kuhu beta Season 1 · First call
A starstucklab notice service

kuhu

Beta — running in the hills above Dharamshala, and not yet tested by a monsoon.

A soft call before the power turns.

The koel is heard, never seen. It calls twice from somewhere in the leaves, and everyone below quietly adjusts their afternoon. kuhu does the same for power cuts: the people who actually operate the local grid post a notice from their phones, and the households that listen for it hear — once, softly, in time to do something about it.

A notice, entire

That is the whole product. Everything else exists so this can arrive before the cut does, and then stop talking.

Who hears it

One call, three kinds of listener.

The team posts

An electrician and their crew, on their phones, in English or हिंदी as each prefers. Region, window, reason — under a minute, with rain on the screen. No dashboard to learn. Nothing on the interface that doesn't need to be there.

Households listen

Pick your region. Get one quiet notification before a cut, and nothing else, ever. The notification budget is sacred — kuhu would rather be missed than muted.

Gadgets ask

A plain JSON API for devices that poll, an MQTT branch for devices that prefer to be told. Inverters, home automations, and kuhu's own siblings — jigawatt and lokki already speak MQTT.

The shape of it

Small now, correct later.

  • Regions come first. A notice is published to a region — a ward, a feeder, a village — not to the world. A subscription is just a set of regions.
  • Teams can nest. One crew and one region to begin with, but the schema already knows about district offices above area teams above linemen. Growing won't mean migrating.
  • Delivery is web push, through an installable web app — free, quiet, no app store between a lineman and the publish button. A Telegram mirror comes nearly free; WhatsApp can come later, where the reach is.
  • The API is boring on purpose. GET /api/regions/{id}/next-cuts — cacheable JSON for anything that polls; retained MQTT on kuhu/<region>/cuts for anything that listens.
The manner

It says what it knows, once, in your language, and goes quiet. It does not chirp about updates, request ratings, or wish you a festive season. Between notices there is only the pleasant sound of nothing — which, if kuhu has done its job, still has the fans running.

Status

Season 1 · First call.

It works. You can open it ↗, pick an area, and be told when the power intends to leave; a crew with an invite link posts the notice that tells you. What it does not have yet is a real crew, or the MQTT branch the gadgets will listen on. So far one notice has been posted, by its author, to a ward that does not exist. It went through. The whole thing is public, in the repository ↗.

Family

Part of starstucklab.

A small ecosystem of personal engineering instruments, each built to solve one specific problem and then, ideally, stop demanding attention.

Where science met poetry, had a brief fling with engineering, and now raises mildly disillusioned but talented offspring.