The vision of sensor systems that collect critical and previously ungathered information about the world is often only realized when sensors, students, and subjects move outside the academic laboratory. However, deployments at even the smallest scales introduce complexities and risks that can be difficult for a research team to anticipate.

Over the past year, our interdisciplinary team of engineers and economists has been designing, deploying, and operating a large sensor network in Accra, Ghana that measures power outages and quality at households and firms. 

We report our experiences as we move from performing small pilot deployments to our current scale, attempting to identify the pain points at each stage of the deployment. Finally, we extract high-level observations and lessons learned from our deployment activities. These insights will be critical as we look toward scaling our deployment to the entire city of Accra and beyond, and we hope that they will encourage and support other researchers looking to measure highly granular information about our world's critical systems.