The house on one screen
Devices are grouped by room, with their state and a direct switch. The counters at the top — total, online, offline, rooms in use — sum up the estate, and the device ones open the full list.
Proof of concept
kAssist
A home automation hub that brings Zigbee, Z-Wave, Matter, WiFi, BLE, infrared and solar inverters behind a single interface: devices, rooms, scenes, automations, alarm and energy in one place. A test bench too — a chance to push the Kore platform somewhere it was not expected: real time, hardware, the edge.
Built on KoreSelf-hostableThe radio stays at home
The problem we were looking at
A well-equipped home ends up with as many apps as it has brands. Each one drives its own bulbs and knows nothing about the rest.
- The bulbs speak Zigbee, the blinds Z-Wave, the freezer socket WiFi — and none of them speak to each other.
- Every brand brings its own app, its own account and a trip through its own cloud.
- Nobody knows what uses what, or how much the solar array actually covers.
- A simple rule — "if nobody is home, switch everything off" — means connecting all of it first.
What kAssist does today
Everything below runs today, and was checked against a fully virtual demonstration home: one site, two floors, six rooms, eighteen stub devices, one simulated camera and one simulated inverter. No real hardware, no real household.
One inventory, whatever the protocol
Zigbee, Z-Wave, Matter/Thread, WiFi, BLE, Broadlink infrared, Govee, WiiM and Chromecast all land in the same registry, with the same normalised capabilities — switch, dim, open, measure. That is what lets a scene mix a Zigbee bulb and a Z-Wave blind without knowing the difference.
Rooms, floors, and a plan
Site, zone, room: the hierarchy is what spreads devices out and scopes the rules. The floor plan places each device by drag and drop and makes its state readable at a glance.
Scenes, and rules that fire them
A scene chains commands — dim the lamp, close the blind, cut the socket — with delays in between. An automation is built as WHEN / IF / THEN: a sensor, a time or an external call fires it, a condition filters, an action runs. Execution is delegated to Kore’s rule engine rather than rewritten.
An alarm built on the sensors already there
The modes — disarmed, home, away, night, panic — lean on the contact and motion sensors already in the house, grouped into zones, with entry and exit delays, a PIN and an event log. A camera in the room concerned can attach its snapshot to the alert.
What the house uses, in euros
Devices able to measure report their power; the total becomes kilowatt-hours, a cost and grams of CO₂ from the tariff and carbon factor set for the household. The breakdown reads by room and by device.
Solar, all the way to the surplus
Huawei, Fronius, SMA, GoodWe and Enphase inverters are polled continuously: production, consumption, battery, import and export. A regulator can send the surplus to a load — water heater, battery, car charger — instead of selling it back.
The radio stays at home
kAssist never connects to a broker directly: a Kore agent sitting on the local network carries the collectors — mqtt, matter, ble, wiim, cast, broadlink, govee — and pushes states up. The hub can therefore run elsewhere, remotely included, without the devices leaving the house.
On a phone, with nothing to install
The screens fold down onto a narrow display, and the app installs from the browser. Offline it still opens — but empty: the local cache keeps the app shell, never the readings.
What kAssist cannot do
The list is long, which is what an exploration looks like. It is kept from the code audit rather than guessed.
- There is no native mobile app, and no push notification to a phone.
- Device firmware updates are not handled.
- The electricity tariff is a single rate: no off-peak, no Tempo, no EJP.
- There is no video recording and no motion detection from the image.
- KNX, LoRaWAN and importing an existing Home Assistant configuration are out of scope.
- Geofencing tracks the household, not each occupant separately.
- Kore’s conversational assistant is there, but it does not know the house yet.
What the exploration showed
kAssist was written first to see how far the Kore platform held outside its usual ground — management, forms, reference data. Home automation is real time, hardware that fails and networks that drop.
The platform held
Users, roles and fine-grained permissions, isolation between households, translations, a single GraphQL API, logging: kAssist inherits all of it instead of rewriting it. Kore’s rule engine runs the automations, and its agents carry the collectors.
See the Kore platformWhat ended up used elsewhere
kAssist’s Bluetooth collector is exposed as a service in its own right; ClubTT uses it to pair the sensors of a training session. An exploration feeding a product that is actually sold is the most concrete result of this one.
See ClubTTNothing goes to a third party
The hub is hosted wherever you want, broker credentials stay on the local agent, and readings live in a database you own. The HomeKit bridge runs inside the hub, not in a cloud.
Talk it over
Multi-protocol home automation, solar self-consumption, or more generally what can be built on the Kore platform: if any of those is on your mind, we are happy to talk.
Get in touch