Aleutia Solar Classroom in a Box Mark II: Easier to Install and Intelligent with GPS tracking and teacher monitoring
We've deployed nearly 300 of our Solar Classroom solutions in Kenya, Uganda (128), Ghana, Sierra Leone, Nigeria, and Zambia. Though it's always been a kit and it's always fit on a pallet, we've had a weakness when it came to the battery. It's just not very attractive to have an exposed battery with cables clipped on leading to the charge controller and so you end up having to build a cabinet or a closet and that's more expensive professional installation costs and carries ongoing risks - in Ghana, we had mice getting into our wooden cabinets and gnawing at wires.
Today we're releasing a new Classroom in a Box solution that can be self-installed or put in place by a handy-man instead of an electrician. All the key cabling is built into a Pelican 1440 case, which is sealed, IP67 Waterproof and can be padlocked at night. It has wheels and so can be moved by any teacher and can in fact be taken offsite at night to prevent battery theft.
Inside is a GPS tracker that sends its location by SMS and can display on Google Maps using Aleutia's forthcoming TrackIT android app.
You can program Geofencing so you are only alerted when it moves offsite. The massive battery inside keeps the hidden tracking device going for months and even if the main battery is dead we have a separate Lithium ion battery with about a week of battery life. So police or security can track down the stolen system.
Inside is a 120Ah Sonnenschein GEL battery, the Gold Standard of deep cycle solar batteries. Not only will it last more cycles but we can run it down to 40% (instead of stopping at 50%) so you effectively get 860 Watt hours which will keep a classroom of 10 Aleutia computers and a server (plus 11 monitors) running for about 6 hours (and all day if solar connected). There's a MPPT 40A Charge Controller so we can use lower cost commodity High Voltage panels such as these Sharp Polycrystalline panels (Poly performs better in high temperatures.
We've designed a faceplate with multiple outputs (including 19V for projectors) and a display that shows the battery level and other key indicators.
That solar system then feeds to our preferred configuration which is 10 student computers and a server that hosts content and works as the teacher's PC. There's no Single Point of Failure since each student PC is a complete system and not a thin client - the server just keeps offline Wikipedia, TED Talks and Khan Academy Lite (70GB).
Finally we have the same card printer we are using in Nigerian clinics that can be used to register students and create ID cards. We're now developing Aleutia computers that will have integrated (or at least USB) NFC card readers so the student can tap their card and it will instantly log in with all the students files, folders, etc in front of them - no needing to remember passwords.
The same technology can be used to track teacher absenteeism - the teacher "parks" their ID card into a slot (on their computer or on the wall and connected by USB) and confirms her attendance. These are logged and then can be uploaded to the cloud over a low cost GPRS access point.
