Shuttleworth Foundation Fellow: Luka Mustafa
We are pleased to announce today that our director Luka Mustafa - Musti has become the Shuttleworth Foundation Fellow to work full-time on open-source development of wireless optical system KORUZA. This amazing and rare opportunity will enable us to focus our efforts in the next year on bringing the KORUZA system to everyone and creating many useful open-source solutions. See the announcement.
Regardless of the location in the world, last-mile broadband infrastructure is deployed extremely slowly and is in the great majority significantly outdated. The cost of infrastructure is too high for profit-driven companies to provide it. We aim to empower people with a wireless optical system that provides gigabit fibre-like capacity where the cost of fibre deployment is too high and radio spectrum too congested for use of WiFi networking.
We believe in an open future, a collaborative world where knowledge is built upon and lives made better collaboratively. KORUZA is designed to use the maximum number of off-the-shelf components (mass-produced, low-cost) and have all custom parts produced with an open-source open-hardware tool-set. Building on the best practice of open-source software stable and nightly releases, we will first release KORUZA to a global hacker and developer community, to boost the innovation and truly create the optimal solutions. Secondly we will prepare a DIY release, empowering tinkerers around the world to be able to build their own units in local hacker-spaces. Ultimately we will prepare a micro-manufacturing release and develop all the tools one requires to produce units for their local environment.
Currently we are documenting the system for the developer release, testing the current design with a small number of World Wide Koruza experimental deployment and analysing the performance to identify any flaws. The main challenges at the moment are the lack of good open hardware documentation practices, lack of KORUZA calibration tools and stability/quality of off-the-shelf parts.
On the documentation front we are joining forces with Open Source Ecology and inviting everyone with open hardware experience to the working group to devise a good documentation standard. The calibration tools base on our recently published NIR pixel are in the final testing stages and we have gone through a range of different parts to be able to finalize the bill of materials.
With Shuttleworth Foundation support in the next year we aim to achieve in following:
- Finish preparing a developer friendly release of KORUZA in the following months
- Develop and/or contribute to a new best practice on documenting open hardware projects
- Contribute to Open Source Ecology GVSC machine development and ensure KORUZA can be produces with open-hardware machines
- Prepare a DIY friendly release, for individuals to be able to construct their own KORUZA units and build the networks
- Prepare and prototype an open-source micro-factory for producing KORUZA and other open-source systems
