Somebody's got to keepan eye on all that timber.
A TimberWatcher is a small sensor unit that sits wherever your timber does, in a container, a warehouse, or a finished floor. It watches the conditions around the timber, and tells you when they have been bad for long enough to do damage.
Timber spends weeks in a sealed box before anyone sees it, and a container crossing the equator is a very effective humidity chamber. A unit travelling with the shipment records what actually happened in there, so a claim is a log file rather than an argument.
Most damage we have seen happens between delivery and installation, in a shed nobody is measuring, or on a site that got wet before it got closed in. Units here watch the stack and notify you when conditions have been out of range long enough to matter.
Once the floor is down it is the expensive thing in the room. A unit left in place keeps watching, so cupping, gapping and movement get flagged as a developing problem rather than discovered as a finished one.
In pilot with importers, floor installers, and a few households who volunteered their living rooms.
- Electronics, firmware and software built in-house
- Melbourne-based
- Registered Pty Ltd
Join the TimberWatcher pilot.
We are placing units with timber importers, floor installers, and households with timber floors. You get hardware to put where your timber lives and the readings it takes. We get real data on how timber behaves over time, and honest feedback on a product that is still being finished.
Tell us where your timber sits and we will work out whether a unit makes sense.
Need electronics designed?
Separate from the pilot. If you have a sensing or hardware problem of your own, book a call and we will tell you whether we are the right people for it.
The Team
Charles Aquilina
Software Engineer
Charles is a software engineer, specialising in all things data. Before tech, he worked in the Australian timber industry for a decade as a timber floor installer, floorsander and salesperson. He now runs Backbone Engineering, where he and the team build business critical software for scaling Australian importer/distributors. He previously worked at Sydney-based startup Chirp, where he architected AI-native applications to reliably serve tens of thousands of users internationally. At TimberWatch he leads the Software side of development: what the units record, how, what it means, and when it's worth waking someone up.
Victor is a very serious electrical engineer, specialising in electronics. His early career was at Umps, where he designed safety-critical hardware for personal alarm and health monitoring devices, along with the software tools behind them. At TimberWatch he handles serious matters, like the TimberWatcher sensor package, PCB design, and embedded firmware. He does not waste time with unserious matters, like writing his own bio.