.9 million to hardware tech incubator Savant
The R1.4-billion SA SME Fund has committed R110-million to Cape Town based hardware tech incubator Savant, with 50% of this amount earmarked for black African owned firms, the fund’s CEO Ketso Gordhan revealed today.
The idea is that R100-million of the R110-million from SA SME Fund, will be committed towards the first close of a R100-million Savant venture fund that will invest in hardware tech businesses with products that are ready for market, Savant CEO Nick Allen told Ventureburn...[more]
Why It’s Time for a Hardware Conference in Nigeria
Introducing Datasheet, a conference on product development
Between the 4th and 6th of April this year, Hardware Lagos will host her first conference. For three days, there will be workshops and talks delivered by experts from across Africa and outside the continent...[more]
The Hardware Supply Chain Africa Needs – Chuma Asuzu @CaptainUnibrow https://theprepared.org/features/2018/12/22/the-supply-chain-africa-needs cc @clintoneltech @tcchukwueke @EmekaOkoye @HardwareNigeria
COMPARING PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT STORIES ACROSS THE CONTINENT
At a conference in Nairobi two years ago, an engineer visiting from Rotterdam stunned me with how easy it was for his team to order electronic components: an order for a BLE chip placed on Thursday evening would be fulfilled by lunch on Friday. Only a month before that, my colleague and I had spent two weeks waiting for a Bluetooth module for a prototype we were taking to the same conference. And two weeks was fast: we had a relationship with a Sparkfun reseller in Lagos, Nigeria. Most orders for electronic components took, at best, a month to arrive.
Long fulfillment times are the norm for small product manufacturers in Africa. Prior to this BLE project, we spent a month (with no tracking information whatsoever) waiting for a capacitor order from Aliexpress. Orders like this are an exercise of faith and at the mercy of the postal service who only offer home delivery for letters; online purchases must be picked up in person at a service office. For both hackers and small manufacturers in these parts, long wait times and uncertainty are an unavoidable part of the product development process.
This article introduces Africa, first as a continent comprised of different countries and markets, then as home to creative entrepreneurs manufacturing products for everyday use. Next, we examine the supply chain difficulties they face and end with recommendations for improvement...[more]
OpenLH: Automating Biology for Everyone via @hackaday https://hackaday.com/2018/12/16/openln-automating-biology-for-everyone/
When we took a biology lab, you had to use a mouth pipette to transfer liquids around. That always seemed odd to use your mouth to pick up something that could be dangerous. It’s also not very efficient. A modern lab will use a liquid handling robot, but these aren’t exactly cheap. Sometimes these are called pipettors and even a used one on eBay will set you back an average of $1,000 — and many of them much more than that. Now there’s an open source alternative, OpenLH, that can be built for under $1,000 that leverages an open source robot arm. You can find a video about the system below...[more]
via
Brenda Livoi the Mechanical Lead at @GearboxKE Makerspace https://www.designindaba.com/articles/creative-work/brenda-livoi-leading-kenya%E2%80%99s-largest-innovation-hub
The mechanical lead at Gearbox is Brenda Livoi. She graduated in mechanical engineering from University of Nairobi and now occupies one of the top positions at Gearbox. Though it is a position that she tells me she derives immense fulfillment from, she remains one of the few women in this kind of leading role in the sector.
via
Still, things are improving, she says, citing the larger amount of women students who she has seen come into Gearbox and make their mark in the environment. “I think women have it in mind that they are trying to make it in a space that is not historically theirs, so they work extra hard and always give their best and are very hands on,” she adds.
Take The Esvendo Project. Created by Kenyan social entrepreneur Esther Mwangi, it aims to increase women's access to low cost sanitary products through the introduction of custom vending machines for as little as a ten shilling coin...[more]
The Frontier Markets Access Hardware Accelerator #China- #Nigeria @emeka_okoye @Oukwuani @ijele5000 @GearboxKE
The Frontier Markets Access Accelerator will bridge the gap between consumer and business needs in Nigeria and available manufacturing capabilities in China to create market-leading products in Nigeria. This is most easily done by identifying white-label products that already exist at scale, and modifying them in intentional and creative, but inexpensive ways to better apply to market needs. This can be done by providing entrepreneurs addressing the Nigerian market with access to design-for-manufacturing and sourcing guidance, and a modest capital runway of around $50,000USD per company. Frontier Markets Access Accelerator is a partnership between the ARTOP design firm, Shenzhen Open Innovation Lab, and Jeremy Kirshbaum to provide this investment capability to capital partners looking to expand into the Nigerian market and beyond...[more]
Microchip Design in #Nigeria from Ndubuisi Ekekwe’s First Atlantic Semiconductors
I spent a key part of this month in the lab testing a design we had engineered. A client had paid to develop the system. One of the reasons I enjoy microelectronics is that it includes most things, from physics to mathematics to software. Yes, the most challenging software anyone can create is the one that controls electronic signals. And you cannot make sense of many things without mathematics. In short, being a good microelectronics engineer requires that you are a solid guy on calculus...[more]
Reflection on 5 Years of BRCK
It was 5 years ago that we created BRCK as a company, and I’ve had the great joy of being on a journey with some fantastic people, including the three here with me in this picture (Reg Orton, Emmanuel Kala, and Philip Walton).
We had an idea of what we were getting into back in October 2013, but none of us were sure where it would actually take us. All we knew then was that the barriers to creating hardware had dropped enough for us to get into it, that there was a problem in the internet connectivity space in Africa (and other frontier markets), and that we had the right mixture of skills, naiveté, and optimism to figure it out. Over the next 12 months we grew to a team of 10 that had this the desire to meet a big challenge and believed we could do hard things. As I write this, 8 of those 10 are still at BRCK.
In the intervening years we’ve built 3 full products and taken them to market (BRCK v1, Kio Kit, SupaBRCK), and a fourth (PicoBRCK) that is still in R&D. That alone is quite an accomplishment. I hadn’t known back in 2011 when the idea for creating a device was first hatched, just what the life cycle of building a hardware+software product would be. I do remember having a conversation with an old friend, Robert Fabricant, that I thought we should be done with the first one in about a year. He laughed and said it would be at least 2-3 years. He was mostly right.
I’ve since learned that it takes approximately 18 months for a product to go through the concept, design, testing, productization, and first samples stages. Then it typically takes us another 9 months for iterations and small fixes on hardware to happen, while that same time is spent concurrently hardening up the software side of things. For example, our most recent SupaBRCK took approximately almost two years from conception to product, and then another 6 months of continued fixes/changes to the low-level software and the hardware before it worked well consistently.
Asking the Right Question
You would often hear us saying, “Why do we use hardware designed for London or New York, when we live in Nairobi or New Delhi?” as a way to frame the problem we thought we were solving. It was only in late December 2014, after we had shipped the BRCK v1 to 50+ countries, that we realized we were only partially on the right track.
It turns out the problem isn’t in making the best hardware for connectivity in difficult environments. Sure, that’s part of the equation – making sure that you have the right tools for people to connect to the internet. But the bigger question involves people, who is connecting to the internet and who isn’t? If, after many years of building BRCK, we had built the best, most rugged and reliable solution for internet connectivity, that would be something we could pat each other on our backs for. However, if the problem instead was “How do we get the rest of Africa online?”, and we were able to solve that problem, then that was a legacy we’d be proud to tell our children about one day.
Sitting in our tiny office around Christmas 2014, we started thinking hard about this bigger issue and began doing deeper research into the problems of this loosely defined “connectivity” space. We started doing some user experience research, manon the street interviews, to figure out what the pain points were for people in Kenya.
Connectivity can generally be broken into two buckets:
First, accessibility – can I connect my device to a nearby signal?
Second, affordability – can I afford that connection?
The results were quite telling, it was definitely about affordability.
For everyone who’s not deep in African tech, let me lay out some interesting numbers for you. Accessibility in most of the emerging markets has been moving rapidly since the mid-2000s when we started to get the undersea cables coming into the continent. These cables then went inland and started a rapid increase in available internet connections and wholesale internet costs decreased rapidly. Since 2008 we’ve had more than one million kilometers of cable dug across the continent, and we have over 240,000 cell phone towers. Concurrently, the mobile device prices continued to drop globally, and by 2016 we started to have more smartphones imported into Africa than non-smartphones.
Reaching deeper into the market research, we started to study this affordability problem.
“A4AI found that the average price of 1GB prepaid mobile broadband, when expressed as a % of average per capita Gross National Income (GNI), varied between 0.84% in North America and 17.49% in Africa.”
It turns out that in almost every country in Africa, there is a consistent ratio among all the smartphone owners in a country: 20% could afford to pay for the internet regularly, and an incredible 80% couldn’t.
Interestingly, when we looked at who else was working in this connectivity space, almost everyone was focused on accessibility, not affordability. Those that were focused on affordability thought that just making the price cheaper was enough. What we’ve seen is that if you just make “less expensive” subscription WiFi (as most do), then you’ll capture another 10% of the market. And while that can make a profitable enterprise, it still leaves 70% of the market unaddressed.
This last blue ocean of internet users in Africa, as well as Asia and Latin America, is still largely ignored. Those who do have the resources go to after it tend to try with iterative approaches in both business models around affordability, and only marginal creativeness in solving for technology accessibility.
Moja Means ONE
It’s taken us five years, going through multiple iterations of new tech, building new hardware, and creating new software stacks that go from the firmware up to the cloud. We’ve been mostly quiet for the past year as we put our heads down and tried to take a new platform to market. Where are we now?
“Moja” means “one” in Swahili, and it was the brand name that we chose to call the software platform that we would build on top of the BRCK hardware. While Moja means one, “pamoja” means “together” or “oneness”, and that was the root we were looking for. To us, Moja is the internet for everyone.
We started by trying to make it work on the BRCK v1, but that was a bit like trying to make a sedan do a job built for a lorry (truck) – it wasn’t powerful enough. The SupaBRCK was envisioned as the hardware we could leverage that would allow us to not just have enough of a powerful and enterprise-level router, but a tool that was actually a highly ruggedized micro-data center. With this, we could host content on each device, as well as get people connected to the internet. Another way to think about the accessibility side of what we do is that we have a new model for how a distributed CDN works on a nation-scale, moving away from the centralized model that the rest of the world uses. In environments like Kenya, we can’t continue to just copy and paste models from more developed infrastructure markets, we have to think of new ways to deal with how the undergirding system actually works and operates.
We give the internet away for free to consumers. How does that work if we all know that the internet isn’t free? After all, someone always pays.
The business model is an indirect one. We charge businesses for some form of digital engagement on our Moja platform (app downloads, surveys, or content caching), and the free internet to our consumers is a by-product of this b2b business model. Like everyone else, we thought we could do it with advertising at first. But we realized that our unique hardware capabilities allowed us some other options, since advertising is a poor option for all but a few of the biggest global tech platforms.
Today we’ve deployed 850 of the SupaBRCK’s running our Moja software into public transportation (buses and matatus) in Kenya and Rwanda. They’ve been quite successful with almost 1/4 million unique users monthly in just the first 3 months. We have both a tested and working technology platform, as well as product market fit. With unit economics that make sense, a growing user base, and a business model that works, we’re excited for the growth phase of the business. This next step means going nation-scale in each of these countries, and also determining our next market to enter.
It’s important that ordinary people across Africa and other frontier markets can stop thinking about the costs of the internet and don’t have to turn off their mobile internet on the smartphones that they already have in their pockets.
Once they know they can afford it, the way they used the internet changes dramatically. An Internet like this is feasible today, and it’s a cheaper, faster, more distributed and resilient one. It’s also being built from the ground up in Africa, where we’re close to both the technology and human problems, and have a better chance of building a the right thing.
Thoughts and Lessons Over 5 Years
First, make sure it’s a big enough problem.
If you’re going to spend 5+ years of your life on something, make sure it’s something that matters. At BRCK we are creating the onramp to the internet for anyone to connect to the internet, and a distribution platform for organizations trying to reach them. If we succeed we only succeed at scale, which by its nature means that we’ve done something big and that it has made a large impact on people.
Second, figure out what to focus on.
When you start out it’s difficult to determine product market fit. We started with a wide funnel of possibilities for our technology, industries that we could target and consumer plays. Over time, we were able to narrow down what could work, and what we could actually do, to the point where we focused on this big “connecting people” problem. We did detour into education with our Kio Kit, which we still think is one of the best (if not the best) holistic solutions for emerging market schools – after all, it’s in places across Africa, as well as the Pacific Islands and as far as Mexico. However, it proved to be too costly for our bottom line to hold inventory, sales cycles are too long, and it was largely a product sale. When we realized that, we started to focus most of our efforts on the bigger underlying issue across all of the markets, which was affordable connectivity and our Moja platform.
Third, persistence trumps skill.
building hardware is hard. It’s even harder doing it in Africa. The upside however is that you’re both closer to the problem, and that if you succeed in figuring it out, you have a good head start on everyone else. The process takes time, costs money, and there are people and organizations who don’t want you to succeed. It always takes longer than you want to get software working properly, or hardware built and reliable. We’ve often been faced by that same problem that plagues all venture backed companies in Africa, in that you have to do a lot of education to investors to even raise the capital, and then when you do you get charged a premium for perceived risk. Partner organizations take resources and time to work with, and they don’t always come through on their promises. All of these things (and more) mean that the best ideas don’t always win in the market, because it’s those that push the hardest and longest that win.
Fourth, it’s the people you do it with.
If you’re going to be on a journey that takes a great deal of time, with intense pressure, and where success is not guaranteed, then you had better do it with people that you can trust, who you can work with, and it helps if you like them too. Throughout my work career I’ve been more fortunate than most (whether at Ushahidi, iHub or BRCK), and this time is no exception. I get to work with a host of wonderful people; not just smart and talented, but also genuinely good human beings. It makes work a joyful challenge, not an exhausting chore.
So, to those back in the day who believed we could do this when it was just a sketch in my notebook, thank you Shuler, Kobia, Nat and Juliana (and the rest of the team at Ushahidi). To our investors who have joined us in this dream of connecting and doing hard things, you’ve continued to step up and that has made this possible. Thank you.
To Jeff, Janet, Birir, Kurt, Barre, and Oira, thank you for sticking it out for all these years and stepping up to more leadership challenges as we’ve evolved. To Philip, Reg, and Kala, I want to thank you for making the impossible happen, time and again, each for more than 5+ years.
Why #Hardware for Development? by @cpbirkelo cc @HardwareNigeria @EmekaOkoye @ijele5000 @UcheAristotle
Making physical, tangible things is more powerful, more important, and more meaningful than you may think.
I first learned about makerspaces as a concept in Ethiopia (the first one I ever visited was iceaddis in Addis Ababa), so to me, it has always seemed perfectly natural that open-access spaces for building manufacturable products — hardware — would be called makerspaces, that they clearly have a role to play in economic development, and that they tend to be full of exactly the kind of creative, talented, and hard-working people that I like to be surrounded by...[more]
The potential of Open-science hardware in the developing world
In the developing world it’s difficult to get and maintain the hi-tech equipment we associate with modern laboratories. But could open-science hardware provide a lifeline? Rachel Brazil investigates
Walk into any modern physics laboratory and you’ll see all kinds of hi-tech instruments. There are spectrometers, microscopes, oscilloscopes and diffractometers all spitting out data, spectra and images. Apart from being expensive, the main problem with these “black-box” instruments is that they can’t be fully inspected or customized. If they break, you often have to pay engineers to come and fix them.
But what if you could make your own equipment? This is the principle behind the open-science hardware movement, which lets people make, modify and share hardware for scientific use. By sharing design blueprints and using 3D printers, equipment can be made quickly and cheaply. The idea has caught the imagination of many researchers, but for scientists in Africa and other parts of the developing world, open-science hardware is a lifeline that could benefit their teaching and research...[more]
Hardware Lagos : A Nigerian Hardware Directory
Nick Quintong – PayGo Energy #Kenya, distributing clean cooking fuel via a "Pay as You Go" smart meter
The most innovative neighborhood in #Tanzania – Twende Hardware Innovation Hub
Hardware Nigeria Community (HNC) —An Introduction
Hardware Nigeria Community (HNC) is a network and synergy of Nigerian inventors, makers and hardware entrepreneurs committed to fixing hardware in Nigeria.
It is a system which facilitates indigenous technology development, entrepreneurship and job creation.
Hardware in this context implies physical technology products such as electronic devices, mechanical devices, machines, gadgets, etc...[more]
African universities not connected to ecosystems as they should be cc @alueducation @AIMS_Next @Ashesi @beniamerican @NSBTGhana @CUHEBRON @AfriLabs @GearboxKE
...at the broader Pan-African level, academic institutions suffer from an isolation syndrome as they are still not as connected to the ecosystem as they could be.Catalysing Tech Ecosystems:
If one takes a look at the hubs, platforms and regional tech ecosystems that span Africa, one may not find many universities that are listed as partners of these hubs or as active members of the ecosystem.
Lack of funding and inadequate staffing issues are two of the main causes of this ecosystem isolation. Also, the African educational programming should be updated to reflect a more adequate entrepreneurial focus.
One way for universities to overcome these challenges is by strengthening their relationships with the hubs to build up their access to the entrepreneurship network and by working on fundraising efforts that support entrepreneurship and innovation.
African governments should realise that academic institutions can effectively power African tech ecosystems if they are equipped with the right funding and resources.More here
They should work more closely with them to support research and entrepreneurial initiatives, such as hacking, startup prototyping and crowdfunding, that can foster youth employment.
Kenyan Start-ups bet on 3D tech to make surgery cheaper
Two Kenyan start-ups, Micrive Infinite and African Born 3D (AB3D), are investing in 3D printing in a bid to help companies and hospitals cut production costs and significantly improve efficiency.
Micrive Infinite, a medical technology company is enhancing the planning process and improving the outcome of surgeries by use of 3D printing which a study found can reduce the amount of time needed for an operation by 25 per cent. This saves a bout $2,700 per surgery...[more]
Kite : An Open Hardware Android Smartphone
More here
Make & 3D print your own phone with sensors, displays, electronics, batteries and antennas. Customize Android and do exactly your thing!
In Robotics – OpenCat
Wireless translation earbuds from MyManu founded by Danny Manu
Danny's product is called Clik and he bills it as the world's first truly wireless earbuds with live translation. The idea is that you speak in one language and another person hears what you say in their own tongue, either via their own earbuds or via the MyManu smartphone app that Danny has already developed...[more]
How to build a #Zcash mining rig #cryptocurrency,
ZCash is an anonymous cryptocurrency that uses zk-snarks to ensure that all the information regarding user transactions is safely encrypted, while still verifiable by miners that can ensure no double-spending has taken place using zero knowledge proofs.
ZCash uses Equihash as a hashing algorithm, which is an asymmetric memory-hard PoW algorithm based on the generalized birthday problem. It relies on high RAM requirements to bottleneck the generation of proofs and making ASIC development unfeasible, much like Ethereum.
If you're not sure how to start mining after you've built your rig, check out this guide.
In this guide, we want to teach you how to build your own zcash mining rig. This will save you a lot of money as pre-built rigs can often be expensive and hard to acquire. Choosing your equipment carefully is probably the most important step in the whole process, so make sure you compare mining equipment and do proper research before buying a piece of hardware...[more]
Silas Adekunle’s AR-powered fighting MekaMon robot goes on sale at Apple Stores #Nigeria
More here
After selling out of its initial run of 500, U.K.-based Reach Robotics scored a $7.5 million funding round to help it produce a more consumer-ready version of its battling robotics platform. Turns out VCs weren’t the only ones paying close attention to the company’s product: Apple has also been watching the company’s growth with keen interest.
via Bella Naija
Wireless LTE Router’s and High Speed Data via electrical cables from VNTS #Nigeria
VNTS, is an Innovative Devices Manufacturing & Platforms Development company. While acknowledging the importance and growth of software development in Africa let us also remember that developing hardware locally is equally important so we don't remain dependent, are able to tailor solutions to our needs and develop local capacity.It's product:
NetPremise® It transmits high speed data through the electrical cables already available in any building and sends it out either wirelessly or through the wired Ethernet Ports on the device. This makes any network deployment or extension easy and cost-effective; and as there is no need of installing any new structural data cable it minimizes business disruption, downtime and offers great user experience.
Deployable Food Systems via Project Ndovu
African elephants need a lot of water every day for drinking and mud baths . During the dry season, their keen sense of smell allows them to detect water underground in dry riverbeds, where they dig holes with their tusks to reach it. Once the elephants have had their fill, other animals move in to drink. These water holes sustain the other animals in the Savannah in times of drought. Ndovu is elephant in Kisawahili.More here
The vision behind Project Ndovu is to create food systems that can be deployed anywhere. An objective of the smart urban farm in West Oakland is to prototype a farming system that can start feeding at least one hundred people in three weeks. Ndovu was chosen as the name for this project due to it’s social nature, scale, intelligence, the waterholes we create and because we had one.
How hackathons are transforming China’s tech industry
MeshPoint – WiFi A Router for first Responder and Humanitarians
MeshPoint is smart and rugged WiFi hotspot designed to provide instant Internet access in adverse conditions, suitable for crisis situations and social events, both indoor and outdoor. It can be employed and used by everyone, from non-tech-savvy to tech-savvy. MeshPoint relies on principles of open source, open hardware, maker culture and modularity...[more]
FIRST LEGO league competition held in #Nigeria
In March, robot programming students took part in the 2016-17 FIRST LEGO LEAGUE competition (FLL) with the theme ‘ANIMAL ALLIES’. FIRST LEGO League (FLL) is a program that supports children and youngsters and introduces them to science and technology in a sporty atmosphere...[more]
image via
Jon Coker, Swyft on running a hackathon in Togo and its electric car parts start-up
Jon Coker, Swyft Group talks about: why he and his business partner Chris Cokson set up Swyft; the electronic car parts start-up they have set up and how it works; the hackathon they ran in Lome; and the expansion plans they have for Swyft.
Journal of Open Hardware
The Journal of Open Hardware (JOH) is an academic forum for open hardware research and development. Its primary goal is to bridge experimental practices of design, fabrication, and dissemination of hardware with professional, academic, and non-academic communities. It serves as a venue for hardware designers to deposit and disseminate their work and for researchers to publish original empirical research on sociocultural, legal, technical, and economic aspects of open hardware projects. In addition to full-length articles and hardware metapapers, we also invite submissions of review articles of open hardware events and opinion pieces on topics of interest to the Free and Open Source community...[more]
Kniterate: The Digital Knitting Machine
Create a design and press knit. A compact digital knitting machine to bring fashion fabrication back to your neighbourhood.
OTOMATIK – Portable Offline Servers
The Otomatik Server is a portable battery powered Wireless Server with no Internet connection and accessible from a User's mobile device via WiFi, this Server is ideal for delivering content to areas where Internet and Electricity are major deal breakers.
Otigba: The experiment that grew into a tech market – Victor Asemota @asemota
I did my NYSC year in Lagos between 1988 and 1989, and I lived on Ola Ayinde street at Ikeja and later at the NYSC secretariat at Opebi. I knew the area very well. I saw Otigba spring up seemingly from nowhere, and it grew to become a major market for technology products. The traders there called themselves the “Lagos Computer Village” but most people know the area as Otigba. It is located conveniently near Ikeja Bus Stop which is a major transportation hub in the metropolis. Sarah Lacy the founder San Francisco-based tech blog “Pando” dubbed it Nigeria’s “BestBuy” supermarket, after the famous US one-stop technology chain...[more]
Kenyan startup BRCK launches SupaBRCK device to solve Africa’s internet equation
Kenyan communications hardware company BRCK unveiled its SupaBRCK this week — a waterproof, solar-powered Wi-Fi box that operates as a 3G hotspot and off-grid server.
image via
SupaBRCK is the sequel to BRCK’s eponymous debut product, launched in 2013 to tackle two common African IT challenges: reliable power and viable internet options...[more]
The ASME Innovation Showcase (ISHOW) a global competition for hardware-led ventures.
The ASME Innovation Showcase (ISHOW) is a global competition for hardware-led ventures. We focus on the design & engineering journey of taking physical products to market. We care about “social innovation,” that is, solving social and environmental issues through enterprise. We believe a focus on users and customers ensures sustainable and scalable solutions. We are a global network of engineers, makers, dreamers, designers, investors and entrepreneurs...[more]
An ultra-low-power artificial synapse for neural-network computing
Stanford University and Sandia National Laboratories researchers have developed an organic artificial synapse based on a new memristor (resistive memory device) design that mimics the way synapses in the brain learn. The new artificial synapse could lead to computers that better recreate the way the human brain processes information. It could also one day directly interface with the human brain...[more]
TD4PAI Abuja’s First Hardware Incubator
Several hubs have come into existence in Nigeria’s tech ecosystem over the past few years. These hubs bridge the gap between the knowledge of technology and its appropriate application. However, only a few technology hubs in Nigeria have the resources to support hardware focused initiatives.
During the Northern Nigeria Innovation tour, we discovered the Technology Development for Poverty Alleviation and Initiative (TD4PAI) hub in Kuje, Abuja. This hub focuses on the development of local technology in the upstream (hardware and firmware) ICT sector. Founded by Dr. Agu Collins in 2014, TD4PAI organises workshops geared towards building made in Nigeria products...[more]
Open-source hardware for medical devices
More hereOpen-source hardware is hardware whose design is made publicly available so anyone can study, modify, distribute, make and sell the design or the hardware based on that design. Some open-source hardware projects can potentially be used as active medical devices. The open-source approach offers a unique combination of advantages, including reducing costs and faster innovation. This article compares 10 of open-source healthcare projects in terms of how easy it is to obtain the required components and build the device.
open-source desktop CT scanner