Calaos Installer

The desktop configuration tool for Calaos, a free and open source home automation platform.

Calaos Installer is where an installation is designed: you declare the rooms of the house, the inputs and outputs wired to each of them, and the rules that tie them together. The resulting configuration (io.xml + rules.xml) is what calaos_server runs on the controller. The application can talk to the controller directly, so a configuration can be downloaded, edited and sent back without leaving the tool.

It ships with Calaos Machine Creator, a companion application that writes Calaos OS images to USB drives and SD cards.

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Features

Configuration

• Organise the installation into rooms, each holding its inputs and outputs
• Build automation rules from conditions and actions, with a graphical editor
• Scenarios, timers, time ranges and internal variables (bool / int / string)
• Lua scripting for conditions and actions that need more than the rule editor offers
• Printable reports of the installation, by room or by input/output

Hardware

• Connect to a Wago PLC, upload the Calaos program, update its firmware (750-841, 750-842, 750-849, 750-880, 750-881, 750-889), or flash a custom one
• DALI and DMX lighting configuration, including the DALI Master 647 CSV import and DMX4ALL addressing
• Auto-detection wizards for MySensors, xPL, Squeezebox and Philips Hue
• Zigbee2MQTT device import

Interfaces

• Remote UI Editor: design touchscreen panel interfaces on a drag-and-drop grid
• Flash Remote UI firmware onto supported ESP32-P4 panels (Waveshare 86 Panel, Touch LCD 7" / 8" / 10.1"), see boards.json

Deployment

• Download from and upload to a Calaos controller
• Write Calaos OS images to USB/SD media with Calaos Machine Creator

Supported devices

Family	Devices
Wago PLC	Digital in/out, analog in/out, temperature, shutters (simple and smart), DALI/DMX dimming and RGB
KNX	Switches, dimmers, RGB, shutters, analog and temperature, via knxd — also KNX/TP1 through a 750-849
MQTT	Generic MQTT I/O and Zigbee2MQTT
MySensors	Switches, dimmers, RGB, shutters, analog, temperature, strings
Lighting	Philips Hue, OLA / DMX
Sensors	1-Wire temperature, GPIO, ping
Cameras	Axis, Foscam, Gadspot, Planet, Reolink, Synology Surveillance Station, generic MJPEG
Audio / AV	Squeezebox, Roon, A/V receivers
Generic	HTTP/Web I/O, Wake-on-LAN

Legacy support for xPL, Zibase and X10 is still present in the codebase.

Installing

Prebuilt Windows installers, macOS application bundles and Flatpak bundles are published on calaos.fr. Development builds for all three platforms are attached as artifacts to every CI Build run.

To build it yourself, read on.

Building from source

Dependencies

• Qt 6 (recommended) or Qt 5 — modules: core gui network widgets xml printsupport quick qml quickwidgets quickcontrols2 serialport, plus core5compat on Qt 6
• KArchive (KF6)
• Qt MQTT (optional) — enables Zigbee2MQTT support when present, detected automatically by qmake
• Linux: libdl; Calaos Machine Creator additionally needs libudev and Qt DBus

Lua 5.1.4, the FTP client and a few other third-party pieces are vendored in-tree; nothing else to install for them.

On Fedora:

sudo dnf install qt6-qtbase-devel qt6-qtdeclarative-devel qt6-qttools-devel \
                 qt6-qt5compat-devel qt6-qtserialport-devel kf6-karchive-devel \
                 systemd-devel

On Debian/Ubuntu (package names vary between releases):

sudo apt install qt6-base-dev qt6-declarative-dev qt6-tools-dev qt6-tools-dev-tools \
                 qt6-5compat-dev qt6-serialport-dev libkf6archive-dev libudev-dev

Build

mkdir -p build && cd build
qmake ../calaos_installer.pro
make -j$(nproc)

The binary lands in build/calaos_installer. Translations are compiled from lang/*.ts to .qm automatically during the build.

Calaos Machine Creator builds separately:

mkdir -p build/machine_creator && cd build/machine_creator
qmake ../../machine_creator/machine_creator.pro
make -j$(nproc)

Install (Linux)

PREFIX is read at qmake time and defaults to /usr/local:

qmake PREFIX=/usr ../calaos_installer.pro
make -j$(nproc)
sudo make install

This installs the binary, the .desktop entry, the AppStream metainfo and the icon.

Repository layout

Calaos/          Core domain model (Room, IOBase, Rule, Condition, Action) — shared with calaos_server
src/             Application source
  common/        Shared utilities, vendored Lua
  ftp/           FTP client used to push firmware and files to the Wago PLC
  wizards/       Setup wizards (Philips Hue)
qml/             Remote UI Editor
data/            .ui forms, Qt resources, images, IO documentation
lang/            Translations — French, German, Spanish, Norwegian, Hindi, Polish, Russian
machine_creator/ Calaos Machine Creator (separate .pro)
tests/           Sample Calaos projects used as manual test data
scripts/         Build and release helpers
flatpak/         Flatpak manifest, desktop entry, AppStream metainfo
win32/ macos/    Platform packaging

Contributing

Patches are welcome — open an issue or a pull request.

AGENTS.md documents the build, the code style and the project conventions in detail; it is written for AI coding agents but is just as useful to a human contributor. The short version: 4-space indentation, opening brace on its own line, m_ prefix on members, new-style connect(), tr() on every user-visible string, and new source files must be registered in calaos_installer.pro.

Two things worth knowing before you start:

• Calaos/ is shared with calaos_server. Changes there affect both, so tread carefully.
• Vendored code (Lua 5.1.4, qftp, drivelist, BLAKE2) should be left alone.

There is no automated test suite. tests/ holds sample XML projects to exercise the application by hand; verify your changes by building and running it.

Translations

Strings are extracted with lupdate and compiled by the build. After adding or changing translatable strings:

lupdate calaos_installer.pro
# then translate lang/calaos_installer_<lang>.ts with Qt Linguist

Related projects

• calaos_base — calaos_server, the controller daemon that runs the configuration
• calaos_wago — the CodeSys program this tool uploads to the Wago PLC
• calaos_remote_ui — firmware for the ESP32-P4 touchscreen panels
• calaos-os — the OS images Calaos Machine Creator writes
• calaos_mobile / calaos-web-app — end-user clients
• calaos.fr — documentation, downloads and community

License

GPL-3.0-or-later. Copyright © Raoul Hecky and the Calaos contributors.