By annie hutches | Team Member
The IIT Empowering Haiti Team has been very busy this semester, planning for our next trip to Haiti in early December. We are working towards several ways of improving the installation at our pilot school, including connecting the school to the Internet, and are moving forward with meaningfully engaging the local community.
Among the technical challenges our team is addressing is how to store and simultaneously charge 400-500 laptops at Haitian schools. The charging stations and docks designed to-date have been too costly and service too few laptops, with the cheapest option costing around $4 perlaptop. Our goal is to reduce the cost of a charging station to less than $1 per laptop, using lowcost materials that are readily available and construction methods that require as few power tools as possible. The solution: a vertical PVC pipe tripod frame that stands four feet tall and can hold twenty XO laptops on corrugated plastic or hardboard shelves supported by nails. The projected cost per laptop is well under a dollar and the entire charging station can be constructed using a drill, hand saw, and knife. Here’s a video of our team assembling a model charging station: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=midXhgu3jwU
On October 21-23, several members of our team attended the OLPC Community Summit in SanFrancisco. We presented our prototype charging station, plans for implementation of a server at the school, hosted a session on our project’s main challenges, and attended numerous other valuable presentations. The team also met with Inveneo, a non-profit organization that trains locals in Haiti on how to set up Internet connections and start a small business based upon this,and with whom we are partnering to carry out the Internet connection at the EFACAP school in Lascahobas. We also met with two groups from UC Berkeley, where we received valuable feedback on how to focus on the longer-term objectives of the project.
We have a lot to accomplish on our upcoming trip including installation of the new laptop charging station and server components at our existing installation, site surveys at neighboring schools for potential future deployments, and strengthening our relationships with the local people who are involved in making this project a success. In addition to all of these tasks, we will be helping to connect our pilot school to the Internet! Both our team in Chicago and the team in Haiti are very excited about this new connection that will open the school to a whole new world of information, as well as enable communication between both teams.
As always, we thank all of you for your support! Please consider forwarding this email to others you know of who may be interested in our work, and be sure to visit our team’s website for further information: http://iitempoweringhaiti.org
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