Review of Electronics (3 Months)

 Post By Kevin

Acer Aspire One

This computer has been the greatest thing we have brought to Africa in my opinion.  As far as capabilities, this computer is great for watching movies and writing blog posts.  By American standards, the processing power is not great, but by African standards, it serves just fine.  We are able to get on Skype in the internet cafes (kind of) and it’s great to have the integrated camera.  The battery has been phenomenal.  We have been able to get around 6 hours of video watching out of one full charge.  I’m slightly concerned about the humidity here.  I have noticed that most of my other rechargeable batteries have been not working so well, and I think that’s to blame.  But after two months, I have noticed no problems. 

Kindle

Having a way to read 1600 books without having a massive book shelf is so wonderful.  The Peace Corps group before us has been generous enough to put all of the books on a flash drive and share them with us.  This has given me quick access to all the books I wanted to read but was never able to.  There has been one hiccup that we have not been able to figure out yet.  The E-Ink seems to have been bleeding and making it quite difficult to read (and getting worse).  I have heard that humidity could be to blame, but it could also be something that has pushed on the screen.  We have not figured it out yet though.  Lara called Amazon about the e-ink and they sent her a replacement Kindle, since it was still under warranty.  We are awaiting the replacement soon, at which point we’ll get back to chipping away at the giant pile of books waiting for us.  In the meantime, if you are wanting to send us an expensive present (pending that we receive packages safely), I would love to have more than one Kindle here.  For anyone looking to bring a Kindle on a trip to Sub-Saharan Africa or anywhere with high humidity, we recommend keeping it in a Ziplock bag (with silica gel packets if possible) or if you’re really fancy, a Pelican case that can be bought at R.E.I. whenever you’re not reading it. That’s our plan, and we’ll update in a few months on how it’s going.

Hybridlight (Solar Flashlight)

This solar flashlight is a great idea, but I am unsure of its practicality.  First things first, it claims to be waterproof, however when I tried to open the battery case, the plastic that protects the solar panel pulled away from the case and seems to have opened the “waterproof” part of the case.  Now when I place it in the sun you can see the condensation build up on the clear plastic.  Secondly, I’m not sure how long the battery is supposed to last on 8 hours of full sun, but it does not seem to last very long (possible humidity problem since it’s obviously not waterproof).  Lastly, the backup batteries that come with the flashlight are the very expensive, very hard to come by, flat batteries.  This is not very feasible for Africa where they only get their batteries from China.

TechLite Lumen Master (Flashlight)

This is a freaking awesome flashlight.  It is the brightest thing that we have brought here and it runs on AAA batteries.  Unfortunately I have not had a chance to replace the batteries because they have been eaten up by all of the other flashlights we’ve been using.  Sometimes, I don’t want the amazing amount of bright light that it exhumes and there’s no way to tone it down unfortunately.  But all in all, it is a great thing to have in a place that does not have street lights.

Voyager Pro by Kaito (AM/FM//Weatherband/Shortwave Radio)

This radio has so many really cool options that I want to talk about.  It has a solar charger, a crank charger, charges using USB input, charges by using AC input, and lastly charges the internal batteries by using the AAA batteries (all of which can in turn charge an iPod or mp3 player [theoretically- I haven’t tried]).  On the backside of the solar panel (which flips up) there is a string of five LED lights that are perfect for eating dinner or grading papers.  There is also a flashlight that makes it easy to look for something directly.  As far as functions on the radio, there are two alarms that can be set and an auto off function that can be set for anywhere up to 1.5 hours after the alarm goes off.  There are also 100 different presets you can program if you would like, but since there is also a number pad on the front of the radio, you could just punch in the radio station you desire.  This radio transmits AM, FM, Weather Band, and Shortwave.  If there were weather band stations in Sierra Leone, I could use the “Alert” function which would make the radio turn on any time there is a weather emergency broadcasting on the weather band.  There is also really good reception where we are in the Bo area, and the radio has a thermometer and barometer on it. 

It seems like for every good thing about this radio though, there is a bad thing.  For one, the first time I used the hand-crank feature, it popped off and all four screws were stripped. I wanted to try and fix this by taking the radio apart and trying to screw them in again with some super glue, but I could not get it apart without feeling like I was breaking it further.  I bought a larger antenna for the radio and after taking the antenna out, I realized that they had soldered the wire for the antenna to it and I had pulled the wire off from where it was soldered on (still works though).  Lastly, with all my solar charging devices, they take way longer to charge than what they claim in the instructions (this could be due to the humidity, which I have yet to see below 70% in the two months I have been here. They don’t call it rainy season for nothing!).

Tecsun FM/Shortwave/MW/LW DSP Receiver [radio]

This was the radio that my father-in-law said was the nice one, and he was definitely right. It doesn’t have the fancy gadgets the other one has, but as far as picking up radio stations it’s pretty killer.  This is a tech geek’s radio, where you actually have to pull out the operations manual to figure out what the hell you are doing, but as far as operations go, it wins outright over the other SW radio.  First thing, it has an antenna that is about 4 feet long.  This would be awesome in the states because we’d probably be able to pick up stations from 50 miles away in the flat lands of Ohio where they have much more powerful transmitters.  Here in Sierra Leone that antenna doesn’t pick up a whole lot (we have 1 FM station in town. That’s all. It broadcasts 7AM-11AM and 7PM-11PM daily. Outside of those hours, silence.)  The radio also came with a 15-foot-long flexible antenna that I spent some time last week feeding up the wall and connecting to our tin roof- now we get several stations, including the BBC, which is very exciting.  The first 3 weeks we were at site we didn’t really have news to speak of. Now we can tune into the BBC and fill up on US and International news. It’s been great to have this radio and we appreciate it quite a lot.

Soladec (USB Solar Charger)

This solar charger is super awesome.  It took some trouble shooting to figure out the problem, but I figured out that the humidity in fact is killing all my batteries.  I found this out by charging it with my computer USB and then keeping it in a ziplock bag.  I have taken it out to charge my speakers from 0% to 100% and it was still showing a green charge light.  I had read that this battery was able to charge an iPod 2.5 times and still be able to use the flashlight on the back.  The flashlight is composed of five LEDs that have ballooned plastic over each of them.  This makes it possible to completely illuminate a room with no problems.  Only downside to this is using the solar panel to charge, I have never been able to get it to fully charge (blame the humidity).

SunPak Solar Charger (On loan)

I will have to update this one later, but it was $7 to purchase it and it seemed to be worth every freakin penny.  I will talk to the PCT we lent it to and see what she thinks of this.

GoalZero Solar Charger (On loan)

Gifted to us from Lara’s brother and the claims of charging an iPod in 1 hour is pretty close (due to the massive size of the panels).  Only complaint, there is no battery pack that it charges, which means you can only use it when the sun is out (a battery is available as an extra feature that I’ve seen fellow PCTs had) and if you don’t have full sun it will in fact draw power from your iPod, so this needs to be monitored closely.  All in all though, it’s a really cool product.

GoalZero Speakers

So grateful that Lara’s brother Eric loves music like he does because I would not have thought to get good quality sounding speakers prior to coming here.  This has made watching movies awesome and listening to music at night incredibly nice.  At one point they even used these speakers to show a movie to a room of 60+ people about malaria and it worked great.  The speakers use a wooden box to resonate the bass and they make any movie watching experience much greater.  They have an internal battery that can be charged by a micro USB input.  I have successfully been able to watch a movie and listen to two hours worth of music on one charge.  One thing that could make this better is if they would have made the battery bigger in the speakers and made an output such that I would have been able to charge my devices.  It is because of this that I leant out the Goal Zero Solar charger as opposed to any other ones that had internal batteries.

Power Film Solar (AA/AAA Solar Charger)

This has been a very useful tool in keeping the many (Read: boku) flashlights charged.  I use this charger to charge AAA and AA batteries and it so far has worked out perfectly.  People have envied my charger because it folds up so small.  It uses six flexible panels to charge 2 or 4 batteries.  It claims to charge them in 3.5 hours for 2 batteries and 6.5 hours for 4 batteries, but once again, the time has taken much longer than they claim.  Again, I will reassess this in the dry season when it actually falls below 90% humidity.  All in all though, this is a great product and I am very happy to have it here in country.

Chinese Adapter/Power Strip (Bought in country)

I bought this power strip at a small wooden stand that was selling all sorts of electronics.  They had this power strip that was made in China and has five three-prong outlets on top and 10 two-prong outlets on the sides.  It also came with a voltage meter on the top and 5 on/off switches for each set of plugs.  After one use, something arched when I had plugged it in and it fried the voltage meter (common problem with 220 volts it turns out).  When I went to purchase this product, the seller gave me the price of Le 38 000 ($8.77).  Because this is a haggle economy, I said Le 15 000 ($3.46).  We bantered back and forth for a bit and eventually ended at Le 25 000 ($5.77).  So far this has been my most exciting and most functional purchase in Sierra Leone because you are able to use any plug on all the outlets on the surge protector.  Also, it’s a freaking surge protector!  There is a real problem with the surges coming from the completely rigged generators that they run here.  This power strip seems to have gone missing somewhere along our trip to site, so we bought a new, smaller one last time we went to Bo.  The smaller one cost Le 10,000 and has 3 outlets. 

Things I wish I had brought:

•  More AAA rechargeable batteries.  (Brought 15, turns out I use somewhere around 21 or 24).
•  More than one Kindle.   Only having one between two people makes things difficult.
• USB Battery charger (just got one sent to my in-laws back in the states, so that’ll be on its way soon!)
• Silica gel packs and Ziplock bags to put all of our electronics and batteries in—the rainy season kills battery life and we think it also may have destroyed our Kindle screen.