MyScience.ie

 

 

So, your PC and peripherals are outdated, running slow, or just plain broken. The obvious thing to do is just chuck them out, right?

Wrong. 

If you slip down an alley just off Thomas Street, Dublin, you’ll find Camara, a new Irish business that will refurbish your computer, monitor and peripherals, and ship them to needy schools in Africa (for a small fee at both ends of the journey).

“One of the themes of Science Week is using technology to improve lives and what we do is a good example of that,” Lenora Lowe, head of development (and chief blogger) at Camara told myscience.ie.                                                  

And Camara is certainly improving lives: schools throughout the continent, from Ethiopa to South Africa, have benefitted from Camara’s program, which has delivered more than 8,100 computers in just two and a half years. With 25 refurbished PCs counting as a “classroom” that’s 324 computer labs.

But that’s just a fraction of the over 1 million working computers that Irish homes and businesses will throw out over over the next 5 years.

So, Camara takes in as many discarded second hand computers as possible, refurbishes them and sends them to Africa.

The company also sends out groups of volunteers to train African colleagues in basic computer literacy and more specialised technology areas so that they can pass this expertise on to others. 

Multimedia material in areas such as HIV/AIDS and gender equality is also bundled with the refurbished computers.

So, how does it work and what’s with the mice?

First, the computers are brought through the arch to Camara’s Thomas Street refurbishing site. Then a team of volunteers, shown below working under the Ethiopian flag, sets to work repairing and replacing broken equipment, erasing data, reformatting the hard drive and installing the open source Camarabuntu operating system that ships with each PC.

Camarabuntu is a complete operating system, based on the popular Edubuntu system. Camara’s team tweaked Edubuntu to incorporate an office suite and web browser.

 

Here are just some of the monitors that Camara volunteers have refurbished and tested, waiting to be connected to a computer, keyboard and mouse…  

 

 …and some tested PCs.  

 

When a pallet-full of computers has been assembled and packed, one of these boxes gets checked.

 

Then the lot is boxed up for shipment. This consignment of 440 computers destined for Kenya is almost ready to go, but they’ve hit a snag.

 

“We can’t send them off just yet because we don’t have enough computer mice. It’s a common problem. We just don’t get enough mice,” says Lowe.

You’ve heard the call.

For Science Week, Camara has invited pupils from two schools –CBS James’ Street and Clongowes Wood College– to come in and help out with the process.

 

Students will get the chance to dismantle some computers (shown above), says Lowe. (And who doesn’t enjoy taking computers apart?) Then they’ll identify seven key components and –”if they’re feeling brave”– put it all back together again, before enjoying a fun Wikipedia quiz.  

“We’re thinking of extending the invitation to other schools, because students, teachers and parents are a good fit for this project,” says Lowe.

Finally, if Camara’s project is not your bag, check out another organisation (and Science Week participant) that can help you put some of your computing power to good use: Irelandboinc.com.  

Irelandboinc enables you to donate some of your spare computing power (a practice known as volunteer computing) to help researchers crunch data in a range of research areas from HIV and climate change to particle physics and astronomy –and you don’t even have to leave the room to do it.