Sites like this need a tl;ds (too long; didn't scroll) general info right up front. Also...why no price and availability?
General Description:
The BRCK is a rugged, cloud managed, full-featured router with built in failover and programmable GPIO expansion. BRCK can connect to the internet through RJ47, GSM, Wifi Bridge, as well as Ethernet Over USB via the GPIO Breakout. It’s rugged build and cloud managed interface make it ideal for “away teams”, monitoring systems in remote locations, and businesses with challenging infrastructure. BRCK’s GPIO breakout provides 20 pins for digital and alaouge Read/Write as well as I2C, SPI and UART. This, combined with BRCK’s Arduino Profile, make it ideal for quickly connecting hardware to the Internet of Things.
Yeah, we totally missed the mark on this. We live BRCK day in, day out, and sometimes forget that we haven't explained the detail to people well. This comment has prompted us to rewrite our copy and clean up the site a bit. Watch this space over the next few days. Thanks.(Source: I'm the CTO of BRCK)
Just as a counterpoint, I think the naysayers are completely wrong (other than the price and availability comments). The first sentence told me a ton about the device, and I began getting a good sense of what it did on each "page" / scroll section.
> BRCK’s GPIO breakout provides 20 pins for digital and alaouge Read/Write as well as I2C, SPI and UART. This, combined with BRCK’s Arduino Profile, make it ideal for quickly connecting hardware to the Internet of Things.
See, now this is a description that makes me want to own one.
Yes because the regular users/clients know exactly what I2C, SPI and UART is and they will jump on it right away.
This isn't really a "for the geeks only" product from what i read so the description will need to be for the geeks and not only, open your market to regular clients and businesses.
More specifically, its the 'connector' piece of the cable, not really the ethernet. It stands for Registered Jack-47 and is more or less a standardization for 'connectors' or jacks.
To be fair, the site was designed to accompany a kickstarter campaign I believe, which ran a few months ago and would have had all of that info up front.
The original (successful) campaign is here on kickstarter:
Seriously, this hipster "design" insanity has to stop. It's hurting your business.
A pretty picture of your product is not design, it's a dream of a first year art school student who doesn't understand business, who doesn't understand how to send the message and how to describe the product.
Your opinion. I think it looks fine. I quite like the 'long scroll' format that's become popular recently. All my devices (MacBook, Android phone etc.) make scrolling simpler than finding and clicking a link. And I feel like I got the main proposition of the product pretty quickly, without having to click around various 'features' and 'specs' pages.
I quite dislike any format that does not provide me immediately with a 2 or 3 sentence general description of what the thing is about, of the sort like you would find at the beginning of a Wikipedia article or in the parent comment (but with a bit less detail).
Taking BRCK as an example, I see "It's the easiest, most reliable way to connect to the Internet." and some picture suggesting that this is a hardware device. Insufficient. If I page down it gets even more confusing.
I have to agree. Excuse my language, but I didn't know wtf it is precisely on the main page. I have to dig into the Specs page for the description of the device. Wasted my time with frustrated layout. Failed design fails.
I agree, but I think it's more this specific implementation than the concept itself. I've seen plenty of "long-scroll" (not sure what to call it) style sites that have been absolutely amazing at dumping information into my head.
I think this site works as a marketing tool. It has strong branding, and it automatically makes me feel more interested in the product even though I don't have any personal use for it.
I don't think it works as a news brief. I had to read the whole page to figure out what the thing does. Of course, it looks like they're selling it as a black box that makes the Internet happen, so maybe the technical details aren't such a big deal.
If I could have figured out anything beyond its buzzword compliance, that would have been super. I could tell it was some sort of router with some dependability, beyond that it all looked like vaporware.
I disagree. They've got an attractive presentation. Perhaps the new layouts are a little gimicky these days; no doubt they'll eventually be pared down to something that is minimal but has the same spirit. Nonetheless, I think what these guys have put together is quite attractive and communicates exactly what they want to communicate about themselves and their product.
I actually liked the picture, it illustrates one segment of the target audience very well. A bit like the camera GoPro showing a picture of a surfer in a wave.
The website misses more specific details about how it works, when it will be available and how much it will cost. I can't wait for this thing to hit the market!
In general devices that actually produce pictures can get away with showing pretty pictures foremost and convey a "it's so fun" overall athmosphere before focusing on the device itself. For a rugged router, this approach is less forgiving IMO.
Scrolled all the way to the bottom (didn't hover over anything) and all I know is it connects to the internet and mentioned being used in Africa twice.
So many product web sites are lacking a simple "how it works" section (I'd say 75%).
Not to mention that Africa is kind of a big place, you know? With plenty of locations inside it that aren't untracked, howling wilderness.
I understand what they're trying to get at, but it annoys me to see them say "used in Africa" as if that were functionally equivalent to "used on the Moon." And I'm American! I have to think it'd sound even more tin-eared to someone from an African country.
Exactly! When it said "works in Africa", my first thought was woah, so how does it work without cell coverage - satellite?, APRS?, etc. etc. Only to realize that it is probably just a rugged 3G-Wifi bridge.
Seriously, I even looked through specs and still not sure what it does!
As someone who has done integration with Iridium and Inmarsat for the NSF, I both love and hate this product. It looks like a ruggedized wifi hotspot, but their claim of "works anywhere" is disingenuous.
Very straightforward. Iridium phones have a module you can use that exposes an RS232 interface; integration with either a microcontroller or a full blown computer is trivial.
Strong headline to capture attention, solid paragraph explaining the details and what problem they're solving, and BOOM a "Get Started Now" button to guide me.
There's no problem with scrolling. That's a usability fallacy from the 90s.
The problem is not communicating what your users care about. Thats such a big part of UX, looking at it from a new customers perspective, instead of your own.
I don't like scrolling to get to the main point. Doesn't journalism follow the inverse pyramid paradigm where each sentence is less important than the last? If so, one would expect PR releases to follow a similar idea.
Yes, succinct and concrete headlines are important. "Not burying the lead". But my criticism is a lack of specific "How it works" copy on most product websites.
You should also make sure the site is readable on a desktop computer. Everything was in the wrong place for me. Everything it seemed like I should be reading was yellow-on-yellow or completely invisible.
Yep - was curious about how it connected to the internet and had to drill down through the dots (which at first I didn't realize were clickable) to find out. Would be good to point that out at the very top!
You learn a little more if you actually hover over the icons in the "Features" section (which is very poorly disoverable, I scrolled past it and then back again and on a hunch tried hovering on the icons). You actually find out what it is on the "Specs" page. http://www.brck.com/specifications/
The BRCK is a rugged, cloud managed, full-featured router
with built in failover and programmable GPIO expansion.
BRCK can connect to the internet through RJ47, GSM, Wifi
Bridge, as well as Ethernet Over USB via the GPIO
Breakout. It’s rugged build and cloud managed interface
make it ideal for “away teams”, monitoring systems in
remote locations, and businesses with challenging
infrastructure. BRCK’s GPIO breakout provides 20 pins for
digital and alaouge Read/Write as well as I2C, SPI and
UART. This, combined with BRCK’s Arduino Profile, make it
ideal for quickly connecting hardware to the Internet of
Things.
RJ47 is also a connector I'm not familiar with. According to this site http://www.accesscomms.com.au/reference/RJreference.htm it's for "Programmed data equipment connected to a key system where the registered terminal equipment is not compatible with electrical characteristics of tip and ring behind line circuit." which really doesn't clarify anything. Given that it's an 8 position jack, however, I think that they meant the same thing as "RJ45" or "Ethernet"; but they don't seem to be good at communicating this.
I don't think we have enough comments complaining about its web design. We probably need a few hundred more!
I get that moaning about its design lets you feel smart by participating in the discussion without actually contributing anything meaningful, but at least just upvote a single person for it instead of posting the same damn comment over and over again.
----
I like that it seems as open and adaptable as they could possibly make it while also keeping it simple. It would be interesting to see just how rugged it is. I'd also like to see how this could be used in an environment that requires a little less "ruggedness", like a coffee shop or a community board room.
|I don't think we have enough comments complaining about its web design
I think the issue here, and we definitely saw this a ton with that Sailfish OS or whatever phone recently (probably fitting that I can't remember what it's called) is with some of these product launches, there is an extremely vague title submitted to HN that gets voted up to the top. There is something alluring about seeing that the community has voted this new thing, whatever it is, as the most important item of the moment. And when we get to the website, we are disappointed and/or annoyed when we can't figure out what exactly this thing is or why it was voted to the top of HN. So we talk about our experience on the website itself, as if it had been presented as a design critique.
It was pretty easy to figure out exactly what this was. It just wasn't handed to you like the majority of HN wants. All of the information was there, though. It just required you to gasp click something.
The problem with all of those "design critiques" (if they could even be called that) is they derail any discussion about the product itself. As of this comment, three of the top four comments are complaining about the design or structure of the website, with the fourth being mine. You have to scroll halfway down the page to get to anyone talking about the actual product. That's shameful.
Honestly, I would complain about the web design, because until I came here and read the comments, I couldn't figure out what a BRCK actually was, or did.
Yeah, while we probably don't need a multitude of threads, the complaining is warranted. I spent 20s there until deciding to check the comments so someone can tell me what it is.
Are you ruling out constructive feedback? The difference between subtle, obscure, and obtuse design is not always evident to the designers (or creative teams directing them). Think of what horrors people used to do in the (low-bandwidth) Flash era.
I am completely in love with the fact that this thing provides a GPIO breakout (and Arduino compatible, no less!). That immediately takes this product from a "neat, but I don't think I have a use for it" to a "holy crap, what can I do with this?" for me.
So, so awesome. I hope more hardware companies start doing this.
Would this allow a satellite internet add-on if you find yourself going somewhere seriously remote? If so, does such a satellite internet peripheral already exist?
It would allow for this. We're talking with two different satellite providers about what this would need to do. The biggest problem seems to be that the satellite connections are pretty good standalone systems, but they don't do a good job of making a WiFi station, what would be helpful is a self-powered router to connect to - and this is where the BRCK sits.
We recently ran a test of the BRCK up in the far northern reaches of Kenya, where the closest mobile phone tower was 160km away. The only option for internet was satellite, so we hooked up a BGAN terminal and ran that ethernet line into the BRCK to broadcast the signal as WiFi. (more here: http://www.brck.com/2013/11/brck-eclipse-day-7-home-again/)
Nope. I'm an "early-bird" backer of this. The last update on shipping says they've pushed to January.
Apparently, there were complications sourcing the 3G modems they intended to use.
From the update:
"Unfortunately, we live in a world where small, African, tech companies don't have the influence to get global component suppliers to meet our delivery deadlines. In particular, we have been unable to secure a timely supply of the 3G modems that are specified for the BRCK. Although it would seem straightforward to simply switch to another modem, the implications of this change effect mechanical design, board layout, and certification - all things that require time to adjust. We are now working with multiple suppliers to find a suitable alternative that we can source in sufficient supply to meet our production demands."
This is correct (and thanks for being a backer). We had some issues with the modem supplier and had to redesign the comms board to work with the new modem. This was after going around in circles with the original supplier and losing valuable time. It sucks being small when dealing with some of these large organizations, but we did eventually find a great modem and have been testing it out this month.
I am sorry we had to delay the production, we all so badly wanted to get it out on time...
>"I am sorry we had to delay the production, we all so badly wanted to get it out on time..."
No worries. I backed the project as a great idea that happens to provide a reward, not the other way around and I have no reason to doubt your ability to deliver.
As a hardware manufacturer ourselves we feel your pain.
We made the mistake of using anodized aluminium for the front panel of our units. Then it turned out that the current batch of Aluminium our suppliers were using was trash and couldn't be anodized. That took weeks and weeks to design a workaround for and get quotes and stock in. In the end we had to pay for junk aluminium that we threw in the bin.
Then we had an aerial manufacturer who kept shipping us different aerials every time we ordered the same part, which never matched the sample.
Next we discover that the manufacturer who provides our plastic cases had taken a plastic with a certain safety rating but didn't take into account that the dye that they also added changed that rating and prevented us from using the cases. We were in a shed filled with noxious smoke trying to burn cases (which shouldn't burn) over several batches to get that sorted.
And finally we have a RF system that some customers try to use in a faraday cage and of course it's pretty hard to get working. For example installations in industrial coldstores.
Your site design choice seems to be taking a lot of heat. How do you personally feel about it? Do you think the cool factor of a "parallax" website outweighs any drawbacks that have been mentioned here?
Hey, BRCK dudes. They invented this thing called the "paragraph" some thousand years ago.[1] It lets you organize several or more sentences into coherent blocks of text expressing complex thoughts. Paragraphs allow you to get across multiple simpler points, expressed as individual sentences, in a succinct way that allows your reader to avoid excessive and unnecessary scrolling.
Also, for something that apparently involves Africa,[2] the loading speed of that page over my iPad's LTE is shameful.
[1] The paragraph was already in use in English by the time of Beowulf, between the 8th and 11th century.
Another shitty parallax product site. It detracts from the message when your presentation has yellow on yellow text depending on where your scroll bar is.
Perhaps this is nit-picky, but this isn't at all parallax. It's fixed elements mixed with non-fixed elements. For it to be simulated "parallax", it must have elements that move at different speeds that mimic the effect that real-life parallax would have.
The BRCK is a beautiful device which deserves much more attention and debate than the website.
The overdosing of criticism on the website might have been somewhat justified if the BRCK was a web product. Yes, a simpler single screen presentation would have been much better. We do not need more than 4 comments saying it.
I am really excited about the BRCK's (badass name)fail over technology and wonder and hope it could be deployed to POS and other devices like tablet and phones. Reliability of POSs are really hindering cashless systems here in Nigeria.
Erik, have you spoken to the TECNO chaps or Huawei about licensing this technology? A minibrck* will not be a bad idea for urban areas that prioritize reliability over backup power.
Good stuff guys, I am excited that a pure technical play is coming out from these parts.
*Not sure you saw what I did there. we'll have the BRCK and the brck.
Your phone doesn't have the same ways to interface with the world, (probably) isn't happy with water/dust, cannot charge other devices and won't last for 8 hours straight (or more, acc. to the specs page, if you're using anything but the 'full power' mode). This looks a cross between an arduino, a d-link sortof appliance with multi-band support for mobile data, a decently sized flash storage device and a huge battery - in a rugged hull.
Your phone isn't even close. If you just want to hop online for a short while: No advantage over using your phone, I guess.
Put your phone in a Ziploc bag and it's water resistant. Add a cheap external 10.000 mAh battery and you'll have lots of battery life. You won't need a large battery, though: the BRCK only lasts for 8 hours, while an LTE iPad can last about 24 hours in hotspot mode.
Sure: and why do I need a fancy iPod when I have this perfectly good casette tape player? Your iPod can hold 10,000 songs? I can put hundreds of cassettes in my backpack. You can recharge your batteries and get 30 hours of battery life? I can carry around a box of double AAs and I never have to recharge them.
WRT water/dust talk to some hikers. I have a nice water proof crush proof case for my phone; it cost quite a sum of money. Where's the case? My phone is ringing should I bother digging it out and removing the case? Its starting to rain, do I risk using the phone or packing it up? Looks like the BRCK could just be tossed in my pack with about as much care as I give a pair of socks.
I will say one funny observation after reading HN for years; I sometimes think I'm the only person here who's ever gone camping or stepped off the asphalt. No other hacker stereotype comes as close to universal as this. All that "never kissed a girl" "don't like sports" has some ring of truth however minimal, but none of it is as almost universally true as "never slept on the ground in a forest". I may very well be the only person here to ever have walked on a hiking trail.
I think, in the US at least, part of the problem would have been Verizon/Sprint. Now with everyone going to LTE and using SIM cards for that it seems more viable (fewer network restrictions).
Why is that a problem? Apple ships millions of 3G/LTE devices a quarter, they can certainly figure it out in the laptop form factor. Worst case and it doesn't support every network--still way better than not supporting any network.
The bigger issue is probably not having OS X architected to play nice when you're paying by the byte.
They shipped different models to handle different carriers and only recently are they shipping unified models for multiple carriers. As I said in another reply, that's bad UX for a device that's not quite at commodity level prices. You could always get a dongle or pair it up (still options), which prevents the computer from becoming obsoleted by changing network affiliations or protocols.
> which prevents the computer from becoming obsoleted by changing network affiliations or protocols.
Which would never be the case... Right now no Macs come with any mobile data and I somehow still manage to find them useful. If my MacBook had come with 3G it wouldn't be obsolete now that LTE is the rage, the worst thing that could happen is I would tether with another device like I do now.
I also have a Chromebook and I have to say it's nice not to even think about it--you're just online.
LTE penetration is still a huge issue. Then there's the question of band support (different carriers use different LTE bands - not all mobile data devices support all bands).
There're two reasons why LTE isn't a panacea to cell standards bifurcation and modern cell phones still require fall-back data radios that support EVDO, HSPA, etc.
They can now. Before we had (and on iPhone still have?) different models to handle different carriers. That's not a good UX for customers, especially as computers are still not at the commodity level that phones and tablets are (refresh purchases are 3+ years apart).
Why would you want to use a SIM card slot in a laptop? What if you want to use other devices? You'll have to power on your laptop in order to use them.
I've always thought iPads with 3G/LTE were a bit redundant. Why not just tether to your phone? It takes a few seconds (which is a bit of a hassle) but you avoid paying an entirely separate monthly fee.
It's not an entirely separate fee. On my plan it's $10 extra a month. Which is well worth it to not have to go through either the hassle of tethering a phone, or worry about killing two batteries at once.
I would consider the extra $10/month far too much for the benefit of using my existing data on a different device (I pay $15/month for my entire phone service). A once-off fee for the SIM card is something I could handle, though.
According to the site, so are the developers. They built it in response to a problem they actually had... in Africa. I think you're taking this the wrong way.
I think this is kind of like an air conditioning company saying, "If it can cool you off in the tropics, it can cool you off anywhere!"
The facts are simple: there are significant parts of Africa that are very sparsely connected to what is commonly available in many (or most) other countries of the world.
I get how this can be somewhat offensive, but I also think the point comes across and isn't directed at the African people.
If it works in Africa, then, objectively, it works in sparsely populated and sparsely connected areas.
My point isn't invalid. Communication is messy, and this is an example of that.
"I was in the middle of the ocean!"
Did you think I was in water? You're wrong. I was on an island that is in the middle of an ocean.
"I stayed in a hotel in New York."
Did you think I rented a hotel room? No, I simply stood in the lobby.
You can't say that because someone says something without constraining it with every detail, that the communicated point is incomplete. Communication is a loose protocol.
Never been to Africa, but this sentence tripped me up too. From what I hear/read some parts of Africa are way ahead in mobile connectivity compared to the US. As in: You can actually put SIM cards into phone (hello Sprint/Verizon), mobile payments are widespread in some countries (Kenya?), and there are sensible ways to purchase connectivity (in less than 2-year increments).
I'm African - Tanzanian - and that wasn't offensive. Our Mobile Networks in cities etc might be great (at times) but I think what they were trying to imply was that it works in truly remote locations like rural areas etc. Nevertheless I'm not convinced of its potential.
The levels on Kickstarter were $150 for the first 50 backers and $200+ "v2". A comment above says they've pushed early-bird shipping to January. Given that knowledge you're probably looking at a minimum 1 year wait for $200-250 retail.
I'd love to know the exact details too but it's unlikely even they will know until at least after the first round of production.
A bit of interesting trivia - I knew I recognized the COO Philip Walton who has his picture near the bottom of the page. He's been on TV and in the news because his wife is a survivor of the Westgate mall massacre. Small world...
The design is intended, as most marketing pages are, to capture attention and interest. Scrolling storytelling is a very effective way to do that.
HN readers, in general, are very critical of emotional-impact-based decisions. The truth is, many people respond to things that are 90% aesthetic and 10% functional. Note: Jabberwocky[0]. If you want to dive in deep, you are a part of the crowd that doesn't make impulsive decisions based on marketing. Congratulations - click on the specs link to see an easily readable, fairly cold page.
If you want to make an impact on the majority of people, consider that most people are less concerned with technical details or even descriptive language, and more concerned with how they feel.
Not necessarily a revolutionary device, in that sim-hotspot devices are not rare...
But - with shared onboard storage, that's cool... what would be interesting is having a device with, say, 4 radios and sim slots - and people could add in their sim to allow the device to aggregate data use from multiple sims in a torrented manner.
Would be nice to be able to perceive the form factor right away. It looked like a credit card sized device to me at first, and only after I scrolled all the way down to the picture of the device in use in Africa did I find out that the thing is quite big (which is what you'd expect from the features the thing has, but it's strange why the site starts out with a top down view of the thing that makes it seem like it's 1/10 the size it really is)
It's interesting that you thought it was so small at first. I've been talking to a number of people about the size over the last few months, and the most common reaction is, "I thought it was bigger". For some reason our early photography left the impression that this was the size of a shoe box or car battery. In reality, it's about the size of 3 stacked iPhones.
We've got some pictures with it next to computers and on top, or near, other "stuff". That was the idea we were going for in that top header image on the site anyway.
Wow. They did never load their site in Firefox. There is at least one JS Error and some features of the site simply do not work. Neither in Africa nor in Europe.
So this my cheap Huawei 3G/4G router plus an RJ45 jack glued together with a mobile battery?
The Huawei is already glued together so it's as rugged as you'll get, and it has a microSD slot for disk storage. "Cloud" - every consumer router I've seen has a WAN configure option...
if i am not wrong it takes SIM network. What if the network is not available ? Moreover, why someone will take extra device with them if they can use mobile "wifi-hotspot" feature to connect.
The device is a bit of a hybrid, its closed source for some of the main firmware, but all the GPIO and sensor connectivity is open source (and open hardware). We are working to open more and more of it up!
It's actually very wide spread, especially in major towns and cities. Network maps are hard to come by, especially up-to-date ones, but you can get a decent idea on a lot of the countries from the GSMA data site here:
I'm one of the BRCK team and I use the Karma when in the US traveling around. I initially bought it for testing and think it's a really well done device. What you should know about it is that it's only really good in US cities, as it uses WiMax backhaul. It's got decent battery as well. Their social mechanism for getting others to signup and get you free Mb really works (pro tip: Keep it on in the airport).
The BRCK was designed for a different use case. It's designed to allow more connections and to have failovers for poor power and internet connectivity. It also allows you to extend it with both hardware and software of your own making.
If you are part of the Ushahidi team, I'd like to thank you and the rest of your team. It was an important part of my life for a short period of time during a difficult disaster recovery event. A product like the BRCK, with the power of Ushahidi, can genuinely make lives better during disaster deployment. I could have used quite a few of those devices myself.
If you buy in batch, it ends up costing $10/GB. I'm connected via a karma device right now; as soon as Comcast asked me for my social security number to sign up in my apartment, I said f that and bought the karma. If I have to download large files, I generally download them to an amazon instance and sync locally when I have an unmetered connection.
What about it? BRCK is marketed as an extremely rugged device with a strong battery that can charge other devices and onboard storage. How does yourkarma compare other than they're both wifi hotspots?
General Description: The BRCK is a rugged, cloud managed, full-featured router with built in failover and programmable GPIO expansion. BRCK can connect to the internet through RJ47, GSM, Wifi Bridge, as well as Ethernet Over USB via the GPIO Breakout. It’s rugged build and cloud managed interface make it ideal for “away teams”, monitoring systems in remote locations, and businesses with challenging infrastructure. BRCK’s GPIO breakout provides 20 pins for digital and alaouge Read/Write as well as I2C, SPI and UART. This, combined with BRCK’s Arduino Profile, make it ideal for quickly connecting hardware to the Internet of Things.