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.
Built in Botswana, runs anywhere, Chaba. It works.
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.
Your AI Agent
Jax is the AI Agent on the other side of the chat — he claims your devices, runs the schedules you ask for, and notices when a pump goes quiet before you have. Say hello now: the conversation is the product, and it costs nothing to start it.
Chat with Jax on WhatsAppNot on WhatsApp?
Chaba speaks MCP — the same open standard your favourite assistant already speaks. Connect it once and it can quote plans, sign you up, and run the farm, right beside everything else it does for you.
Connect your AI agent →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 press alerts the family you choose — anywhere in the world, with your location attached. Every Chaba customer gets a free Thuso household; Thuso delivers it as fast as the network allows and is not an emergency service. (The farm's own device SOS — LoRa, switches, gates — stays right here.)
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.
LoRa
LoRa is a long-range, low-power radio — the complement to your WiFi, not a rival. WiFi stops at the yard wall, cable will never reach the far camp, and a satellite terminal at every gate costs more than the gate. LoRa carries small messages kilometres past all of that: to the kraal, the lands, the borehole at the river. Chaba builds its messaging on it. Every property gets a Post — a solar-powered radio box that holds an inbox for everyone on the farm. You chat with your workers by text from the app; they answer from the Post or a Message Point out in the lands. Your messages wait in your own inbox and follow you — read them on the farm or a province away, on the phone in your pocket. And if the farmer next door runs Chaba too, you chat straight across, farm to farm, the moment you've both said hello.
WiFi covers the yard; LoRa covers the property. Several kilometres per hop, and the Posts relay for each other — so reach is a chain, not a limit, and no satellite bill per point.
A LoRa node sips milliamps. A small solar panel and one battery run a Post or a Message Point through the seasons — no trench, no mains, no cable to steal.
LoRa uses licence-exempt radio bands — put up an antenna and talk. No radio licence, no spectrum fees, no airtime for your messages.
Tlhano — five words, one place
Tlhano is an open, self-hosted global addressing scheme: every ~5 m² cell of the planet gets five common English words — and a check word that catches a mis-heard address with certainty. Chaba builds it in, so the places on your farm stop being nicknames and become addresses anyone can be told.
On the farm: a Chaba alarm carries your farmhouse's five words — verified live the moment you set them. On your phone: every Thuso press carries the press point's five words the same way. Whoever answers can be told the place over a bad line, in words, no map pins to share.
Stand next to the pump, tap "Use my location": the app shows the five words before anything is saved, and that device carries them for life. "Borehole 2" stops being a nickname — it becomes a place.
No licence, no per-lookup fees, no third party in the middle. Machines resolve addresses at api.tlhano.com; people look them up at tlhano.com. Tlhano is Setswana for five.
Look any address up — or play with one — at tlhano.com.
The farmer behind the handbook
A Kalahari farmer and a qualified electrical technician who took on a farm the district had written off, and spent sixteen years making it run itself. The handbook we sell is his.
Jaco crossed into Botswana in 2010 with an electrical trade qualification and six years of mine and construction electrics behind him. The freehold farm he bought in the Ghanzi district had no power line within sixty kilometres, two collapsed boreholes, and a reputation for being unfixable. He fixed it in the order the mines taught him — water first, then power, then everything else — and he never bought a farm system that did not run on the sun.
By his own account he was most of the way there already. What he would not do was drive ninety kilometres to re-crimp one cable. Chaba is the last part he did not want to build himself: remote access, schedules, and firmware updates that land on the pump without anyone visiting the farm.
Jaco is Chaba's brand character. He is a fictional persona our team writes and produces — not a real farmer, not a customer, and the reviews in his videos are not testimony. The footage and voice are AI-generated, and Chaba sponsors the channel. We say so here because a fabricated testimonial is worth nothing to anyone who is trying to decide.
Pricing
Every tier runs on the same AI, the same app, the same encrypted connection. What the plans change is how much of your property it can run — and how many real switches it will schedule for you.
Free
$0/month
For trying Chaba on one corner of the yard.
Every signup gets a demo relay with no hardware behind it — set a schedule on it and watch it fire. Upgrade when you want that on the real pump.
Community
$5/month
Your farm, talking to the network.
The bolt-on that turns a farm chat into the network — where nothing else reaches.
Pro
$20/month
Flat. In US dollars. Cancel anytime.
The plan most homes and small farms ever need.
Unlimited
$50/month
For big farms, crews and whole estates.
Every family member, every pump and gate, one chat.
Whichever plan you pick, the hardware is yours: buy Chaba devices, or source your own parts from about $25. The intelligence is the subscription.
Sign up
No account forms, no passwords to invent. Tell us your name and your WhatsApp number — that number is your account. We'll chat to finish setting up, and an installer sorts the hardware side.
Your number is used to set up your account and message you about it. Nothing else, no spam. Not ready to sign up? Contact us with a question first.
Contact us
Hardware, coverage, the app, an order, a partnership — or something the FAQ above didn't answer. Leave your name, your WhatsApp number and the reason, and a person gets back to you on WhatsApp.
Prefer to go straight to the source? Chat with Jax on WhatsApp.
Questions
No — and both apps say so. Thuso, every Chaba customer's free family-safety household, alerts the people you chose as fast as the network allows, with your phone's location attached when you grant it and the press point's Tlhano address — five words, one place, lookable-up at tlhano.com — so a responder can be told, not sent. No monitoring centre, no delivery-time promise. The farm's own device SOS stays in Chaba, unchanged.
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.
Built in Botswana, runs anywhere, Chaba. It works.
