Koubachi

» see koubachi.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Koubachi AG was founded in Zurich in May 2009, a spin-off out of ETH Zurich built around work by Philipp Bolliger on getting indoor plants to communicate with their owners. The first product was free and soft: an iPhone app that held a library of plant species and told you, from the species and from where you lived, roughly when to water. The second product was the one people remember. In March 2012 the company shipped the Wi-Fi Plant Sensor, a white plastic stem you pushed into the soil.

It read moisture at the root and light at the leaf, then pushed the readings over Wi-Fi to Koubachi's servers, where something the company called the Plant Care Engine turned them into an instruction. Your phone told you to water the ficus. An outdoor model followed for gardens, and later a Pro aimed at people who needed the numbers rather than the advice. Apple sold the thing in its European retail stores, which for a Swiss hardware startup in 2012 was close to the top of the mountain.

Husqvarna Group announced it was buying Koubachi on 15 July 2015. The team joined the Gardena division and the technology was folded into the Gardena smart system. Koubachi stopped selling anything under its own name. Sensors already in soil kept reporting. The company promised they would keep reporting for a while yet.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ three years of sunset ~

Husqvarna did better than most acquirers here, and the farewell page says so in its own arithmetic. "After a three years sunsetting period we will discontinue our services on Wednesday, 23rd of October 2019," it read, giving the reason plainly: the company could no longer guarantee reliable and secure operation "without major investments into different components." Nobody wanted to pay to re-certify a 2012 radio stack. Three years of notice is more than almost any connected gadget gets, and the end of it was still a Wednesday with a date on it.

~ what the owners were told to do ~

The instruction underneath is the part that stays with you. "As of the 23rd of October you will no longer have access to the Koubachi system. Please make sure to find an alternative solution to regularly care for your plants. If you own a Koubachi Plant Sensor, you will have to remove its batteries and properly recycle the device." The notice closed by thanking users for nine years and hoping they could now hear their plants without help.

The sensor was not broken on 23 October 2019. The capacitance probe still worked and the batteries were fine. What stopped was the endpoint it had been trained to talk to, and because every bit of interpretation lived on the far side of that connection, a working instrument became a piece of plastic in a pot. Koubachi's own site stayed up a few weeks longer out of inertia; by 12 December 2019 koubachi.com was answering with a Swiss hoster's default page reading "Domain nicht eingerichtet".

~ the python server ~

Somebody read the protocol and wrote a replacement. The koubachi-pyserver project stands in for the original endpoint and forwards each reading to whatever MQTT or REST address you give it, so the sensors keep working for anyone willing to run a small Python service on a box at home. It exists only because the device's silence was a routing problem rather than a hardware one.

I build vision systems for drones, and this is the failure mode I think about most at work. A device that does its computing somewhere else is renting its own intelligence, and the rent is payable by a company whose plans you do not get to see. Koubachi gave three years of warning and still ended with the manufacturer telling customers to recycle equipment that functioned perfectly. The sensible lesson is not that the cloud is bad. It is that whatever the thing has to be able to do in year ten should be the part that runs on the thing.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »