Home & farm automation · built in Botswana
Chaba switches the things you care about: borehole pumps and irrigation valves on the farm, gates, geysers and lights at home. You assemble the hardware — or we do. The brain is an AI you simply chat with.
In plain words
Automation means the electrical things around you — pumps, gates, lights, heaters, valves — switch themselves on and off on command or on a schedule, and you control them from your phone, from anywhere. No panels to learn, no apps to babysit. You tell the system what you want; it does the remembering.
A small relay box behind the switch turns ordinary wiring into obedient wiring. The geyser heats before you wake. The gate opens for the plumber while you are at work. The lights at mother's house answer from your desk. A flat in the city, a house in the village, a holiday place far from everywhere — if it has power and signal, it can be switched from your pocket.
Borehole pumps, irrigation valves, greenhouse fans, coop doors — wired to a device that listens. Water the back field at dawn without driving there at dawn. Run the irrigator for exactly forty minutes. Know the pump went offline before the stock do. Farms run on timing, and timing is exactly what a machine is good at.
The shape of it
A small relay box at the pump, gate, or switchboard. Buy ours assembled, or build your own from a board and a relay. It runs off a socket — or a 6 W solar panel.
A little router that carries your devices' traffic to the cloud through an encrypted tunnel. Ours arrives pre-configured; yours, if you prefer, takes minutes.
The brain. It knows your devices by name, runs the schedules, keeps the history, and gets smarter without anyone visiting your property.
The app already on your phone. Type or talk in your own language; the AI answers, acts, and asks when it is unsure.
The keys to the tunnel come with your subscription — that is what turns the lock. Nobody reaches your devices except you.
Hardware
Both routes end in the same place: your things, listening. The difference is who holds the screwdriver.
For the outcome, not the hobby
Up-front hardware cost · then the subscription
For the pride of building it
Same subscription · your hardware, your skills
Whichever way you start, the hardware is yours. The intelligence is the subscription.
The brain
WhatsApp is already on the phone of nearly everyone you know — so the control room for your whole property is a chat you already know how to use. Type or send a voice note, in any language, and the AI on the other side does the rest.
Provisioning
Scan the sticker on a new device and the AI finds it, checks its signal, and names it with you. Adding your fifth device is as easy as your first.
Scheduling
“Water the back field at dawn, off by eight.” Daily, weekdays, this Saturday only, run for twenty minutes now. Clock changes are handled for you.
Support
When a device goes quiet, the AI has usually seen it before you have — and walks you through the fix step by step, with a human one message away.
A real conversation, three moments: claiming a device, setting a schedule, and sorting out a problem. Notice there is no manual anywhere in sight.
The mobile app
Prefer a screen over a chat? The Chaba app gives you your devices, their state, and the AI conversation side by side. You install it straight from the browser — no app store, no waiting — and it runs on anything with a browser at all.
One app, every platform — install it on the phone in your pocket and the laptop on your desk, and sign in to the same account.
It installs from the browser in two taps. No downloads to babysit, no storage warnings, no 200 MB of "updates".
The app updates itself quietly in the background. Next time you open it, the newest version is simply there.
And if you never install anything: WhatsApp alone runs the whole system. The app is there when you want a bigger window onto it.
Pricing
Chaba Cloud
$0/month
Flat. In US dollars. Cancel anytime.
Hardware is once-off: buy Chaba devices, or source your own parts from about $25. Self-assembled setups save on installation.
Questions
A phone with WhatsApp, a WiFi network your devices can join, and power where the devices live — a socket, or a small solar panel. A screwdriver if you build your own. That is the whole list.
No. Chaba devices arrive assembled. Bringing your own means screw terminals and jumper wires, and the handbook shows every step. No code is written by anybody.
Schedules live in the cloud and in the devices: when connection returns, everything catches up. A device that loses contact for too long switches its loads off safely — the fail-safe is on by default.
Chaba devices, or any common ESP32-class board with a relay module — the C-series is what we build with. The old ESP-01 boards you see in cheap listings are the previous generation; charming, but cramped.
Your site reaches the cloud through an encrypted VPN tunnel, and the keys are issued to you with your subscription. There is no public address for anyone to knock on — commands only travel through your own tunnel.
There is, and it runs on any operating system — Android, iOS, Windows, macOS, Linux. You install it straight from the browser with two taps, no app store involved. But it is optional: WhatsApp alone runs the whole system.
Anywhere a WhatsApp message reaches. Chaba is built in Botswana and serves the neighbouring countries first — but the service does not care where the property is, or whether it is a farm, a house, or a room at the back of the yard.
Chaba — in Setswana: the people, the community. Go chaba: the sun rises.
Order your first device, or pick up a screwdriver — either way, by this time next week the pump answers when you call.
