Hands-on electronics work at the HCS bench
Travis Labs · Research & development

Things we have designed. And the ones we are designing next.

Every product below started on the same bench in Nyumbayanga: a board that ships to America, a kit in 57 schools, a card a utility runs on, and a phone that does not exist yet.

Lamia 1 concept render
Concept · target 2028Consumer electronics

Lamia 1

The first mobile phone designed in Zambia — mainboard, power and battery subsystem and industrial design off the Travis Labs bench. The flagship of everything below.

The Lamia programme
Abby child-safety wearable, front view
In prototypingChild-safety wearable

Abby

A wearable for school children — tap to board the bus, an SOS button, a beacon the bus never loses. Built as the hardware layer of Route43 in O'Sense.

Route43 in O'Sense
WaterHandler board silkscreened Designed in Zambia, Assembled in USA
Shipping · exported to the USASmart water shut-off

WaterHandler

Motorised valve, Smart Control Box and app. The control board is designed and built in Lusaka — silkscreened "Designed in Zambia, Assembled in USA" — and ships to Texas every month.

WaterHandler
WaterHandler kit
In developmentWaterHandler add-on

Water leak sensors

Battery-powered sensors — up to 36 per system — that sit behind the fridge, the toilets, the water heater and the washing machine. 1/16 inch of water on the contacts and the box shuts the main and notifies the owner's phone.

How the system works
Zabble STEM training board
Shipped · in 57 schoolsEducation electronics

Zabble STEM kit

Zambia's first designed-and-manufactured STEM board. Its fuse-protected, ESD-aware power fabric is published in Springer Nature's Discover Electronics. Ships with the 272-page Embedded IoT Systems textbook.

Training with Zabble
3D render of the HCS contactor coil economizer board for Lusaka Water
Deployed Feb 2026 · zero failuresReplacement board · paper submitted

LWSC contactor coil economizer

The discontinued OEM pump-station card, reverse-engineered, redesigned with current parts and built here — "Made in Zambia by HERO" on the silkscreen. Running at Lusaka Water since February 2026. The fixed-DC versus PWM economizer comparison behind it is submitted to MDPI Electronics.

The LWSC story
RiverSense unit installed at a river
BuiltEnvironmental monitoring

RiverSense

The WaterHandler platform fitted with calibrated probes for public river water-quality monitoring — electronics, probe calibration and software by HCS. The research behind it became a Zambia ICT Journal paper and a book.

The research
Battery management system prototype on its schematic
OngoingPower electronics

Battery management systems

Cell monitoring, balancing and protection for lithium packs from portable devices to modular storage; CAN, RS-485 and IoT telemetry.

Design capabilities
Software R&D

The code side of the bench.

Published on npm · v2.0.1

SecureDX

Graduated security gates for DevSecOps pipelines: SAST, secrets detection, IaC scanning, SBOM and a data-residency scanner that maps where an application sends data — built for Zambia's Data Protection Act 2021. BLOCK / WARN / PASS on CVSS thresholds instead of binary fail. Made in Zambia.

npm · Yarn

Live · osense.io

O'Sense

Operations platform for Zambian businesses — payroll, CRM, books, stock, workshop and Route43 — read and sent by AI on WhatsApp. Android app on Google Play.

O'Sense · osense.io

In development

TravisOS

The operating system for our own devices — Lamia 1 and Abby. Lightweight, offline-first and low-power for microcontroller-class hardware, with WhatsApp/USSD-native services, local languages and over-the-air updates as design goals. Built on open-source foundations (PaxOS 9, AGPL-3.0) and being adapted for HCS hardware.

Lamia 1 · Abby

How R&D is funded

Client revenue first. Then partners who want to go faster.

Repair and design work for telecom, utilities and industry pays for the bench. Where capital accelerates something already working — Lamia 1, in-house PCB fabrication, Zabble production — we talk to aligned investors and development partners.

Invest in our Travis Labs R&D
Batch of HCS boards under test
Zabble board on an oscilloscope
Abby wristband render

Have a product to design?

Send us the problem — we will tell you what a Zambian-built solution looks like.

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