An orchestration layer for KNX and DALI
Win the job without giving up the bus.
A layer your clients can buy from you, sitting on top of the installation you already commission. It never becomes a dependency — pull it out and the bus keeps running exactly as ETS programmed it.
- Sold
- Through integrators
- If it fails
- The house keeps working
- Speaks
- KNX · DALI · Matter
Sydney, Australia
01 / Failure mode
Pull the plug and the house keeps working.
Casient is a layer, not a controller. Every safety- and comfort-critical behaviour stays where your ETS project put it — in the actuators, sensors and gateways on the bus. Nothing routes through us to reach a light.
This is the one claim a panel-based system cannot make. When a Control4 or Basalte processor dies, the house degrades to whatever the panel was not responsible for — which, in a system sold on doing everything, is very little. You have had that call.
Keeps working
- Every wall switch and keypad
- All ETS-programmed bus logic
- Presence detection and staircase timers
- DALI scenes stored in the gateway
- Heating and zone control
- Locks, gates and alarm interfaces
Stops until it is back
- Learned and anticipatory behaviour
- Cross-system orchestration
- The decision log and the console
- Third-party integrations (media, HVAC apps)
The test we ask every partner to run at handover: unplug the appliance in front of the client and walk the house. Nothing in the left-hand column should change. If anything does, the commissioning is wrong and we will say so.
02 / The case
What it does to your quote.
Casient is sold through integrators and nowhere else. There is no direct channel, no consumer store, and no route by which a homeowner buys this around you.
It wins the comparison you keep losing
The client has a Control4 or Basalte quote next to yours. Theirs demos better in a showroom. Yours is a better building. Casient gives you the capability that demo was selling, on top of the installation you were going to do anyway.
Phase 2, not a different Phase 1
Commission KNX exactly as you do now, standalone and signed off. Casient goes on afterwards, against a working bus. Nothing about your process, your suppliers or your ETS practice changes, and the client can accept or defer it without stalling the job.
No ecosystem to be locked into
Open protocols underneath, your ETS project as the source of truth, and no proprietary keypad line you have to keep buying. If the client leaves us, they keep a fully working KNX house and you keep the account.
The third-party work stops being a liability
Media, HVAC apps, streaming — the things that make raw KNX look dated and generate the callbacks you cannot bill for. Hardened, monitored, and repaired by us rather than rebuilt by you every time a vendor changes an API.
Try it
Give the house a disagreement.
Every other system resolves conflicts by whichever instruction arrived last. Pick a situation and watch this one actually decide.
Proposals · 0/5/7 quiet since 21:04 · one guest still in the annexe
- vacancy-aggregatorTier 6 · Efficiency
Switch the west wing off
No motion on any detector in the wing for 40 minutes.
- guest-presenceTier 4 · Instruction
Hold the annexe lighting
A guest was admitted at 19:20 and has not left the property.
- circadianTier 5 · Comfort
Warm the remaining circuits to 2200 K
Past 21:00; colour temperature should already be falling.
The arbiter
Resolving…
This is the complaint every owner of an automated house recognises: the lights going off while somebody is still in the room. Here the efficiency policy is simply outranked.
Proposals · kitchen · single sensor · no corroborating heat rise
- fire-egressTier 1 · Safety
Light the full egress path
Any smoke signal is sufficient grounds for a reversible action.
- fire-egress · locksTier 1 · Safety
Release the door locks
One sensor, no heat rise. Irreversible, and a burglary vector if wrong.
- comfort-holdTier 5 · Comfort
Maintain the current scene
No comfort reason to change anything.
The arbiter
Resolving…
Both top proposals sit at tier 1. Tier alone is not enough for an irreversible physical action — unlocking waits for a second sensor or a person. This exact failure is written up in our journal.
Proposals · 31.4 kWh forecast · export price negative until 15:00
- load-shiftTier 6 · Efficiency
Start the dishwasher now
Free energy, and export is worth less than self-consumption.
- quiet-hoursTier 5 · Comfort
Defer — the study is occupied
The dishwasher is audible from the study; someone is working.
- battery-healthTier 3 · Habitability
Stop charging at 96%
Sustained 100% state of charge shortens cell life.
The arbiter
Resolving…
Three policies, three different objectives, none of them wrong. Battery health is a habitability concern and takes precedence; the dishwasher waits for the study to empty.
Proposals · 1/1/31 · sitting room · 90 seconds after an automated off
- human-overrideTier 4 · Instruction
Restore, and stand down here
A person walked to a switch. That outranks anything inferred.
- vacancy-aggregatorTier 6 · Efficiency
Switch off again
Still no motion detected in the space.
The arbiter
Resolving…
The override wins, the vacancy policy yields for this room for the rest of the evening, and the disagreement is recorded as evidence — a person walking to a switch is the strongest signal the system ever gets.
Real group addresses · real policies · the tiers are enforced in the engine, not by convention
03 / Evidence
One house, fourteen months, every decision on the record.
Casient has been running a single Sydney house since its first commit — a 629-address KNX installation with two DALI gateways, eight ducted zones, a 40 kWh battery and four residents who did not agree to be patient. Everything below is drawn from that house.
Reference installation · anonymised
- Group addresses
- 0
- Decisions / day
- 0
- Overruled
- 0%
- Months running
- 0
An overrule rate this low is not a boast. It is the only number that matters: it is how often the house was wrong about what you wanted, and we publish it because a system that hides it has something to hide.
04 / Partnership
Licensed to certified integrators.
Licensed to certified integrators. Pricing and scope set per project. The commercial structure is a partnership with revenue share, agreed per partner — we would rather discuss it with you than publish a tier table that fits nobody's business.
We are early. One reference installation exists, it is ours, and there are no paying customers yet. We are not asking you to resell something unproven to a client — we are asking to be put in front of one difficult house and judged on the result.
Become a partner- Channel
- Integrators only. No direct sales.
- Your position
- System integrator of record. The bus, the ETS project and the client stay yours.
- Commercials
- Agreed per partner. Nothing published here.
05 / Written material
Explain it to a client without writing it yourself.
Long-form pieces on what KNX does well, where it genuinely stops, and how to tell the categories of product apart. Written for an owner to read, and yours to send.
Autonomy needs an audit log
The argument against autonomous homes is not that the machine will be wrong. It is that you will not be able to find out why. That is a solvable engineering problem, and solving it is the whole licence to operate.
10 min readTechnical noteWhat your ETS project already knows
A .knxproj file is treated as a wiring record. Read properly, it is a structural model of the building — and the single cheapest path to a house that understands itself.
11 min readEssayThe scene is the problem
Every high-end control system in the world is built on an abstraction that cannot learn. That is not a bug in Control4 or KNX. It is the ceiling of the idea itself.
9 min read