Around Kenya in 4 days and a year ( part 2)

The New Year adventure continued past the sad mercury laden mines of Migori to the Tanzania border , Isebania in particular. We met up with professor Sangai Mohochi and had a brief gander into Tanzania ( Serere) for a beer. Later we had some Orokore Beer made from millet, we sat around a car tyre sipping still fermenting beer from straws.

We took our leave from the professor and had a long drive out to Rusinga island. A beautiful place without much of the tourist trappings lakeside places have. The Suba culture is being revived with festivals. We woke up early and did a trip around Rusinga Island and visited Tom Mboya's Mausoleum. One of my high school's illustrious alumni. 

After another long day of driving and some fiddling with charging phones directly from a car battery ( another story on how many engineers does it take to charge a phone), we ended up in Naiberi River Campsite. It is more like a glamping spot and ideal for a quiet New Year's celebration around a fire in the main hall.

A late lunch/early dinner at Rift Valley Lodge Golf Club. We went for a post dinner walk on the greens and ran into herds of zebras and antelopes. No wonder this golf club is classed as one of the best in the Africa. All the excitement was followed by an uneventful drive back to Nairobi.

We arrived tired but energized the beauty and possibilities in Kenya. The roads need to be built, electricity needs to be channeled to houses, there is a lot to do. We look forward to hanging around and getting it done. Eric is heading back to his PhD at Harvard, Gichini will be doing something about the weather prediction and I have helped put Lori Systems on a solid technical footing and change the Logistics landscape.

Around Kenya in 4 days and a year ( part 1)

2018 was a year on making impromptu decisions and hopping on random flights heading for adventure. In the beginning of the year I left Aerometrex to explore new opportunities at Lori.

It turned out I finished the year in similar markovian motion travelling around Kenya with a couple of high school friends. Thank you so much Eric for driving and showing us the beautiful country.

I received a call late on the 29th December proposing the trip. I booked a ticket of Safarilink and went to bed.  Flying out of Wilson Airport is magnitudes easier than flying out of Jomo Kenyatta International. I almost missed the flight, but the empty Christmas streets in Nairobi and low access overheads in Wilson meant I flew into Kisumu with zero dramas. I hopped in a Probox from Kisumu to catch up with the other 2 in Kericho. The Probox are known for being death machines, but is a super cheap and fast way to get around. There is another article somewhere revolving around the impact of the Probox on transport in Kenya.

Tiny Kisumu Airport

Safarilink Flight (Turboprop)

We then travelled via some roads still being built from the tea-gardens of Kericho to the lush sugarcame farms of Awendo. In sections the road meandered into farms and cars had to go in a single file and often backup into fields when a truck came by from the other side.

Road through Kisii

It was a great night of going out to watch football match in Ulanda town and staying at Owuor's Simba. The road from Awendo to Ulanda is awesome. The sugar cane is a mass scale project and produces a lot of bagasse which can be recycled into paper tissue and other products with the right infrastructure.

Mercury laden waters used to extract gold nodules

Sheds housing diesel engines and rock crushers for mining

Next day we took a side trip to Macalder gold mines. It was in interesting experience what people will do to earn a living in far flung places in the country. Migori county is known for its high concentration of mercury in water. The operations here clearly explain why. Rocks are dug up from underground gold mine and manually broken up into smaller chunks and ground into dust using diesel operated octagonal drum crushers. The whole place is noisy. The dust is then filtered to remove solubles and then mixed with mercury to form gold amalgam nodule, women (some of whom were pregnant) then stir the mixture by hand to find gold bits. Mercury is then recovered by retorting in small ovens and reused. At least some work is being done to raise awareness of the harm from Mercury, hopefully sanity will prevail over economic incentives.

We then continued our trip south towards Kenya Tanzania border and I will continue the story in another post.

Making PCB protos in Kenya

In Adelaide I made a lot of prototypes PCB's and filled up filing cabinets and shelves with them. Some had value to others and I sold them on Tindie and CrowdSupply. For the last year I have been hanging out in Kenya working at Lori. The output in terms of open-source hardware has taken a back seat compared to proprietary company code (we did release one open-source piece of ETL code).

This is near the end of my 3-month stint in Kenya and I decided to run an experiment in the feasibility of designing and assembling prototype batches of PCB's for an energy monitor ASIC I have been meaning to try out - the CS5490. This is a super low bar for a test run. The IC has very few dependent components and large pin pitch making it ideal of teaching manual SMD soldering.

PCB Design

Once the goal was set I broke out KiCAD and spent a night and a Sunday churning out a basic breakout board. The PCB Design and BOM are published here.

Order PCB

The harder part begins once the PCB design is done. Actually making this a physical reality in Kenya. I placed the usual order via PCBWay. A few days before Christmas before I went off to a round a country drive with some friends ( awesome content for another post). The shipping would be from Shenzhen via DHL. The logistics promises arrival by the 28th December.

Order Parts

The BOM for the design is not super complex either. Mouser covers the Kenya region. However there is no option for free DHL for orders over $60 which I get in Australia. I will be in Kenya only till the 20th January and the streets have no numbers or postcodes, which makes ordering via snail mail for any international shipping simply not fit the address template most places have. Perhaps global addressing via plus codes will become reality in future eCommerce systems. Mouser shipped the parts out of Texas immediately, I ended up paying more on shipping than for parts. The customs magic was yet to come.

Clear customs

Any packages with value below $1000 sail through customs in Australia. The Kenyan government will lose out on significant revenues if they followed this practice. On the flipside young engineers with limited resources are being stifled in self-driven learning and experimentation by this practice. I got a detailed/itemized bill from customs via DHL which ended up being the same cost as PCB + shipping for PCB's and around 20% of the cost of the parts. See file here for details and breakdown.

Source tools and materials

Thankfully this bit was much easier with a couple of local soldering iron , jumper wire and tweezers suppliers filling the gap. The ball was dropped by Fargo in delivering the stuff I ordered online again due to the addressing snafu, they attempted 5 deliveries to the wrong place before I had to redirect to the office address where a lot of parcels are received. I can recommend Nerokas and Ktechnics for getting parts in without hassle. Again better last mile logistics would have made things faster. I ended up attending the assembly meetup without the proper tools.

Find assembly space

To avoid annoying my landlord with solder fumes and messy paste workbench I started looking for a place to get together with a few interested parties and assemble the boards (at least one). I ended up starting an open-source hardware meetup and getting some Mang'u engineers together to hand solder the parts. 

1 PCB - x3 assemblers and a gas stove from a local shop. pic.twitter.com/S09EZJbZ5k

— Tisham Dhar (@whatnick) January 5, 2019

Test and publish drivers

Finally this Sunday I have put together some basic micropython code to read registers from the CS5490 over serial and display them in a micropython notebook. Nothing production ready but proof that the PCB design and assembly worked as expected and we can achieve custom products here, with a lot of bureaucracy and false starts.

I am happy to meet more people designing and building open-source hardware in Nairobi and hear about their experience.

Kenya Trip 2016 - Magical Lamu

Arrving in Lamu on Flight 540

After about a week in Nairobi, Gichini and I decided to take a trip to Lamu to do get some R&R. Fly540 goes to Lamu almost every day and tickets are only about $100, the accommodation is cheap as well since the decline in the tourist trade due to the al shabab terrorist threat and abduction of westerners.As the article says Lamu is indeed a slice of paradise. Beautiful beaches, relaxed people and great food. I will try to keep this post low on words and let the pictures tell a story.

The Rasta men of Lamu

A lot of the people are ocean people. Fishing or transporting people in fibre glass boats with outboard motors or old school sailing dhows, a lot of which are made in Mozambique. One particular dhow was decked out with flags from multiple countries and had rastamen crewing it.

The beached dhow (made in Mozambique), prepping for a trip to Zanzibar

One of the downsides of the low tourist business is that we got approached by everybody who had something to sell. It made things affordable, but sometimes we overdid things a bit. On our walk from the airport ferry to the accommodation in Shela beach we met a guy who offered us fresh oysters. So we ended up with 4 dozen oysters for breakfast. The food overall was great, especially the fruits and seafood.

Oysters for breakfast

I took a day for a guided tour around Lamu old town. It has distinct Arab, Indian, Portuguese, Swahili sections. There are of course some modern areas as well. Building on an island is hard work, getting materials in and putting it together. A lot of the buildings are very old with marvellous hand crafted doors.

Old Wells

The Central Square

Some new buildings have replicated the old glamour and look like a set from a Medieval show (I am looking at you Game of Thrones).

New doors of old Lamu

The ocean seems to have crawled up and taken residence in the walls. Coral reefs have left their stamp.

Details in the coral lined walls

I took a day trip to a settlement from the 1500's with old walls and a secluded beach. Passed people from the Luo village quarrying limestone and coral by hand on the way.

Making charcoal the old school way

Quarrying for limestone

On the last day we took the boat back to the airport with friends we made on Shela beach. A glorious few days in an island paradise.I think I will go back as soon as I can.

On the boat back to the airport with Shay and Gichini

Beautiful isolated beaches on the Indian Ocean

Kenya Trip 2016 - Bustling Nairobi

This year I decided to visit Nairobi and Kenya in general after a long hiatus. I was there last in 2009, just before my family moved back. Otherwise most of my formative years have been spent there and I have many fond memories. So this year I decided to bite the bullet and visit the long lost high school and family friends. Arriving in Nairobi and staying in Kilimani was an eye opener. So much has changed in half-a-dozen years. Kilimani used to be farmlands and forests, now it is crowded with high rise apartment buildings.

Had to work hard to get past the Askaris at M-Kopa

Several successful start-up are located here as well. I managed to visit M-Kopa (which manages to turn a profit while selling/loaning solar panels to the poorest people), BRCK which has built one of the worlds first completely sealed and mostly waterproof educational tablets thanks to Qi chargers.

Apartments are being built everywhere in Nairboi

The top floor of the same building houses iHub, a co-working space allowing freelancers and start-ups looking for contract workers to meet-up and work together. The view from iHub is amazing as well.

The view of Nairobi from iHub, with a little bit of the human element

Gearbox is downstairs from iHub, it is geared towards hardware start-ups with soldering microscopes, lathes, CNC mills and of course a mandatory 3D printer. It is run by former theater props maker, skilled in wood and other materials as well.

My former high school friends have got their university educations in country or overseas and are itching to move forward with business plans. There is an IBM research lab and a Bitcoin start-up called BitPesa working in the remittances arena. I took UberX everywhere and stayed at an AirBnB with fibre access (albeit intermittent power). It felt like being in a hybrid world.

Three men on a pole - standard overhead cable fixing practice

Overall it was a great eye opener in the way Nairobi has changed in the last decade. A place to keep on the radar for future movers and shakers.