As a startup looking to validate our idea, one of our goals for the Video Hotspot was to keep the design time short. We used off-the-shelf components rather than designing everything from the ground up. Onion’s prototyping boards made this a quick and easy process.

For the hardware, we used an Onion Omega2+ as the brain of the Video Hotspot. Keeping in mind the fact that many parts of Africa were prone to losing power multiple times in a day, we used Onion’s Power Dock v2 to add a lithium-ion battery, providing the battery backup needed for those situations.

For schools that want the Hotspot to live on their local intranet (instead of connecting over the Omega’s built-in WiFi), we used the  Onion’s Ethernet Expansion.

Lastly, with our development team based in Waterloo, Canada, we needed a way to connect to the device remotely, in order to to update the video content, pull analytics, and update the software on the device. To do this, we used a 3G dongle, and although this 3G connection is slow and unreliable, it doesn’t affect the user, since any video the user sees has already been downloaded to the device. When we want to push any content or software updates, we can do so overnight.