What is BuildLab?

At its core, BuildLab is made up of a team of committed Researchers and Engineers with a passion for building impactful technologies and understanding how best they can serve our local communities and be used to better effect in the Global South. This is all done with the aim of encouraging and nurturing aspirations of Kenyan youth in hardware innovation. Our programs channel the creative effort of Kenyan youth through the collaborative development of thoughtful and appropriate hardware solutions.

An internal initiative based out of iHub Research, BuildLab is inspired and partly modeled in the spirit of the Maker movement. We have grown to reach and expose hundreds of young inquisitive minds to the underlying hardware technologies that define the world in which we live. We believe that to grow Africa’s youth into hardware innovators and leaders, Africa’s youth need to be better positioned on the world stage. To this end, we iteratively develop and run a number of enhanced learning platforms, workshops and programs that cater to the needs of young schoolers and University students to bring them to the international playing field.


Who Are You?

We're experimenters at heart who love to prototype ideas and build hardware, learning as we go along and sharing as much as we can while we do. We are especially keen on sensor devices/networked technologies. We love open development platforms and incorporate them into our outputs as much as possible, so you can access our work under friendly licences like the Creative Commons license (CC) or General Public License (GPL).

We have a motto here and it’s to build people building hardware to build knowledge. This means we are constantly looking for ways to help advance the field of hardware innovation locally, but in a manner that helps compound the generation of relevant knowledge that others could then use to do the same - this is our virtuous cycle.


What Work Have You Done?

Since the Lab's humble beginnings in November 2013, there a number of projects and initiatives that we have pushed and collaborated on. Here are a few choice works from 2014 that define a lot of what we do at BuildLab.

The Kids Hacker Camp

The Kids Hacker Camp is an open learning platform initiative under ongoing interative development at iHub Research. The camps aims to stir a culture of STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Art, Mathematics) based hands-on learning locally. With 5 camps held to date since 2013, each camp has focused on developing both soft and hard skills, through exposure to various open learning platforms like the Arduino and Scratch as well as Empathy Building and Design Thinking activities that foster the 5 C's: Curiosity, Critical Thinking, Communication, Collaboration and Creativity. 2015 brings a whole slew of progressive changes to the platform as we incorporate our research findings and insights with the equally driven work done under the Waza Experience Program. We look forward to releasing our work and research for general commercial and non-commercial use in 2015.

2015 brings a whole slew of progressive changes to the platform as we incorporate our research findings and insights with the equally driven work done by The Waza Experience Program.

The Intel Galileo Challenge

The Intel Galileo Challenge was a month-long bootcamp and competition held under the auspices of Intel East Africa. As a part of our corporate client service offering, we ran and facilitated the Challenge over the two months at Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology, The University of Nairobi (in conjunction with FabLab-Nairobi) and Kenyatta University. The Challenge consisted of a 7-8 hour introductory boot camp to Intel’s Galileo Development Board held at each of the aforementioned Universities. Competing groups then had a period of 4 weeks over which to develop thematic projects that solved for problems in the following sectors: Agricuture, Security, Water, Waste, Food..

Panyabot

Panyabot represents our first collaboratively developed hardware solution. Designed and built to be low cost, PanyaBot is an educational robot platform made with reused materials. The chassis of the bot is made from old disused USB PC mice and the motors are reused from DVD players. Our intent is to make robotics and hardware-enhanced educational platforms more accessible to a greater audience, thereby lowering the typically high barriers to entry, such as prohibitive market pricing; A factor that is especially prevalent in lower income/resource constrained areas.

Panyabot in development

We are currently undertaking various concurrent development activities around design research, hardware/software development as well as funds to support these activities.

The project has received honourable mentions and a first place community award from The Africa Robotics Network’s 2014 Design Challenge. 2015 brings a breathe of fresh air back into this ambitious project as we hunch down to further the project.


Do You Provide Free Consult?

While we do have open door policy and culture at iHub and love to have a chat with interesting people, we unfortunately can't design or drive external consult work pro bono. If you do have an interesting project or suggestion though, please feel free to come down to one of our Buildathon workshops or reach out to us over email and we can go from there.

Sign up over at our meetups page for up-to-date event notifications and updates from the team.


Why Do You Host Your Website on Github?

We were looking for a simple and clean way to connect and share but at the same time wanted to learn something new. While Medium, Wordpress, Tumblr e.t.c are arguably simple and clean, we didn't feel like you could get down and dirty with the plumbing as it were while still maintaining a certain level of ease of deployment. Our answer came in the form of Github pages and we haven't looked back. What's more we can share our journey, from the code and documentation to the end result, openly and freely over Github, as a resource to like minded people. Win win!!


How Can I Join BuildLab?

We're always on the lookout for great talent and minds. To do this, we know to attract the best we have to offer the best. That's why over the course of the past year, we have painstakingly worked to formulate and develop various induction avenues into BuildLab to accomodate for diverse skillsets and needs of potential team members like yourself. Please read through the engaging programs we have on offer to find one that best suits you.