Our First Tech Demo: Success!

Today was a productive day by any metric. Early in the morning, Muni and I went out to get supplies for a wind turbine I plan on building next week. The basic design is a Maruti Suzuki alternator, which we got brand new for $30 USD. This alternator will provide 12V @ 40amps when spun at 1000RPM or greater. We are using a 10:1 gear ratio, in a configuration of either dynamo (bicycle powered alternator) or wind turbine (wind spins blades which drive the alternator).

Muni inspects the alternator

While 1000RPM is far from ideal for our work (hence the usage of the 10:1 gear system), there are no stores in Nepal which are selling low-RPM high-output generators. We plan on mounting the wind turbine at the top of the antenna that is currently hosting the WiFi setup I talked about in the post “A Mile Of WiFi“, or attaching it to a bicycle with the wheels removed. Either way, 12V @ 40amps is 480W, and for $50 less than the solar panel and charge controller setup, it would be a much more cost effective method of generating electricity, if we can get it to work.

After Muni and I got home, Bishwa and I rode his motorcycle to a local bank to fix a Buffalo TeraStation Pro we had sold them. The TeraStation is a device with four 1TB hard drives and a RAID controller. The TeraStation Pro makes these four drives (since it is RAID 5, it is effectively 3TB) available to anyone on the local intranet (this is called a NAS — Network Attached Storage). Unfortunately, a combination of both hardware errors and user errors makes it seem like we will only be able to recover the data by removing all four drives from the TeraStation and putting them into a computer with four SATA ports and RAID 5 support. That’ll have to wait for another day, we’ll see how things turn out.

After this, Bishwa took me to lunch at a place I haven’t been to before. It was a hole-in-the-wall kind of restaurant with all different varieties of food, rather than the usual “fast food” offerings of buffalo Momos. I had a variety of different foods which Bishwa recommended. After I told him that the spicy meat he recommended “just wasn’t that spicy”, he asked the chef to bring me some buffalo with extra hot sauce on them: the kind of hot sauce which requires a pair of launch codes to serve to customers. They arrived and I ate them. Nothing! I told Bishwa the story behind my tolerance towards spicy foods: on a plane ride to India once upon a time, I noticed that the people around me weren’t eating their chillis. Considering the surprisingly small size, I foolishly assumed that they would be mild. I was very, very wrong. Shunning the now-evident wisdom of the locals, I popped the whole thing in my mouth, and it was by far the hottest pepper I’ve ever eaten. Considering this flight was aboard a low-cost flight on a small airplane en-route to India, they had no complementary beverage service to satiate my burning taste buds. In fact, the chilli was so hot that my ears were sweating, which I believe to be a world wide culinary first. It was actually making me radiate heat, and I don’t doubt that it raised my core body temperature a few degrees. I sat there for what felt like a transatlantic plane ride’s worth of singed tongue tissue before we landed and I ran to the airport bathroom for a drink of water. Since then, I haven’t had the same reaction to spicy foods — so I hope the restaurant owner didn’t feel too bad that his prize-winning blend of spices didn’t reduce me to a shivering wreck.

I feel like Anthony Bourdain!

On the way home, Bishwa wanted to take me to a place “that my blog readers would love to read about”. With an invitation like that, I just couldn’t turn him down. My mind was racing among all the things it could have been: a skate park for rhesus monkeys wearing inline skates? A 20′ tall fondue fountain?  The largest ball of yarn in the world? I was glad that the destination exceeded my wildest (and most preposterous) dreams. He was instead going to be showing me an interesting part of Nepalese culture. The store he took me to was a clothing store for children under one year old, selling traditional outfits and clothes, including the elaborate gowns worn by boys when they turn six months old. The shop keeper was a fascinating 70 year old who had worked at the store for years and years.

It did make me a little nervous that they sold honey at a store for kids less than a year old. Botulism?

Bishwa also took me upstairs, where almost all the merchandise sold in the store is manufactured with traditional materials homespun on metal looms — I was glad to see that the store was using cotton rather than some cheap blend of synthetic materials. This store also houses a social welfare aspect, funded in part by the merchandise sold on the floor below. Let me know if someone you know needs an awesome baby present: these clothes are fairly priced, incredibly high quality, locally made, and support a growing social welfare network. Bishwa was right, this is certainly a lot more interesting than the stuff I was thinking of: I’m glad I had the chance to visit a store as successful and well-meaning as Nepal Grihini Udyog.

Once we got home, Muni asked me if I was ready for the visit from the Minister Of Education. I had completely forgotten! I was working at light speed with a knot in my stomach, making sure I knew the computers inside and out before he arrived. With Ram’s help, we setup the solar panel on the roof with enough high gauge wire to have the solar charge controller inside my room. The solar charge controller had one output going into the 12V deep cycle 40amp-hour battery, and another output going directly into the computer. With the solar panel producing 23W, the controller was able to both fully power the computer and supply around a third of an amp to the battery: even while using the computer, the battery would be charging.

Around half an hour passed and I hear the gates open, and I see a blue SUV pull inside. They first stopped and talked with Muni a while, but then I heard footsteps coming up the stairs: this was it. Doomsday. Armageddon. Zero-hour. Four people enter: the Minister of Education, followed by his wife, a friend of his (who is a doctor by profession), and a political adviser. Muni brought up the rear, entering fifth. I greet them the best I can (by saying swagaat and offering a handshake), and ask them if they would rather see the computer first, or how it was powered. The Minister asked to be given a tour of the computer, so I gave them the complete rundown, starting with technical specifications. At 13.8V, it was drawing 0.9amps. It is a 1.6GHz Intel Atom powered computer running Intel’s 945GSE chipset. 2GB of RAM, 160GB hard drive dual booting Ubuntu and, for now, a beta version of Windows 7.

First, I show the Nepali script integration I have been working on: programs which have been translated to Nepalese, input of Devanagari script, the hotkey “CTRL + Space” to switch between English and Nepalese character input, how to switch between phonetic (Romanized) and traditional Nepali keyboard input, etc. I then showed them the capabilities of the machine, opening a 185 page dictionary in .PDF format with different languages, some 3D accelerated programs (such as the amazing desktop planetarium software Stellarium), the CPU usage monitor to show that these activities weren’t fully maxing out the computers, etc.

After that, I demoed some of the excellent free and open software that is provided as an optional download on Ubuntu. I demonstrated some basic learning tools like touch typing software and a geography program with a test of the states / regions of any country in the world, plus things like the continents, the oceans, world capitals — you could learn a lot of geography from this program. I also showed other interactive learning software from kindergarten up to college-level material: they were especially interested in the chemistry program which had a built-in periodic table of elements, a chemical equation solver and a whole host of other chemistry-related functionality. I also demonstrated some math software, especially the software KMPlot. I entered two basic functions and found the intersect, then I entered two functions and found the derivative and integral for each: it could make learning everything from basic algebra up to calculus more interactive, interesting, and easy to understand.

After I had exhausted the walk through of the computers, I thanked the Minister of Education for taking time to look at our prototype, and they left to go discuss other things with Muni for a while. I heard from Muni over dinner that they were very impressed about the project. The previous Education Minister had tried a similar project of distributing computers to schools a few years ago. Two things got in the way, he told Muni: first off, the blackouts were too prohibitive, especially during the winter months where there is only eight hours of electricity a day. Secondly, the computers fell out of use around six months into the project because nobody had bothered to update or maintain the computers: the Minister was sure that these computers would prevent the first problem from becoming a nuisance, and that HTP could provide a reliable support network to maintain the computers, even if they were distributed to the 12,000 public high schools across Nepal. This project took a huge step forward today, and I’m really excited about what the future brings.

After they left, I wanted to try my hand at some astrophotography. I haven’t tried this before, so I took some photographs of the sun [disclaimer: don't try this. Even at f/72 and 1/8000 at ISO100, it was blindingly bright. Don't ruin your retinas!] and some of Jupiter. The sun photographs were over exposed, and there is too much atmospheric lensing (whats gives starts the ‘twinkle’) to get any sharp photos of Jupiter, but it was interesting and I thought I’d share them with you here.

Surprising how bright the sun is, even at 1/8000, ISO100 and f/72.

I overexposed this photo to better show all four of Jupiter's 'Gallilean' moons.

Note: two lines running from the upper left to the lower right, plus the barely visible Great Red Spot

As I was taking these photos, a large firework exploded off in the distance: every day closer to Divali / Deepawali, the celebrations intensify. Two days ago there were sporadic cracks and bangs from fireworks, but these days they are going off every few minutes from sundown until around 10:00PM. I didn’t manage to get any good photos, although I did get to take this video. Unfortunately, even with the camera running at 24p, the shutter speed must be 1/25 or faster. At night time, it is just too dark to get any reasonable low-light performance out of the camera. From now on, I’ll stick to still images once the sun goes down.

That’s all for now.
Charles