Cynet

What it does

Cynet is the next-generation gate, visitor and attendance platform the spiritual successor to Sentry Falcon, rebuilt from the studs. Same problem space (residential estates, schools, corporate sites), same core surfaces (number-plate OCR, face matching, ID scanning, resident pre-authorisation), but rewritten with five years of Sentry Falcon learnings shaping every layer.

What's new in v2

• Edge appliance, not a tablet vision compute moves off the guard's tablet onto a dedicated small-form-factor appliance per site. Frees the tablet for UX, doubles plate-recognition speed, halves the false-negative rate.
• Multi-tenant from day one security companies running dozens of sites get a unified HQ console; onboarding a new site is a 5-minute self-serve flow, not a deployment.
• Live everything the shift dashboard, the visitor list, the entry feed are all push-driven (WebSockets); no more "refresh to see who's at the gate".
• Cleaner audit + maker-checker every roster change (add resident, deny-list a vehicle, approve a vendor) flows through the audit log and, where the site demands, through moffhub/maker-checker for two-eyes approval.
• Modern UX Inertia + Vue front-end with reka-ui primitives; the guard's "happy path" is one tap, not a screen of dropdowns.

Highlights

• Edge-side ANPR + face matching vehicle plate read in <250ms (down from ~400ms on Sentry Falcon's tablet pipeline). Resident match runs against a local roster cached on the appliance works through full-day internet outages.
• Resident pre-auth via WhatsApp / SMS / web generate a one-time guest pass on your phone, with optional photo of the visitor for face match at the gate.
• ID-card + driver's-licence OCR name + ID number extracted into the visitor log; tied to the photo at the gate so the audit log links a face to a record.
• Live shift dashboard current head count, expected arrivals, last-N entries, anomaly flags (unknown vehicle, unrecognised face, repeat denied entry). Updates in real time.
• Multi-site HQ console security company HQ sees a roll-up of every site they manage: open incidents, shift handovers in progress, anomalies needing review.
• API-first REST + webhooks let property managers wire Cynet into their billing system, payroll for staff attendance, or visitor reservations from a booking app. Sentry Falcon was hard to integrate; Cynet is built around the integration.
• Visitor billing / tolling sites that charge guest parking can take payment via M-Pesa STK at the gate; receipt SMS to the visitor, ledger entry to the site.
• Mobile resident app residents see their own entry history, manage their guest list, get a push notification when an expected guest arrives. Replaces the SMS-only Sentry Falcon flow for tech-comfortable residents.
• Staff attendance + payroll hook the same gate that scans visitors clocks staff in/out; daily attendance roll-up exports to the property manager's payroll system.

How we built it

The cloud platform is Laravel 13 + Inertia + Vue 3, multi-tenant single-DB, on Postgres + Redis + Spaces. The edge appliance runs a small Linux distro with our vision pipeline pre-installed (OpenCV-based plate recognition, a face-match model trained on Kenyan-population imagery, an OCR model tuned for Kenyan ID-card layouts). Appliance ↔ cloud is bidirectional MQTT; the local DB on the appliance is the source of truth during outages and reconciles up on reconnect.

The guard tablet is a Vue PWA installable, offline-tolerant, screen-locked to the gate UI. Pairing a tablet to an appliance is a QR-code-on-screen scan; no manual config files.

Behind the scenes

• Per-site appliance doubles as a video proxy: NVR cameras feed through it, the cloud sees a heartbeat + thumbnails, full footage stays on-site for storage compliance.
• Idempotent sync every gate event carries a UUID so a double-recorded entry (network blip + retry) collapses to one canonical row in the cloud.
• Roster delta sync only changes since the last reconciliation move over the wire; full resident lists with thousands of entries don't shuttle every 5 minutes.
• Privacy-aware retention visitor photos default to 30-day retention on the cloud, longer on-site if the contract requires; configurable per site.
• Security audit trail every login to the HQ console, every roster edit, every override at the gate writes to the activity log with actor + IP + signed timestamp.

What changed for the client

The big wins versus Sentry Falcon: onboarding a new site went from "schedule an engineer" to "ship the appliance, scan the QR" a 90% reduction in deployment time. Plate recognition is faster and more accurate, which removes the most common guard frustration ("the gate doesn't recognise my regular delivery van"). And the API surface unlocked integrations property managers had been asking for since Sentry Falcon shipped the gate is no longer an island.