Software that touches the physical world
Controlling real devices, reverse-engineering legacy protocols, and shipping native apps — with safety gates on anything that actuates.
Silent Sentinel — a live operator console for real cameras
A WinUI 3 desktop console running today against real cameras, driving the manufacturer's own control protocol directly — no SDK, and no vendor application to sit behind. Where the screen has to tell the truth about the hardware, the console re-reads the setting off the camera, because on this equipment an acknowledgement alone doesn't prove it landed.
- Protocol operations
- An 88-operation catalogue generated from the vendor's protocol document — the subset the console drives — plus device behaviour that document does not describe
- Cameras it runs against
- Six on the last network sweep, each a real unit — the console drives one at a time and detects which firmware generation it is talking to
- Write safety
- Where the screen has to tell the truth about the hardware — stabilisation on, this profile selected, that overlay showing — the console re-reads the setting off the camera rather than trusting the acknowledgement
- Default posture
- Read-only — a connection opens without writing anything, and nothing moves until an operator asks it to
- Secrets at rest
- Saved connection profiles and assistant secrets are encrypted at rest with the operating system's own key store, not left in a config file
- Automated tests
- Around 2,600 tests run against the console itself, and around seventy more against the imaging engine
Multi-feed geometry aligned into one continuous view.
Mertens exposure fusion for high-contrast and low-light scenes.
Coordinator + scene classifier ranking candidates across a live feed.
Video stitching, HDR and tracking are built and exercised against the live feed — not yet the long-running production path the console itself runs day to day.
A device, a protocol, or a fleet that needs a safe control surface — half an hour tells you what's possible.
Start a conversationBeyond one console
Sonos, Samsung, Ring, Hive, Tuya and Alexa unified into one control plane and one voice surface — over a hundred devices, proven on a real installation MAST runs day to day.
One backend contract, native clients on both sides — a Windows desktop app and an iOS/Mac app built from the same protocol, deployed through a remote build pipeline with no local Xcode.
From protocol to a safe, working console
- 01
Protocol audit
Read the vendor spec where one exists, work out the rest against the device, and catalogue the operations the system actually needs.
- 02
Verified build
Read-only by default, and the settings that have to be right are read back off the device rather than assumed from its reply.
- 03
Live integration
Ship against the real devices, not a simulator.
- 04
Maintain
Firmware drifts — the console keeps working when the vendor changes it.
What stops the software from actuating something by accident?
Connections open read-only, so nothing moves until an operator asks it to. The settings known to be able to break a deployment are held behind a named destructive-path list and a typed confirmation, and any custom command button can be armed so it needs a second deliberate action. And because this camera will acknowledge a setting it did not actually apply, the settings that matter are read back off the device rather than trusted.
Do you need the vendor's documentation to integrate a device?
Not always, and not only. On the camera console there was a vendor protocol document but no SDK, so the operation catalogue was generated straight from that document — and then the gaps were worked out against the hardware, because the parts a spec leaves out are usually the parts that matter. Where a device also speaks an industry standard, the console uses it: this one falls back to ONVIF for basic movement when the manufacturer's own protocol will not serve.
Can the same system run on Windows and mobile?
Yes — one backend contract, native clients built for each platform, including an iOS/Mac build pipeline that runs from a Windows machine over a remote build step.
Tell MAST which piece of work consumes your week. Half an hour is enough to see whether an agentic system is worth building.
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