kuhu beta Season 2 · A second word
A starstucklab notice service

kuhu

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

A soft call before things go off.

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 the things a neighbourhood needs warning about: the people who actually keep them running post a notice from their phones, and the households listening for it hear — once, softly, in time to do something about it. Electricity is the first of those things. It will not be the last.

A notice, entire

That is the whole product. Everything else exists so this can arrive before the thing does, and then stop talking. A water notice is the same card with a different word on it.

Who hears it

One call, three kinds of listener.

The crew posts

An electrician, a water operator, whoever keeps that thing working — on their phones, in English or हिंदी as each prefers. Area, window, reason: under a minute, with rain on the screen. Each crew sees only its own service, so nobody scrolls past somebody else's job.

Households listen

Pick what you want warning about — this area's power, that area's water. One quiet notification before it happens, 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

One service today. Room for the next.

  • A service is a row, not a fork. Electricity is the first. Water, or anything else, is a new row carrying its own words — "no supply", "tanker coming" — without a line of code being written or deployed.
  • Geography is shared. Naddi is Naddi whether the notice is about power or water. Each crew declares which areas it answers for; the map underneath belongs to everyone.
  • Authority nests. A site admin above service admins above crews, each seeing only their own part of it. It is one tree, so the same question — what may this person touch? — has one answer.
  • Complexity stays hidden. With one service, nobody is ever shown the word "service". A lineman gets areas, a window and a reason; that is all there is on his screen.
  • The API is boring on purpose. GET /api/services/{service}/areas/{area}/notices — cacheable JSON for anything that polls; retained MQTT on kuhu/<service>/<area>/notices 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 2 · Learning a second word.

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, and it arrives by notification, by Telegram and over MQTT at the same time. kuhu now knows how to hold more than one kind of notice — a second service has been stood up in testing and taken down again, which is the only honest way to claim it. What it still does not have is a real crew. 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.