Rugged monitoring hardware for farms, homesteads, and rural property — built to work where Wi-Fi doesn't reach.
Rural America has millions of off-grid properties where the nearest neighbor is a mile away, the mailbox is at the end of the road, and the coop door is the only thing standing between your flock and a hawk. We build the hardware that watches those things for you.
Connected monitoring systems that keep watch over the things a farm can't afford to lose — and that keep working through weather, distance, and spotty connectivity.
Cellular and Wi-Fi connected. Solar where it counts. Built to be installed once and trusted.
Everything is designed, assembled, and field-tested in-house — from the circuit board to the cloud that sends you the alert.
Products in field testing now — first releases expected 2027
Know the moment your chicken door fails.
Mother Hen 2.0 is a cellular chicken-door controller that alerts you day or night when your coop door doesn't open or close on time — no Wi-Fi, no other equipment, no timers to set. It uses the coop's location to compute sunrise and sunset and adjusts for the seasons automatically.
It runs on solar with an included panel, or plugs into an outlet via USB-C. It works with one bar of cell signal. It opens, closes, and reports from any web browser on your phone or computer. If something's in the way, it backs off, tries again, then stops and texts you instead of pinching.
Coming soon Mother Hen will also watch the coop's other doors — people door, nest box lid, run gate — with up to three included wireless tags, and alert you if one is left open after lock-up or egg collection.
Three rural Tennessee farms are running Mother Hen 2.0 right now. A limited number of early units are available for real coops before launch.
Know the moment your mailbox opens.
RFD Alert is a cellular mailbox alert for rural homes — no Wi-Fi, no other equipment. The unit mounts underneath the mailbox, out of sight and out of the weather. The moment the door opens — by the carrier or anyone else — an alert hits your phone within seconds, wherever you are. If the door is left open, you get a second alert so you can close it before rain soaks the mail.
Powered by four AA lithium batteries lasting an estimated two years, user-replaceable with off-the-shelf cells. Requires one bar of cell signal at the mailbox. No wiring or setup in the house.
In rural America the mail isn't a walk to the porch. It's a trip to the end of the road, and half the time the box is empty. The other half, something that mattered — a package, a check, a prescription — sat in the afternoon heat for hours before you knew it had come.
In field testing now. Full launch in 2027. Join the free waiting list.
Smith Varmint Works is built by Tennis Smith — a homesteader who got tired of finding out about problems after the damage was done.
He designs the circuit boards, solders them, 3D-prints the enclosures, and field-tests every product himself, outdoors, for months before it ships. Nothing leaves the shop until it has survived real duty doing its job.
Behind the hardware are decades of experience building large-scale software and cloud systems — which is why the cloud side of every alert is built in-house too.
Every product starts as a real problem on a real homestead.
We built a product that worked perfectly and sold nothing — then figured out why.
Nobody Said Take My Money — a seven-part post-mortem of Mother Hen, a smart chicken-coop product that worked perfectly and sold nothing. Read the series →