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Our goal is to offer quality professional trainings to underprivileged students  in emerging countries thanks to distant learning. There is quite a large number of technical solutions to this problem from cheap and simple to sophisticated and expensive. However local schools usually have an extremely tight budget and many are not even connected to the electricity grid. Our challenge was therefore to select and integrate the right hardware and software tools that would provide the highest possible quality and reliability at the lowest possible price and power consumption.  Our minimal setup equipment list is given in the power point footer. 
 

From a software viewpoint, the configuration includes the following features: 
• Audio/ video conferencing,
•  Desktop and whiteboard sharing,
• Document hand annotation
• Internet browsing
• Access to our training content database
• Open Office Software
• Email

Thanks to our studies and industry technology progress, we were able to cut system power consumption by a factor of 3 from 1800 down to 600 Watts*hours per day. In particular 2008 has been the year of  low power notebook computers and the first commercial LED projectors. The power consumption of the former is half that of regular laptops and the latter consumes one fifth the power of standard projectors. Yet brightness was enough for a classroom environment and it also includes loudspeakers. All these dramatically reduced the solar power supply system cost. Finally we were able to test and install Wiimote (50€) in lieu of commercial Interactive Whiteboards (1500€).  All these improvements resulted in cutting the overall equipment cost from around 6000€ down to 2000€. Last but not least the Software bill was brought down to zero as we selected and tested freeware exclusively.