an open SDK for IoT, robotics & drones
pamoja runs on a two-dollar microcontroller, on a solar panel, over an intermittent radio link - so connected devices can reach the farms, clinics, and disaster zones that every other stack quietly leaves out.
Smallholder farms · East Africa
A drip controller reads soil moisture from RS485 probes down a long cable, watches a well's level, and opens the valve only when it should - then duty-cycles back to sleep on a small solar panel until the next cycle. One node, a whole season, unattended.
Rural clinics · the last mile
A solar-run clinic tracks the things it cannot afford to lose - the power to the ward, the oxygen on the shelf, the cold chain for medicines - and writes each reading into a tamper-evident log. Drop the link for days and nothing is lost; when it returns, the record uploads intact.
Clean water · every drop counted
A sensor on the well watches the water level and the flow through the pump, logging every draw, so a community - and the people who fund the repair - can see a pump weakening before it fails, not weeks after the queue has already given up on it.
Conservation · eyes on the wild
Low-power nodes across a reserve relay the sound of a chainsaw or a shot, the level of a drying river, the movement at a waterhole - hop by hop to a ranger post, on batteries that last a season, where pulling a wire was never an option.
Off-grid · by design
Nodes form a mesh, each relaying for the next - flooding a message across the valley exactly once, then learning cheaper routes from the traffic they overhear, so the airtime and battery that blind flooding wastes is saved for the messages that matter.
When the grid goes dark
A typhoon makes landfall and the cell network goes with it. Along the coast, battery nodes relay hop by hop to a gateway that still holds a satellite uplink - carrying the one thing that matters in the first hours: where people are, and who needs help.
Robotics & drones
A sensor reads the world; a robot acts on it. pamoja models a wheeled rover, a robot arm, or a whole fleet as ordinary devices - drive them, work out where they are, solve their motion, keep them safe, and bridge them to ROS 2 over Zenoh, all from the same API.
One core, composed
Every capability is a separate crate behind a trait in
pamoja-core. On a microcontroller you bring in two crates
and nothing else. Everything below is grouped by what it does and
filtered to what ships today or the committed roadmap.
Reach
One memory-safe engine, idiomatic bindings on top. Connect, subscribe, publish, iterate messages - the concepts never change when you change languages.
Where it is going
pamoja already runs on real radios and real hardware today, and it is built to grow into the whole stack - robots and drones as ordinary devices, security that survives a hostile link, and every language a maker reaches for. Solid markers ship now; the rest is the committed direction.
Back the mission
The software is free and MIT-licensed forever. What costs money is the hardware - cheap, salvageable boards, radios, and a USB or SD card with the SDK preloaded - put into the hands of the people who need it. Donors fund kits; vendors and partners help build and ship them.
Hardware is one-time; the link is the one recurring cost. Sponsor a shared gateway's satellite or cellular plan - or partner as a carrier - and the last rung of the ladder stays free at the point of use.
Use it, fork it, ship it. No sign-up, no cost, no lock-in.