GiraConnect: Graphical Time-Switch Control for the Gira HomeServer

A floodlight does not simply switch on. In a large football stadium, every switch hangs on a chain of lead times, kick-off times, training slots, cleaning windows and energy rules. Whoever maintains that by hand sits in front of long lists of switch points — time, weekday, action, line by line. That is exactly where a stadium operator in the Alpine region came to us: the technology worked, but operating it was a chore.

The building is controlled by a Gira HomeServer 4. It can do a great deal, and that is precisely the problem: its universal time switches (UZSU, recognisable in the object tree by the TI prefix) are configured through raw switch points. For a single lamp that is fine. For a stadium with dozens of timers that run differently depending on match day, weekday and event, it becomes a source of errors. We turned that into GiraConnect — a web interface that puts every time switch onto a Gantt board.

From switch point to timeline

The core of GiraConnect is the translation: what is a list of "hhmm" timestamps and weekday indices (0 for Monday through 6 for Sunday) inside the HomeServer becomes a bar on a timeline for us. The operator sees all timers stacked, drags a switch point to the right spot, sets the weekdays and the action — done. No counting indices, no typing times in four-digit format.

One thing mattered to us here, and it is something GiraConnect deliberately does not do: it does not run the timers itself. There is no second scheduler that has to stay online. GiraConnect writes the switch points into the HomeServer, and the HomeServer triggers them — just as before. If the interface goes down, the stadium keeps switching anyway. In an operation where a missed floodlight is a real problem, that is not a detail but the basic condition.

Presets for match day

A stadium has recurring routines. A normal training day looks different from a home match, and a home match different from an external event. Writing these scenarios onto the timers by hand every time is exactly the work we wanted to remove.

For this, GiraConnect stores up to 20 presets. A preset captures a complete switching state — all relevant timers with their switch points — and replays it at the push of a button. "Home match, evening" is built cleanly once, then activated with a single click. If a timer is missing on replay because the HomeServer configuration has changed, GiraConnect creates it as a stub instead of silently skipping something. The operator sees what happens.

Air-gapped, because the network demands it

Building control technology does not belong on the open internet. The HomeServer and the control attached to it live in an isolated network, and GiraConnect had to comply. The application therefore runs fully air-gapped: no CDN, no external scripts, no remotely loaded fonts. Everything the browser needs sits locally. The only network connection at runtime goes to the HomeServer in the local network — nothing else.

In practice that means: set up once with internet, then the machine can be disconnected from the network permanently. For us as developers it was an exercise in discipline — every dependency you would otherwise pull thoughtlessly from a cloud service had to be bundled locally. For the operator it is simply the precondition for the solution being allowed into the network at all. How we plan such isolated environments is also part of our IT consulting & digitalisation practice.

Synced both ways

A control system that only writes in one direction eventually drifts away from reality. Someone changes a timer directly on the HomeServer, and the interface shows stale data. That is why GiraConnect reconciles every few minutes: a pull sync fetches the timer list, states and meta information from the HomeServer and also adopts HomeServer-side changes — new or deleted timers, changed actions. If the HomeServer is currently unreachable, the run logs a warning and retries at the next interval. Nothing is lost, and nobody has to press a button.

The connection itself runs over the HomeServer's documented CGI API — with basic auth, timeout and a triple retry, so a brief network hiccup does not mean a failed switch point. We verified the read and write paths against real HomeServer 4 hardware, not just against a simulation.

What counts in the end

For the operator the work has shifted: away from maintaining raw switch lists, towards thinking in scenarios. A new match-day routine is a preset, not half an afternoon. And because every change lands in an audit log, you can trace who touched which switch point and when — in an operation with several shifts and people in charge, not a luxury but a necessity.

GiraConnect is a good example of what we mean by custom software development: not an off-the-shelf solution, but a slim, robust interface on top of an existing, proven installation. The HomeServer stays the brain. GiraConnect is the hand that makes it operable. More about the product itself is on the GiraConnect product page.

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