GREAT NEWS! Luka was successful with his Shuttleworth Foundation Fellowship Program reapplication

18 December 2015

We are pleased to announce that Luka Mustafa - Musti was successful with his reapplication for Shuttleworth Foundation Fellowship Program.

Shuttleworth-Foundation-Fellow

We see this as a confirmation of our past efforts, but even more as unique opportunity to keep up the same pace improving open-source wireless optical system KORUZA, developing other open source open hardware solutions and making them accessible for communities around the globe.

We want to take this great news as an opportunity to reflect a bit on our current work and to think about the future. KORUZA 1.0 is now released as a developer friendly version suitable for production in hackspaces following our instructions. This enables us to amplify “Develop globally, manufacture locally” for open hardware as it happened for software. While we are exploring and continuing this path, further work is crucial to make KORUZA widely available at sufficiently low-cost to meet the primary goal of empowering people to build last-mile networks. Advancing the current version and using it as a testbed, a cost optimized and production ready version of KORUZA will be explored in the next year.

Furthermore, KORUZA 1.0 is optimized for the creation of a global experimental network of wireless optical links, which will provide us with real-time performance information for majority of the units built. It will thus help us find out the performance of our system, behavior of these links on the global scale, including human installation factor, building instability and various other random error sources. This will be the first open data set on wireless optical links. 

As well, we are going to explore longer range 100Mbps and shorter range 10Gbps versions of KORUZA, advancing the range of its application. Through open data from the envisioned KORUZA 1.0 experimental units reporting their real-time performance we will form first realistic model of the free-space optical channel and based on that adapt technology to implement optimal performance.

Best practices and technological solutions for the centralize model will form KORUZA 2.0 version, an open product optimized for mass production, openness showing primarily in user understanding of operation and servicing, while original KORUZA 1.0 remaining optimal for modifying and hacking.

In addition, we will build on our current work on GoodEnoughCNC open hardware manufacturing to optimize and join the systems into a standalone micro-factory solution, not only serving as a base for KORUZA distributed manufacturing but as well for all other products. The impact of this work will best show when currently economically underprivileged communities will be able to start using technology to create sustainable businesses.