So today, the 3rd of august, we continued with the second day of training. To start with we had another game to get to know everyone just a bit better, and get a ‘feel’ for each other. The game was the (to us in the west usual) storytelling where everyone adds 1 sentence and a story is slowly build. Seeing that game carried out here, in Nepal, as well as the sometimes strange twists the story took really was a good start of the day.
After that we continued with a recap of the material covered yesterday, primarily on power and power usage.
Overnight and this morning we’d discussed the matter and decided we still needed to ask some ‘questions’. Obviously a lot of matter wasn’t covered the first day (it’s a subject that’s far too extensive to cover in 1 day), but some things would lead to mistakes of such a kind that we felt they needed to be asked.
The primary of these was concerning what would happen if different batteries (different voltages and different amp hours) would be connected at the same time (in series and parallel). Furthermore we had one concerning voltage transformations from batteries to show that the system was just a tad more complex.
Mark and Anders handled the questions quite smoothly and, from the talk during the break and a few follow up questions asked, they were useful additions (especially the one on voltage differences as it’s a great security matter).
After the recap of power the training went on to the installation of solar panels and how one takes care of this. The information itself was interesting, although not new it was good to hear this from people who’ve done it several times in the field (And I can say I’m looking forward to the field training). A few small jokes hidden in the presentation (location location, location! Thank you Achmed) were also well placed to keep us alert.
The mathematics of the panels and how much you need were, not surprisingly, not too difficult for us. The tools they used to assist with calculations (excel) however were.
Not so much the formulas that do the calculations within the sheet but the reason for choosing certain display values or ways of rounding (which we discussed during the break) were quite enlightening. Looking at it it seemed obvious to us that the best way to display for example ‘back up time’ was per hours (instead of inverted % of days, where 200% was half a day, 100% was a day, 50% was 2 days etc). After discussing it however we came to the (I think shared) conclusion was that the best way is to discuss it in number of days one can operate normally. Hours being rebounded because it often caused confusion (they’d tried it), was it after all hours of a normal running day or time the equipment could run on batteries (were 8 hours would be enough for 4 days if you only wanted to use it 2 hours per day).
There were a few more points like this like locking parts of the sheet. The real matter here seems to have been in the reasoning behind telling things this way.
After another pleasant lunch (there was some Indian bread added, and perhaps the food was a bit more spicy), we tried to get the internet working. The line of sight to the post office with the external connector was problematic. After climbing around on the upper floors of the building, hanging the receiver out on the balcony, or even outside of the roof we still hadn’t managed to get a good connection. A thing we won’t be managing today but that will hopefully be set up tomorrow (Mark and Andres will be looking at the set-up at the post office).
After the break, fiddling around with the connector and recapping with a quick power calculation we went on to networking. The theory of the networks itself was again not shocking. The ideas of how the layers of a network go (from the hardware layer all the way up to the higher software layers), how the binary packets work and differences between bridging and routing have been stamped into us for long enough.
The challenges really did arise here though when we had to start thinking about what would be best for the actual situation we’ll be setting up.
With the great amount of ‘relay’ towers (due to the mountains) the small networks of 2 or 3 devices and the great amount of locations what would be best. A bridged network, a routed network, or a combination of both? And what difficulties are we still facing in the terrain? The military base, for example, really won’t be the best place to have an important node, but it is one of the central mountain relay points.
At present the best solution, we’ve thought of quickly, seems to be a bridged network with a clear definition of IP’s and which IP’s need to be assigned to the relay points and can be used in a village.
Although sleeping on it for another night is probably best, as well as looking more carefully at the situation in the villages and decide how quickly the amount of computers there might rise.
And now, as the training is running to an end, we still have the questions to think about. Furthermore we’ll be going to the post office to get things online and look at the NRIDS website quickly.
And that’s about it for today.
Jos
Pictures to follow when we have time to GIMP edit it.
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