Calaos Home

Role

Calaos Home is the interface displayed on the touchscreen connected to the server. It presents the home — rooms, lights, shutters, temperatures, cameras, audio — and is also used for a few operations on the system itself: network configuration, installation onto the disk, confirming a rollback.

It is written in Qt / QML and lives in the calaos_mobile repository, which it shares with the mobile applications.

Code layout

On the C++ side, the main classes are shared by both products:

And some exist only for the desktop version:

Interface state is managed with QuickFlux, an implementation of the Flux pattern for QML: components emit actions, which are handled centrally.

Connecting to the server

At startup the application broadcasts CALAOS_DISCOVER over UDP on port 4545 and waits for the server to answer. The search is retried every five seconds as long as no server has replied.

If the calaos_server_host setting is filled in, discovery is disabled and the given address is used directly. See Touchscreen.

CalaosConnection then builds the URL according to what it is given:

• an address starting with ws:// or wss:// is used as is;
• an address starting with http:// or https:// is converted to its WebSocket equivalent;
• a plain IP address gives ws://address:5454/api on the desktop version.

Local settings

The application reads its own configuration from local_config.xml, using the same keys as those described in calaos_config: show_cursor, dpms_enable, dpms_standby, calaos_server_host, cn_user, cn_pass, latitude, longitude.

On first launch, if no file exists, the application writes one with default values: credentials user / pass, cursor shown, sleep disabled, and geographic coordinates pointing at Paris.

ScreenManager reads dpms_standby in minutes and converts it to milliseconds; with no usable value it falls back to one minute.

Driving the system

This is what makes Calaos Home special: beyond home automation, it administers the machine. It does so through a local REST API, exposed by the calaos-container daemon on http://127.0.0.1:8000.

Authentication uses a token, read from /run/calaos/calaos-ct.token — a file regenerated at every boot by init_calaosfs — and passed in an Authorization: bearer <token> header.

These endpoints explain behaviours described elsewhere in this documentation: the confirmation button that appears when you have booted on a restore point — see Rolling back — and the disk installation offered from Live mode, described in Installation.

Building

The project is built with Qt. The repository’s GitHub Actions workflows (.github/workflows/) describe the full chain, including the Docker build images, and are the most reliable reference for reproducing a build.