Background
Many schools in rural Africa are without computers and network access, and have almost no books for their students to use. Internet access could greatly improve the situation, but many schools are in locations with no electrical service or network connectivity. This basically presents a chicken or egg problem. With a lack of education, the infrastructure cannot be improved. But without a better infrastructure, education cannot take place. We hope to break this vicious cycle by providing a means for educating the next generation despite the lack of a well developed infrastructure.
How we plan to solve this
Lenovo is supporting development of a system to allow charging of batteries using solar panels, then powering one or more computers, a satellite Internet link, and 4-8 LCD-based seats. Prior work in 480, and by a team of Telecomm students, and by ECE personnel have produced a working system, but it is not maximally power-efficient and lacks the monitoring/control and safety features needed to make it usable in the field. The Fall '08 MSU team and two EE students from the University of Dar es Salaam will explore technology tradeoffs, internet connectivity tradeoffs, and power monitoring/control, so that a user can look at an LCD panel and LEDs on the main module and determine solar charge rate, present power consumption, time until battery exhausted at current rates, internet connectivity, LAN connectivity, and a variety of fault conditions. Simultaneously, the teams will also implement open-source (Linux-based) software to allow users to browse the Internet, with the capability to restrict access to a specified list of sites.