Open Hardware and Tackling the Challenges of Reliable Electricity to the Poorest Nations Glenn McKnight Alfredo Herrera

mcknight.glenn@gmail.com alfredo.herrera@ieee.org HTC Reliable Connectivity liaison Chair IEEE Canada HIC IEEE Canada HIC

Abstract An opportunity to solve some of the pressing needs of impoverished nations may be effectively addressed by the active sharing of Open Hardware (OHW) solutions. Open Source Software (OSS) is already being used as cost effective technology in developing countries [1,2], and the adoption of OHW, as an alternative to Commercial Off-TheShelf (COTS) products, may be as effective a solution to the global development challenges. In this paper, we will not discuss socio-economic aspects inherent to global initiatives; but we ask readers to keep in mind the need for meaningful dialogue to come up with appropriate and long lasting solutions. The focus of this article is on one of the recent activities of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic engineers (IEEE): the Humanitarian Technology Challenge (HTC) which identified humanitarian problems that could be solved through technology and challenged participants to find an open-source approach to tackle them. The challenges were: Reliable Electricity, Data Connectivity and Personal ID Records; this paper will emphasize the work part of the Reliable Electricity challenge from three perspectives: that of the initial HTC Reliable Electricity team; its offspring, called Community Solutions Initiatives (CSI); and a group in Canada called the Humanitarian Initiatives Committee (HIC). All of these groups are part of the IEEE. Context of IEEE Humanitarian Initiatives According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), in 2002 about 4.5 billion people had access to electricity [3] The United Nations (UN) reports that the lack of modern fuels and electricity in most developing countries entrenches poverty, constrains the delivery of social services, limits opportunities for women, and erodes environmental sustainability. Currently, they estimate that 1.6 billion people lack access to electricity and 2.4 billion people lack access to modern fuels for cooking and heating [4]. These populations are forced to use lighting and heating with potentially deadly health risks, negative impacts to the environment, and cost anywhere from 5-100 times more than electricity. The poor are spending a disproportionate share of their income on energy when compared to the developed world. This is making the climb out of poverty even harder.

The most used alternative for lighting a home is kerosene lamps. The kerosene needed to light a home costs most families 10%-40% of their income. These lamps emit hazardous fumes which fill the lungs of the residence particularly the children as the sit close to the lamps to read. Inhaling kerosene fumes is the equivalent of smoking two packs of cigarettes a day. Some estimates report that worldwide (in 2002), burns and smoke inhalation are responsible for over 322,000 deaths annually [5]; these numbers are probably grossly underestimated, but they provide a sense of the scope of a problem worth eradicating. Electricity is a safer and less expensive technology than kerosene; and affordable and reliable electricity for basic lighting and low energy appliances can certainly improve the living standards for families in developing countries. Medical clinics in rural communities are in desperate need of lighting and refrigeration for blood storage. For example, maternal mortality worldwide accounts for more than half a million deaths a year; 99 percent of these occur in underdeveloped countries. The availability of reliable electricity for these clinics will greatly reduce these staggering statistics. IEEE Humanitarian Technology Challenge In 2008 the IEEE Humanitarian Technology Challenge (HTC) [6] was formulated as a joint effort funded by the IEEE Foundation, the Vodafone Foundation and the UN Foundation. It was designed to be a collaboration between technologists (led by IEEE) and humanitarians (led by UN Foundation) with the objective to identify humanitarian problems that could be solved through technology; it challenged participants to find an open-source approach to tackle them. Using on-line collaboration (crowd sourcing) and workshops, it relied on the altruistic and voluntary participation of technologists, humanitarians, nonprofit organizations, students and government employees. An HTC conference was held in June 2009 that brought together 153 attendees with approximately equal mix of humanitarian and technology representatives. At this conference, three selected challenges were documented and ratified by working groups that were tasked to find solutions for them. The three challenges were: Reliable Electricity, including: low power stationary facilities; rugged, mobile power supplies for emergency settings; mechanical transducers; passive generation devices (e.g., charge as you walk); renewable energy hubs. Data Connectivity of Rural District Health Offices, including: two way transmission; daily data batch transfer; emergency/outbreak alerts; more affordable and/or higher bandwidth service; mapping of existing global connectivity; creation of data relay network with intermediate field offices.

Individual ID and Tied to Health Records, including: secure, confidential ID for patients; emergency response and chronic care applications; routine care for migrant populations.

An HTC workshop was held in October 2009 focused on defining plans for field tests of solution ideas. It brought together about 70 people, with representation from 15 countries. At this workshop basic plans were established for four field tests: Integrated power-on-demand electricity supply & management system 2.4 GHz and 5.8 GHz WiFi data communications links for rural outposts Patients identification using facial characteristics in a clinical setting Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) linked to medical records The HTC workshop in the fall of 2009 focused on defining plans for field tests of solution ideas, with two panels with five NGO representatives addressing the realities of field test implementations and field test funding and partnerships. Out of this workshop, two strategies polarized discussions: one side wanted to focus on defining a system to address the needs expressed by the panels; the other side wanted to focus on jointly creating community-based solutions with organizations in the field. In modern development theory [12], the former view would rely on socio-economic institutions to support the adoption and diffusion of the new technology (technology transfer); while the later would rely on grassroots community development based on human needs. The HTC Reliable Electricity team adopted the technology transfer approach, while the CSI team emerged as a group by adopting the human needs approach. Out of the four planned field trials, only two will continue to completion: integrated power on-demand system (HTC Reliable Electricity), and WiFi data communications link (HTC Data Connectivity [9]). Restructuring of humanitarian project policy within the IEEE caused the emergence of two new groups: the HIC and the CSI. Three of these groups have almost exclusively focused on activities relating to the HTC Reliable Electricity challenge and these are the groups we will describe in this article. At this point we must point out that all four groups vouched to create solutions following the OSS collaborative model; but in practice the onus has been relegated to the HIC to define and promote the details of what OSS and OHW means in the context of the IEEE humanitarian initiatives. IEEE Humanitarian Technology Challenge Reliable Electricity team This small team created through the HTC initiative still remains focused on a 250 Watt power generation and load management system, this is a solution to provide a scalable renewable energy hub for the Reliable Electricity challenge. A generous contributor of ideas for this team was Laura Stachel, co-founder of WE CARE Solar [10], her experience in providing solar-based electricity to clinics around the world was

determinant in finalizing the specifications of the 250 Watt system. Lead by Percy (Butch) Shadwells and Dr. Pritpal Singh of Villaninova University, the HTC Reliable Electricity team has two lab facilities working on a proof-of-concept system (Jacksonville, FL, and Villanova University, PA). The objectives for this project were to firstly produce a working system that was configured to gather data on user behavior and field stresses, and secondly to test a first cut of the design of a power system that could be totally self-managing and operable by people that were totally unfamiliar with electrical technology and were perhaps even illiterate. These two issues were the main drivers for a test site selection. IEEE Power & Energy Society Community Solutions Initiative team The Community Solutions Initiative (CSI) is a new committee of the IEEE Power & Energy Society. It is an informal but dedicated collaboration with a core group of professional engineers plus a spectrum of multidisciplinary professionals from medical, industrial, educational, legal, business, marketing and research fields. Membership is not restricted to IEEE members or to the engineering professions. The major goal of the HTC program was to have a major impact on the eradication of poverty as articulated under the UN Millennium Development Goals [13] which call for a two-stage program heavily funded by a percentage of GDP donations from highly developed country member nations. The original concept of HTC was to invent a range of useful advances in technologies and rely solely on Non-Government Organizations (NGOs) or new forprofit ventures to develop deployment by means to be determined. The CSI group was formed specifically to attack the key transition problems of (a) how to initially deploy such technologies; and (b) how to partner with NGOs to create local business models empowering local entrepreneurs to maximize growth of local economies. NGOs are key to the solution because of their established community relationships, but not all NGOs have the needed entrepreneurial business skills to make good entrepreneurial partnerships on the ground. CSIs core principles are: 1. Dedication to developing indigenous entrepreneur opportunity and reinvestment in the local community: business development, not charity. 2. All technology specifications, designs, business and operations plans are nonexclusive open-source. 3. All CSI partners work pro-bono as a contribution to their professional organizations 4. All individual and business partners of CSI, non-profit and for-profit, are dedicated to a success metric that sees their efforts helping millions of people emerging from extreme poverty. The main project of CSI is the design of a 1kW mobile charging station; but its members are also actively working on an open source wind turbine design, as well as an opensource pedal powered electricity generation project.

IEEE Canada Humanitarian Initiatives Committee The HICs mission is to support those participating in humanitarian initiatives or building relationships that will enable members to fulfill IEEEs strategic vision of being universally recognized for the contributions of technology and of technical professionals in improving global conditions. The HIC promotes IEEEs core value of advancing technology for the benefit of humanity by raising awareness of how IEEE Canada can best use its strengths and relevant technologies to address societal problems. In practice this means that the HIC will support the work of IEEE members involved in: relief assistance during natural disasters like ice storms and floods; socio-economic development abroad like improving affordable electricity access in developing countries; or awareness initiatives in our communities like student design competitions with humanitarian applications. Since their inception, the authors of this article have been active members in both the HTC Reliable Electricity and the CSI teams described above: active on weekly calls and meetings, providing ideas and leads, leveraging the HIC network. The HIC recently launched its first student design competition. The competition consists on improving, extending or innovating WE CARE Solar's system [10]. For this project, WE CARE and the HIC are collaborating in defining a version of WE CAREs system that the HIC can make available as OHW to participants in the competition; students will thus be able to contribute back their ideas as OHW. This work is a reference model being presented by the HIC to the other IEEE groups mentioned in this article to enable their work. Open Source and Open Hardware In [1], Negash and al. explored the differences in the adoption behaviour of OSS between Economically Developing Countries (EDC) and Industrialized Countries (IC). Their case studies lead them to identify four factors to consider in EDCs: reward/compensation, local competency, piracy, and intellectual property laws. If we adapt their conclusion to OHW, we expect to find similar behaviour for OHW: unless there is an economic incentive for individuals and organizations in EDCs to adopt OHW, adoption will be slow; and piracy practice in EDCs may have the viral effect intended by the Open-Source model, but it will probably work against the creation of a sustainable ecosystem. Among the many Open Hardware licences the Creative Commons Share Alike [16, 21] licence is an interesting choice. It allows users to to share (copy, distribute and transmit) the work and to remix (adapt) the work under the following conditions: attribution of the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor; share alike, distribute adapted or modified work only under the same or similar license to this one. This shall be done with the understanding that: any of the above conditions can be waived if you get permission

from the copyright holder; if the work or any of its elements is in the public domain under applicable law, that status is in no way affected by the license; and that in no way are any of the following rights affected by the license: fair dealing, fair use rights or other applicable copyright exceptions and limitations; the author's moral rights; the rights other persons may have. But when we consider the differences between the hardware and software development processes as presented in [14], we can see why the OHW developer should carefully consider exactly what he seeks to protect: the source documentation that embodies the design (from which it can be manufacture); and/or the products that are in fact manufactured from that source. especially since: The copyright act makes clear that copyright in a design cannot normally control the physical realization of that design, because as noted above copyright does not extend to the implementation of ideas expressed in a copyrighted work.[14] The TAPR Open Hardware License (OHL) [15] was created by the Tucson Amateur Packet Radio (TAPR) to address this particularity of Hardware designs. This license only covers hardware design and implementation of the design idea, not the software or firmware that may run on it. According to the official website, like the GNU General Public License, the OHL is designed to guarantee freedom to share and to create. It forbids anyone who receives rights under the OHL to deny any other licensee those same rights to copy, modify, and distribute documentation, and to make, use and distribute products based on that documentation. The copyleft provisions of the OHL, like GPL, makes it a less likely choice for products that may combine non-copyleft components. IEEE Open Hardware Projects HTC Reliable Electricity, Lead by Percy (Butch) Shadwells and Dr. Pritpal Singh. 250W Integrated power-on-demand electricity supply & management system for a community center, medical clinic or individual dwelling. This stand-alone hybrid power system uses a 24VDC bus to minimize wire size and cost. It provide power for fans, lighting, water pumping, refrigeration, radio, and cell phone charging. All inputs and outputs have current monitoring, programmatic disconnect, and auto-resetting circuit protection. The built in data logger can collect user and environmental information for months in non-volatile memory. There is also a trial load shedding algorithm meant to optimize battery usage. The initial design is over-instrumented to provide field study feedback, later versions will be simpler. PES-CSI, 1KW Mobile charging station, Lead by Dr. Ray Larsen, Dr. Robin Podmore, Paul Lacourciere and Philippe Barjon.

The Sirona Cares Foundation (Sirona) and the CSI are jointly developing and deploying sustainable businesses in Haiti to provide renewable electricity to 1 million Haitian people. This program is centered on giving Haitians the ability to earn a living by providing electricity to their community. CSI has brought together highly trained engineers to design a generating system that is easy to deploy, operate and maintain. Together, CSI and Sirona have developed sustainable business models around this generating system. Sirona is now working with its partners in Haiti to deploy these models and integrate sustainable businesses into communities. The businesses will use a combination of renewable electricity generators (principally, solar) to provide a battery charging service. HIC, Open Hardware student design competition [20]. Lead by Alfredo Herrera. Participants will be asked to study the WE CARE solar suitcase system, available under OWH licensing, to propose ideas that will improve, extend or innovate. Starting points for potential projects include: the simplification of the installation; the creation of a collection of direct current (12VDC) medical devices; enabling the use of Li-Ion batteries; enabling the use of electric handheld tool batteries; optimizing the charge controller; improving the systems serviceability and cost; improving the systems enclosure; innovating the connectors and cabling; enabling recycling and sustainability aspects. The student design ideas will be released as OHW. PES-CSI, WindTurbine Task Force, Lead Dr.Henry Louie CSI is teaming with professors and students at Seattle University, University of Washington, and the Seattle chapter of Engineers Without Borders to build a smallscale wind turbine. The deployment of the wind turbine into rural Africa is projected for the summer of 2011. The wind-turbine is being designed out of materials which could be assembled in country with minimal instruction and training. The output of electricity would be stored in "Community Charging Stations" where members of local and surrounding villages could come to refill their home batteries. PES-CSI, Pedal Power, Lead Robin Podmore CSI is teaming with IncSys to build an affordable and easy to operate pedal powered generator. The project is called Power2Light and will allow any community member to assemble and run a micro-generation business out of their home. With 10 hours of pedaling, energy can be created to light over 100 homes. Conclusion By presenting the recent humanitarian projects of the IEEE, we demonstrated that OHW concepts and projects are applicable in tackling the challenges faced the most vulnerable. We did not explore the existing growing OHW market [22], which has

tremendous potential to benefit humanitarian and commercial endeavours; but we look forward to engage in that conversation at a later date. The IEEE aims to make a tangible impact by advancing technology for humanity, and we recommend the readers to get involved initiatives like the HIC: it is a rewarding experience! Part Three: Links and Resources [1] Negash, Solomon; Carter, Michelle S.; Chen, Charlie C.; and Wilcox, Marlene V., "Open Source Software for Economically Developing Countries: A Free IT Solution for Success" (2007). SAIS 2007 Proceedings. Paper 33. http://aisel.aisnet.org/sais2007/33 [2] David Becker, Se habla open source?, February 16, 2004. CNET News. http://news.cnet.com/Se-habla-open-source/2100-7344_3-5159179.html [3] http://www.iea.org//textbase/nppdf/free/2000/weo2002.pdf [4] http://esa.un.org/un-energy/ [5] WHO Global Burden of Disease database; 2002. http://www.who.int/violence_injury_prevention/publications/other_injury/en/burns_factsh eet.pdf [6] IEEE Humanitarian Technology Challenge http://www.ieeehtc.org/ [7] IEEE Humanitarian Technology Network http://www.ieeehtn.org/ [8] IEEE Canada Humanitarian Initiatives Committee http://www.ieee.ca/hic/ [9] HTC Data Connectivity project site. http://ieeehtcdata.ning.com/?xgi=06iRdJdmoBWW42 [10] WeCare Solar. Contact Hal Aronson, Laura Stachel http://www.wecaresolar.org http://www.facebook.com/pages/WE-CARE-Solar/109441703751 [11] Community Solutions Initiative http://www.communitysolutionsinitiative.org/

[12] Thomas, Alan, 2000, Meanings and Views of Development, chapter 2, pp. 23-48 in Tim Allen and Alan Thomas (eds), Poverty and Development into the 21st Century, Oxford, New York, Open University in association with Oxford University Press. [13] N Millennium Development Goals http://www.un.org/millenniumgoals/ [14] John R. Ackermann, Toward Open Source Hardware, U. of Dayton. Law Review, volume 34 winter 2009, number 2 [15] TAPR, Organization http://www.tapr.org/organization.html [16] Creative Commons http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/ [17] Heidi J. C. Ellis, Ralph A. Morelli, Trishan R. de Lanerolle, Jonathan Damon, Jonathan Raye, Can Humanitarian Open-Source Software Development Draw New Students to CS?. SIGCSE07, March 710, 2007, Covington, Kentucky, USA. [18] Free Charge Controller. http://www.freechargecontroller.com [19] Yahoo Discussion group Open Source Controller Discussion http://groups.yahoo.com/group/charge-controller/ [20] HIC student design competition http://ewh.ieee.org/mu/r7-hic/initiatives/student-design-competition-2010-2011 [21] Open Hardware Blog http://csiopensource.wordpress.com [22] Businesses designing and selling open source hardware, making millions http://www.adafruit.com/pt/fooeastignite2010.pdf