Twenty-five-year-old Gaël Hirwa recently became the CEO of HackSplash Ltd, a software company that is building and developing technological tools including an Internet of Things kit called TUNGA, designed to give people a full overview into the digital world of connected objects and people. According to Ibm.com, the Internet of Things (IoT) is the concept of connecting any device - as long as it has an on/off switch – to the Internet and to other connected devices. It is a network of connected things and people – all of which collect and share data about the way they are used and about the environment around them. Hirwa said that the purpose of creating a TUNGA IoT kit (which literally means to own) is to help people understand, analyse, apply and create IoT-based products and services. He revealed that their company which has a team of nine programmers has drawn inspiration from the National ICT Strategy and Plan of Rwanda known as NICI Plan, in the phase called SMART Rwanda. “When we learned the idea of making Kigali a SMART City, our company automatically sensed that we will need a local taskforce of IoT developers. We started working on this kit and gave it a shape of Rwanda and an ancient print design known as Imigongo,” he said. He added, “There are over a thousand solutions you can develop with this kit. The user can be able to build a face recognition bot, air pollution monitoring system and smart agriculture system. It is a kit of a thousand hills with thousand solutions.” TUNGA IoT kit is a Printed Circuit Board (motherboard) that contains components such as microcontrollers, sensors, actuators and microprocessors. Explaining how it works, Hirwa said that the user plugs it on the computer by using USB and can start following prompts on its IoT Cloud, a cutting-edge web-based IoT application where you read, save, and visualize data. The user can also access lessons and even create their own projects, he said. “If you are a farmer in a rural area and you have to sell your crops in an urban area located within a distance, it means you will not have enough time to physically follow what is happening at the farm. However, with this kit, you can monitor your farm by using sensors that send information on your phone. You can have real-time data regarding humidity of the soil and can do irrigation with a single click on your phone,” said Hirwa. He also explained how this Tunga IoT kit can be used in a SMART Home. “Lets say you have a house where you have installed the temperature sensor which is sending data on the cloud and you have programmed that when the temperature exceeds 15°c, the air conditioner should turn on to bring in some cool air and as well as turn off the lights on the chandelier. The process of turning ON or OFF should be done by an actuator and the process of sensing the temperature should be done by the sensor and the cloud that receives data,” he said. Another simple case in our daily life, he continued, is when a cooking gas leaks and you are not home, he added. “The sensor installed on the gas and connected to the IoT cloud can let you know when it leaks. Through a Webapp dashboard installed on your phone, you can monitor and turn the gas off or on accordingly,” he added. He revealed that the TUNGA IoT kit can be used by a beginner who wants to learn or a tech guru who knows how to connect dots and build something. This kit does not require any prior knowledge of the Internet of Things or how to collect data via cloud services, or various sensors. It is at the beta stage. We have a community of 20 people currently using the TUNGA IoT and IoT Cloud,” he said. However, like other tech-preneurs, they still face a challenge of insufficient capital and digital literacy which is still down in Rwanda although the government is enhancing the tech sector. Hirwa and his team are planning to deploy 10000 IoT engineers and users by 2024. They also seek to sell IoT-based products and services to different institutions and individuals. “At HackSplash Ltd, we aim at building tech tools for engineers that also help different people. We are currently a versatile team of 9 people with backgrounds in IT, business and arts,” he said. “Rwanda is leading the way with its SMART Rwanda initiative establishing an IoT ecosystem in which both commercial and public sector organizations may test new technology. This is the right time to have local engineers who have skills in developing smart solutions based on IoT.” For more information you can contact them at info@hacksplash.com.
