Solar panel on balcony

So far I’ve just been using this to charge my phones overnight – but that doesn’t seem to be using up much of the power generated. The indicator LED on the charge controller is often indicating the battery is full. Even though it’s winter, I’m in Madrid so the days are usually quite clear and bright. The panel is set up on my (3rd floor) balcony, facing roughly south-east, so it gets the sun for much of the day. I built a small frame so I can angle it better on the balcony.

Charging smartphone

I’m planning to test running my laptop off this system, so I bought a DC/DC convertor, but unfortunately it didn’t come with the right power supply tip for my Lenovo, so I’m now waiting for that to arrive. I’ve also ordered a larger battery – 60Ah, compared to the 4Ah battery I currently have. So once it’s all set up together will be interesting to see how long I’m able to run my laptop from this before (if?) I need to plug back into mains power.

This evening I just tested running my wireless router on this system – seems to be working well so far…

Powering my wireless router

Whilst there was an unnerving cracking noise whenever I opened the lid, it still worked ok, but after another couple of weeks, the screen failed completely. The machine itself was still usable, providing I plugged it into an external monitor, but was proving to be rather useless for travelling:

So I’ve just bought myself anther new laptop, this time a Lenovo ThinkPad X220:

I’m running Ubuntu on it (11.04) and all installed very easily, no messing around with configurations/patches to get any of the hardware (webcam/wireless etc) working which I’ve had before. All the special keys worked out of the box with no extra configuration. The only very slight comment I’d have is that it has combined speaker and mic jack socket rather than a separate one for each.

Feels good to have a proper laptop rather than just using a netbook as I have been for the last 3 years or so. Although the X220 is still quite small and light it vastly more powerful!

Next week I return to Ethiopia for a few days and will then go to present at the eLearning Africa conference in Tanzania.

Here is a short video of how to switch between virtual keyboards and how to use the keyboard:

Please let me know if you have any feedback/questions.

Over the past few weeks, a group of graduate students at Alcalá University have been creating a virtual keyboard for Android to allow the input of Ge’ez script. This will allow anyone using Android smartphones or tablets to input Amharic and Tigrinya in their native script. We’ll be trialling use of this keyboard in our mHealth projects.

As the script contains over 200 characters they can’t all be displayed on the keyboard, so tapping the root consonant character will allow users to cycle through the 7 consonant+vowel combinations to enter a particular character, much like using a numeric keypad to enter Latin script characters. We’re also working on a version where the possible combinations appear in a small pop-up window when the root consonant is pressed.

The installation isn’t yet as simple as we’d like because the Ge’ez font isn’t default on Android, so the devices need to be rooted and the system font installed before the keyboard will work correctly. We’re currently putting together some full instructions and video and I’ll post up a link when these are ready. If anyone wants to try it out now, please contact me, we can provide a ROM with the font and application pre-installed.

More photos of the keyboard in action.

One of our successes was to improve the boot speed and responsiveness of the refurbished PCs when they boot from the thin client server. The improvement was as a result of some changes to the network switches (they were only operating at half duplex for the ports these machines are attached to), and also to update the protocol used for the display. We’re now using FreeNX, which is proving far quicker than X11. We also tested XRDP which was also very responsive. With X11 the responsiveness to mouse clicks or key presses was so slow as to make the machines almost unusable, now these machines actually appear faster than the SunRay terminals. Much of this is simply my experiences during testing, rather than scientific measurement, and we’ve not yet tested these terminals when the lab and network is under load. So I was very pleased we were able to get the lab in a position where the old PCs would be usable, even with a less than ideal network.

We’re not sure if the thief (or thieves) realise that without being connected to a server to boot up from, the devices are pretty much useless and there’s going to be an extremely limited market for reselling such stolen devices in Ethiopia. So it’s a small consolation that the thief/thieves are unlikely to profit from the robbery.

It’s far more disappointing they have taken the opportunity for the students to fully use the lab, now being down to half the original number of terminals. However, most students are in the run up to their exams over the coming weeks, followed by the semester break, so they won’t be accessing the lab as much as during the rest of the semester.

This gives a few weeks to get the lab back up and running fully before the start of the next semester (probably in first weeks of March) and we very quickly managed to put plans together for how we can replace the missing terminals. We’re hoping to (at least temporarily) replace some of the missing terminals with refurbished PCs, we’d already been testing this over the past few months, so just means that we will deploy them sooner than expected. We’re also checking the costs of having some (SunRay) terminals we had in the US shipped over as replacements for those which have gone missing.

So, despite the setback, the lab should be back up and running within a couple of weeks.

As I’ve mentioned before, not staying in the same place quite long enough (or not knowing how long I’ll be staying) doesn’t make it worthwhile getting a contract account (or broadband installed at home) so means I’m paying the top price for all the phone and data services. The cost of mobile broadband is far higher here in Spain than the UK. In UK I paid 15GBP (around 17EUR) for 3Gb to use within a month, which I thought was bad enough, but in Spain I’ll be paying 20EUR for 1Gb to use within a month. So more than 3 times as much. The small consolation I have is that after I’ve topped up 3 times, I get 2Gb free – so that’s 60EUR for 5Gb.
Hopefully though, whilst in the UK my mobile dongle was my only means of internet access, here I can use the office connection much of the time.

One slight quirk with my new internet account is that to find out how much data I have left for the month, I need to send an email with my phone no and ask for the data balance. When I asked what format the email needed to be in (assuming that it would be an automated response) I was told that the format doesn’t matter as it will be a real person looking up my balance and replying manually – possibly one of the reasons for the high cost.

I’ve spent a few days this week in Barcelona with Cast-Info investigating their Desktop4All solution, which we’re looking to trial as an alternative to the OpenSolaris setup we currently have. Goitom, one of the phds students from Mekelle will spend the next few weeks based in the Cast-Info offices, learning how to install and set up the server system used for Desktop4All, with a view to installing this when back in Mekelle in a couple of months.

Desktop4All, based on Linux, is a set of integrated open source applications. It’s likely to produce a similar end result to the solution that we already have running with OpenSolaris, but the main advantage for us will be in the support and documentation available as a reference. Testing out Desktop4All will give us the opportunity to collaborate in the development and to investigate whether we get similar types of issues arising as we have had with OpenSolaris.

When we started the Digital Campus project, I think there was some concern over whether the students would need much training in how to use a non-Windows operating system, given that much (all?) of their previous experience of using computers/pcs was with Windows (usually XP). This has turned out not to be the case, given that many students have had limited time to become locked in Windows, we’ve found few issues with students being unable to navigate the interface or use applications. I suspect we don’t always give the students credit for their ability to adapt to new interfaces and systems (especially judging by how quickly they find their way to webmail, youtube and facebook).

I recently became the owner of an unlocked HTC Dream smartphone (running Android 1.6). Smart phones are still quite a rarity in Mekelle (and I’d guess in much of the rest of Ethiopia), so despite this not being the most recent model, everyone who sees me using it asks me to have a look & play around. I have seen a few people with Nokia E71 phones, but when you look closer they’re actually Nokla E71′s (yes, that’s Nokia with an L instead of an i).

In a couple of days I will be heading out to some rural areas with a colleague doing his doctorate in public health. He’s testing different smartphones and applications for data collection whilst he’s interviewing Health Extension Workers (HEWs). I’m joining him to see what some of the issues are with using these types of phones and applications in this context, with a view to spending some time over the coming months seeing how these devices may be used to deliver training.

I’ve only really been using the phone for the past week or so and there are a couple of areas where I can already see we may run into problems.

Firstly, the battery life. With my usage, not particularly heavy, the battery usually only lasts just over a day. Given that we’ll be using these devices for data collection, then they’re likely to be having heavy use in areas with little or no mains power. We are testing out some small solar power chargers.

Secondly, the GPRS coverage. GPRS is not used widely here and coverage in extremely patchy (even in large city like Mekelle) and it’s not yet been rolled out to other more rural areas (or even large towns). Sim cards need to be specifically enabled to use GPRS – it’s not turned on by default. The applications we’re testing out (EpiSurveyor and Sana) will both allow data to stored until an area with coverage is reached, but unless the user visits Mekelle on a regular basis then the data will never get uploaded.

I’m sure that improvements in the phones and the phone network infrastructure will eventually make both of my concerns invalid – it’s just a question of when they will be addressed.

The other questions and areas I’d like to look at include:

1) How easy is inputting the data on such a small screen? Might a tablet or netbook PC be more appropriate? Perhaps they’ll work well for short, relatively simple surveys, but not for others?
2) Do any of the HEW’s already have java enabled phones? If so, this would enable them to use the EpiSurveyor application without any new phones.
3) Do any of the phones support input using ge’ez (the alphabet used for Amharic and Tigrinian)? I can’t see how to input these characters on my phone (if anyone knows how I’d be pleased to hear from you), but I can display the characters.
4) How long do the phones take to get a GPS signal? For each record input we can automatically attach the location coordinates – but I’ve noticed that sometimes the phones can take a long time getting a GPS fix. With the power issues it’s unlikely they’d want to leave the GPS on all the time.
5) Would they really be used? Getting reliable data in these areas (even just for the number of births/deaths) is extremely difficult – reporting processes are often unreliable or just not used. Using these phones could help with gathering this info – but obviously only if they are used.
5) What are the other uses for the phones? E.g. providing remote diagnostic support, clinical support, training content/activities or reference, or perhaps for fun/social activities.

Plus I’m sure many other questions and possibilities will arise over the coming days.