From the site to the model
Most people who design extra-low voltage systems have never pulled the cable. Most people who pull the cable never open the model. Raul Kalev has done both, and that route through the trade is the thing that shapes how he works.
After more than five years of field experience on installation work, he moved into design — carrying with him a specific, practical sense of what a drawing costs to build. A cable route that looks tidy in a plan view and a cable route that can actually be installed in a ceiling void are not always the same route. Knowing the difference is not something that can be picked up from a manual.
He holds a BSc in Architectural Technology and Construction Management from KEA — Copenhagen School of Design and Technology, which supplies the other half: the building as a coordinated whole rather than a set of disciplines that meet at a clash report.
What he works on
The day job is at Eule OÜ in Tallinn, an engineering studio designing electrical, security, IT and building automation systems in BIM. His own focus is extra-low voltage design in Revit — the systems that make a building aware of itself:
- Fire detection and alarm — device layouts, loop and circuit design, addressing schemes and coordinated documentation.
- CCTV and video surveillance — camera placement driven by real field-of-view geometry rather than guesswork.
- Access control and security — door hardware, controller topology and cable schedules.
- IT and communications infrastructure — containment, outlets, racks and structured cabling.
- Lighting control — DALI addressing, line capacity and controller assignment.
Alongside that sits BIM coordination proper: model setup and project standards, IFC exchange with other disciplines, clash resolution, and the unglamorous documentation work that determines whether a set of drawings is actually usable on site.
Why the plugins exist
Revit is a capable tool that leaves a surprising amount of repetitive work on the table. Renumbering devices by hand. Re-tagging a view after every layout change. Rebuilding a panel schematic because three circuits moved. None of it is difficult; all of it is slow, and slow work is where mistakes come from.
RK Tools is the accumulated response to that — a library of more than twenty Revit add-ins, each one built to remove a specific piece of friction encountered on a real project. CAD Manager handles DWG visibility per view, bypassing the limits of view templates, and is published on the Autodesk App Store. Camera FOV computes coverage cones from actual sensor specifications. SoundCalcs runs SPL and STI calculations from a speaker layout. Renumber, SmartTags, Panel Schematics and the rest each address a task that used to be done by hand.
More recently the work has moved toward AI-assisted design. The Revit MCP Connector exposes a controlled set of tools that let assistants like Claude and Codex operate on a live Revit model, and Pulse is a Revit-first control centre for visualising, validating and documenting addressable building systems.
The tools are built in C# and .NET against the Revit API, with WPF interfaces, plus Python and JavaScript where they fit better. New ones are added most months, because new friction keeps turning up.
Selected tools
The full library lives on the plugins page. A representative sample:
- CAD Manager — per-view DWG and layer control that works around view template limitations, with database-backed settings. Published on the Autodesk App Store.
- Camera FOV — surveillance coverage cones generated from real sensor specifications, updating parametrically in 2D and 3D.
- SoundCalcs — SPL and STI calculations from a speaker layout, with octave-band and intelligibility heatmaps accounting for walls, reflections and reverberation.
- DALI Manager — controller and line organisation with live address and current-capacity monitoring.
- Revit MCP Connector — a controlled tool surface across ten workflow groups that lets AI assistants operate on a live Revit model.
- Single Line Diagrams — circuit-based generation with level-aware placement and spacing control.
How he works
A tool earns its place by being used on a live project first. Everything in RK Tools began as something that was needed on a deadline, which is a stricter filter than any feature list — and the reason the library skews toward unglamorous, high-frequency tasks rather than impressive demonstrations.
Anything that touches a model is built to be reversible: undo-friendly, idempotent where possible, and preview-before-commit where the change is significant. Trust in a tool that edits a shared model is hard to earn and very easy to lose.
Get in touch
For questions about the plugins, licensing, or collaboration on Revit and extra-low voltage work, email raul.kalev@icloud.com. Code is on GitHub and professional history on LinkedIn.