For some of us it started with an RGB bulb, some with a Tasmotized LED strip, some a smart outlet.  No matter what the spark was, we all now have a shared passion for Home Automation.

With a combined experience of 24 years in all walks of IoT and Home Automation, our team is uniquely geared to not only deliver solutions, but to understand the day-to-day use of those solutions.  We are boots on the ground, and we’re on your side to help you take control of your smart home how you want.

We want to specifically thank the users who are participating in our open-source community projects, and the friends we’ve made along the way for inspiring us to take on this challenge.  Let’s make this something we can all be proud of.  

To join the OLL community, click here!

CORE is a community-driven home automation hardware platform, designed and built on the foundation that PRIVACY is paramount, INTERFACE should be intuitive, and TECHNOLOGY should be radically inclusive.  We bring the best of leading-edge home automation technology, methods and ideas into one hardware solution.  Providing an unmatched home automation experience for everyone is our mission at its CORE.

What does it do?

CORE is your honest-to-goodness 100% local* home automation solution, acting as the conductor to your orchestra of smart devices. It makes building automations a fun visual experience where you’ll gain confidence and experience making your devices work for you, how you want them to.  Also, we make the brand names and the no names work together so that you can get the most out of what devices you already own.

* Cloud-based voice assistants can be integrated with, but are not required.
 

How are we different from “smart hubs”?

• TRULY LOCAL – Others might claim to be “local” but contain back doors, fine print and will even urge you to use cloud alternatives instead of their local offerings.  We follow through with our promise to keep you in control of your devices with an emphasis on Security, Privacy and Speed.
   
• COMMUNITY DRIVEN – We are an active part of the home automation community, have launched and support successful projects that have been built on and improved upon with the input and relationships we have with our peers.  No egos, a good idea is a good idea.  We listen, we collaborate, we improve, and we implement.
   
• ULTRA LOW LATENCY – Though there are other solutions that claim “local processing” we’ve decided that their bar is not high enough.  We have made a concerted effort from end to end to create and use the most optimal technologies resulting in latencies that would be ideal even by competitive gaming standards.
   
• SUPERIOR HARDWARE – See our specs below.  They speak for themselves.
   
• SUPERIOR SOFTWARE – We pride ourselves in our unique process for design, development, innovation and adoption of new technologies.  Simply put, you’ll have the best home automation resources in one place backed by a team of experts and enthusiasts that have done the research to define the difference.

Interacting with your devices is more than pressing a button and having your device do something, it’s every step in that device’s journey.   
 

This might look like just another listing of devices, but we’ve put extra effort into making improvements to give you what you need, where you need it.

• Custom Filter Groups / Smart Filter Groups –  Our tabbed interface for device management can be customized to not only filter by device attributes (name, type, etc) but also by dynamic queries of those attributes. (example: a filter group for devices with Last Activity over 1 day)
   
• Intelligent bulk actions [active development]  – Select multiple devices that share capabilities and preferences, we offer you a list of what commands you can send in bulk.

The “Room” terminology is outdated, and brings up existential questions like, “If a door is between two rooms, which does it exist in?”.  Nobody should be forced to answer that question.  We are saving you the headache, and have elevated our thinking.  SPACE.  In the continuing spirit of being modular and flexible, we’ve built a better way to organize your devices.  The end result- a device can exist in multiple spaces, and spaces can exist within other spaces.  Spaces can be used for smart filtering, auto-generated dashboards, and eventually for mapping (future development).

Why do dashboards exist? They give you exactly what you need to see and control right at your fingertips in the most efficient way possible.  It just makes sense.  Why have we grown accustomed to configuration, settings and commands being crammed into some one-size-fits-all page that looks like the glossary of a textbook?   The solution is right here, to use tiles within dashboards throughout the UI.

We  have adopted a tile-based device methodology for configuration, automation and control. The Z-Wave controller? Device.  The timer you created in Logic Engine? Device.  The CORE itself? Device.

Every device configuration, command and preference has a tile interface. Want to send a command? Tile.  Want to change a preference? Tile.

The tabs within the Device Detail are also customizable dashboards of tiles..

We make creating your own automations easy through the visual use of tiles.  How cool is that?

Notice our unique FOLLOW filter group, allowing condensed and simplified flows. 

Based on our tile-based methodology, we provide an interface for selection and device state manipulation that just makes sense.

You can design a Flow using devices that you don’t currently have.  Get ahead!  This also allows you to build logic engine Flows for others.

Share your Flows with friends, or the community.   Even complex chained Flows can be packaged in easy to distribute JSON.

No walking around the house waving your arms and flipping switches.  Test your Flows interactively before deploying them. 

• Virtual Test Dashboard – On click, we generate a temporary dashboard that includes all devices you’ve used in your Flow, but with all devices click-state enabled (example: click on a motion tile to trigger motion).  This capability also allows us to test our Flows with placeholder devices before sharing them.
• Real Test Dashboard – Same as the Virtual Test Dashboard, but using your real devices.  *No triggering sensors with a click, though.   You’ll need to open and close that door in real life.

From our custom Linux-based OS on up, we live and breathe Open Source. We at Oh-La LABS not only have a passion for researching and adopting the leading edge of Open Source projects, but also a passion for the communities that create and support them.  

In the spirit of community innovation and inclusion, we have also unlocked our bootloader to unleash your creativity.

We aspire to be active contributors and sponsors of projects that we have adopted into our ecosystem, including being an active part of improving device support in the Z-Wave JS and Zigbee Herdsman movement. 
 

You can’t call yourself independent if you’re phoning home to momma all day. We are all grown up and we don’t need a babysitter.  But seriously, one of the most highly requested features in any home automation solution is that YOU have control over how and when your hardware talks to the outside world. We’ve taken this to heart.

* Unless YOU choose to integrate with Cloud services.

Your CORE will only access the outside world when you want it to.  Not only do we identify and clearly label services and code that could potentially access the outside world, we’ve baked in additional technology for your protection.  Our focus is on YOU having control over your hardware. 

WireGuard is included in our system and can be enabled in just a click.  This is a safe way for YOU to access your CORE from the outside world.  No rocket science required.

We handle the tough parts of the configuration and have simplified it to just a few steps.  Once enabled, we generate QR codes for one-click setup of devices you’d like to access your CORE from anywhere, safely.

Each Primary CORE has its own unique root certificate installed which enables you to be 100% offline, still secure.

(optional) For your certificate to be signed by a recognized Certificate Authority, it will require a one-time communication with Oh-La LABS servers to be set up, and intervaled communication with Oh-La LABS servers to keep the certificate up to date.

Back up your CORE to a local storage device or server of your choice. This configurable backup contains everything you’d expect but also specific radio chip information and user data that includes Node-Red and the entirety of any of your work in our IDE.

The OS and firmware are not part of this backup.

If you’d like to stay 100% off the grid, you can download the latest update to a USB stick. Plug it in, Reboot. Done! 

Through the combination of Oh-La LABS development and the adoption of leading-edge open-source projects, at last glance we have around 2300 supported devices and counting.  Our focus is not just getting devices on a list, but to ensure they work.  The improvements we make are shared back to the projects we adopt.  Period.
 

The communication methods we support include:
Zigbee, Z-Wave, Thread*, BT and WiFi + more*

* active development

It takes time to stay up-to-speed and involved in order to make informed decisions on adoption.  We put ongoing significant time into R&D so you don’t have to.  The result is that efficient code makes us faster,  and being modular makes us nimble.

• Speed.  All of our adopted and developed technologies have been designed with low-latency as a high priority goal.
   
• Modular. Our system is not only containerized using Podman, but our CORE services are also siloed.  Our UI (active development) communicates with CORE’s MAIN service using our extremely efficient and lightweight API.  Our stock UI is built in React.  There is further componentization within each of the services so that we can make updates to pieces of our services without affecting the whole.
   
• Lightweight.  Our system is built deliberately, cleanly and efficiently.  Heck, we even have code that writes and optimizes code.  We call this “The Markus Effect”.
   
• Compatibility. Collective CORE is able to “adopt” devices, hubs and controllers to flawlessly integrate with them.  We help to create one cohesive CORE environment. 

An outstanding Zigbee gateway solution, providing support for an ever-growing database of devices.  We share the same Zigbee controller chipset with those supported in this project, allowing us to not only benefit from a partnership with the community, but also to contribute our own development back to a central location where all can benefit. 

A thing of beauty.  In our opinion, this is the gold-standard of spec compliant Z-Wave drivers.  It’s lightweight, brilliantly developed and we are thrilled to be a part of this movement.  Z-Wave JS makes automatically injecting system generated drivers near-flawless.

Node-RED is a browser-based flow development tool for visual programming and automation.  This is an optional feature which is installed natively on the CORE.  For those who are familiar, we have also taken the liberty of creating our own Collective CORE nodes!

Enabled for integration with doodads such as Tasmota based WiFi devices, and anything else that uses this service.  It might surprise you how many there are! This two-way street also makes it possible for you to expose CORE devices to other systems.  A great tool for integrators.

Tech Notes – MQTT is built-in, but you can also use an external one if you prefer.

A very cool piece of tech! A full blown IDE running inside the CORE for developers.  This will give you the ability to actively develop your own device drivers or to create integrations that could be made available in our future store. 

Given the sheer power of this feature, it is recommended to be run on a separate CORE. 
 

Software that is part of making our system modular and secure. This enables us to update one piece of the puzzle without affecting the other pieces.  It also allows us to coordinate dependencies from other environments without affecting the core services, creating a strong reliable foundation.

Tech Notes – No daemon, no root privileges needed.

Continuing with our lightweight and modular development ideology, React allows us to keep track of everything so that when changes take place, it updates the screen in real time.

Paired with FeathersJS, our React-based UI will give you real-time feedback of changes in the system.  Have 5 different tabs open that are displaying a particular device in them?  Change the device label in one and you’ll see that change in real-time throughout the other tabs.  This is what React + FeathersJS does.

Feathers is a lightweight web-framework for creating real-time applications and REST APIs using JavaScript or TypeScript.  Feathers can interact with any backend technology, supports over a dozen databases and works with any frontend technology like React, VueJS, Angular, React Native, Android or iOS.

TypeScript is a strict syntactical superset of JavaScript and adds optional static typing to the language.  What does this mean? It means it natively detects mistakes and makes you fix them before moving forward.  It means ultra-clean code, always.

System

Chipset: Amlogic S905x3

Processor: 64-bit quad-core ARM® Cortex™ A55 @ 1.9GHz

GPU: ARM® Mali-G31 MP2

RAM: 4GB DDR3

eMMC: 32GB/64GB

Communication

Zigbee/Thread/BT LE: Zigbee 3.0 capable multi-protocol chip (TI or Silabs)

Z-Wave: 700-series by Silabs

LAN: 1 Gbps

Wi-Fi: 2.4 & 5 GHz (used for pairing and temporary tasks)

Bluetooth: BT 4.1 (combined with the Wi-Fi module)

Interface

DC: 5V/2A barrel connector

HDMI: HDMI v2.1 (included for future use)

USB: 1x USB 3.0, 1x USB 2.0

OTHER: Various other ports are included for possible future use.