Story

What actually happened

I pre-ordered a unu Scooter Pro in 2019. The delivery was a saga (18 months delayed, with a warehouse fire that destroyed the entire first batch in the middle), but the thing eventually arrived. What didn't work: the motor controller, regularly. "Electrical issue – please stop driving" mid-ride, four shop visits, a replacement scooter, a new controller, the problem stayed. In July 2021 I returned the scooter and got a refund. The whole saga is documented in a five-part series on moeffju.net.

Long before that, and in parallel, I had been deep into my Horwin EK1: anti-theft system, GPS tracking, dashcam, new relays, running lights, prodding around the ECU. So when unu went into insolvency, I had no particular sympathy for the brand, but I did know roughly what's inside an e-moped of that class.

Back to unu, three years later

In late 2024 I bought a used unu Pro for my partner. Cheap, because the post-insolvency market for unu scooters is not exactly hot. Test-riding it I remembered what I actually liked about the bike. "It's been three years now, surely the bugs are out", I figured, and bought a second one from the same seller. For me.

The actual problem showed up on first power-on. The unu cloud responsible for GPS, sharing, and all the smartphone features had been turned off with the insolvency. The scooters were mechanically sound, but their connected features were gone.

So: opened the scooter, desoldered the old SIM, dropped in an M2M SIM, started reverse engineering. First the DBC, then the MDB, then the cloud endpoints. On November 30, 2024 I joined the unu Community on Discord with the textbook "I scrolled back a year" question: is anyone working on a cloud replacement?

The answer was: not really. A lot was already documented (hardware, protocol sketches, service architecture), but nobody had sat down and built a replacement server. Other people in the Discord had built other things: GPS time sync for scooters cut off from the original cloud, software for the keycards (whose seam glue had started giving up after years), small tools.

On December 16, 2024, after two weeks of fighting UART, modem and NetworkManager, a first version of what would become Sunshine ran: a custom MQTT broker, a Rails backend, the scooter reporting telemetry. "I want to build a first version of a cloud replacement today" was the Discord entry that day.

Sunshine, Librescoot, rescoot

Sunshine has grown a lot since. Trip statistics, sharing, achievements, a web app, several patches to the MDB firmware to make things work that unu never built. More on the Sunshine project page.

Librescoot is a parallel project built by a broader community: a full firmware replacement for the Pro, with features like offline navigation and a configurable steering lock. I've been part of it since February 2025, supporting, contributing, lending hardware.

In early 2025, I brought the projects and their infrastructure together under the name rescoot. Starsong GmbH carries the server infrastructure and a large share of Sunshine development; Librescoot remains an independent community project.

My Horwin EK1 is still my everyday scooter. I continue to work on hardware modifications for it alongside these projects.