Frequently asked questions

BATCAD is design software for building automation and HVAC controls. It is a drawing tool where every device you place is a real manufacturer part, so a controller renders with its own faceplate and terminal layout, wires carry signal types and gauge specs, and the bill of materials, the installation hours and the power budget are all derived from the sheet rather than maintained separately. It runs in the browser and several engineers can edit the same drawing at once.

No. Automatic sheet generation from a specification set is in development, not shipped, and it is not connected to the deployed app. The pipeline that reads a spec PDF and emits sheets runs today as a standalone service in our lab. Inside BATCAD the Agent Mode entry point is commented out, and the Generate diagrams button in the Documents panel plays a canned progress animation that leaves no sheets you can open. AI does already do real work in the product: the vendor faceplates, with their terminal layouts, were generated from manufacturer drawings, which is why placing a real part number gives you its real I/O.

The seeded catalog covers parts from vendors including Johnson Controls, Automated Logic, Belimo and Functional Devices, with controllers, sensors, actuators, drives and transformers. Twenty of those parts ship with an authored faceplate that reproduces the manufacturer's terminal layout, and thirteen of those declare themselves BACnet MS/TP devices so they expose an editable MAC address constrained to 0 through 127. A part with no authored faceplate still places, wires and counts toward the bill of materials, it just renders as a generic device. Your organisation can also add its own parts, and editing a shared catalog part clones it into your own rows rather than changing anyone else's.

Yes, and this is live in production. Opening a sheet does not reserve it. Every engineer with edit permission on that project can draw at the same time, changes appear on the other screens in under a second, and you see your colleagues as named coloured cursors on the canvas with their avatars in the top bar. There is no Save button: edits reach the collaborative document immediately and the top bar states whether your work has reached the server. Each open sheet is also cached in your browser, so if the link drops while you are working the tab keeps accepting edits and merges them back when it returns. Reloading the page or opening a sheet while offline gives you a read-only canvas, because BATCAD paints a sheet only once the collaboration server has synced.

It rolls up the devices you have actually placed. Because assigning a manufacturer part number is how a device gets its faceplate, the drawing already knows what every symbol is, so the BOM tab groups placed devices by part number and joins vendor, unit price and installation hours from the parts catalog. A separate project-level page totals material and labour cost across every sheet in the job. You can mark a device By Others, Existing, Excluded from BOM or Field Verified, which drops it out of the bill of materials, the labour estimate and the power rollup together. From there the BOM can be snapshotted into a purchase order grouped by vendor.

Every catalog part carries installation hours, and your organisation sets one default hourly rate on the Labour page. Costing honours a separate rate per discipline for design engineering, software, system specification and electrical install once one is set, but BATCAD ships no editor for those yet, so today every discipline runs on the default. On top of that you name the people on your crew, and each person carries a single rate factor that multiplies the hours their work takes: 1 is the normal pace every catalog hour is quoted at, and 0.5 finishes the same work twice as fast. A person never sets a rate, only a speed, which keeps how fast someone works from being confused with what their hour costs. Picking a different person per discipline re-costs every number on screen instantly, and that choice is a scenario lever that is never saved to the server.

It checks that your transformers can carry the load and that no device is wired to a voltage that will destroy it. Enter a device's draw in Watts for DC or VA for AC, give each transformer or supply its rating, output voltage, class and derate percentage, then wire them together on the normal PWR ports. The engine walks the galvanic net from each source and raises a blocker when a source is loaded past the 80 percent limit. It also checks each load against the specific terminal the wire actually lands on, so feeding a device more volts than that terminal is rated for produces a blocker reading over-voltage, this will burn the device. Faults are drawn on the canvas as a coloured ring and corner badge, recomputed on every edit rather than at export time.

Yes. Running validation checks the active sheet against a rule set and returns blockers and warnings grouped by severity, and clicking any issue zooms the canvas to the device it names. The rules cover unconnected ports, devices with a missing or still-default label, devices with no manufacturer part number, symbols the library does not recognise, and controllers with no power port connected. PDF export of the sheet or of the whole set is disabled while the last run reported any blocker, behind a banner reading Resolve all validation blockers before exporting.

PDF, plus JSON bundles for moving work between projects. You can export the current sheet or every sheet in the project as one multi-page PDF, with the page size following the drawing boundary you set and a title block stamped on each page carrying project, company, sheet number, revision, date, initials, designer, description and your organisation's logo. Separately, a sheet or a whole folder can be exported as a versioned JSON bundle and imported back into a project. There is no DXF or SVG export today.

Yes, and BATCAD can pull one out of a drawing set you already have. Import a floor plan straight from a busy architectural or MEP PDF: BATCAD reads the page's vector geometry, finds the plan region, works out which line weights are the walls, and shows you a preview where you can toggle weight bands on and off before committing. You can also take a multi-page floor plan PDF and assign each page to its own sheet in a single pass, or drop in a plain image and set its exact position, size and opacity. Zones and rooms can then be drawn over the plan as polygons, and a device dropped inside one picks that zone up as its field location.

For controls sheets, that is what it is for. The difference is that a generic CAD or diagramming tool treats a controller as a rectangle with text on it, so the drawing knows nothing about terminals, signal types, part numbers, load or cost, and every schedule has to be rebuilt by hand and kept in step. In BATCAD those are properties of the drawing, which is what lets validation, the bill of materials, the labour estimate and the power budget all derive from one source. What BATCAD does not do today is export DXF or SVG, so if your deliverable must arrive as a native CAD file it is not a drop-in replacement yet.

Every company gets its own isolated workspace. Projects, sheets, teams, people, documents and history all belong to one organisation and are never visible to another. The parts catalog is the deliberate exception: BATCAD maintains a global catalog every organisation can read, while the parts you add, and any edit you make to a global part, stay private to you. Inside your organisation, people are grouped into teams, a team owns the projects its members can reach, and each member carries a team role, so the same person can be a designer on one job and a viewer on another. What someone can do is decided by permissions rather than by a job title, and the same check applies to live editing: the collaboration server asks the API what you may do on that specific sheet before letting you in. Both the access and refresh tokens ride in HttpOnly cookies that page scripts cannot read, and replaying a stolen refresh token revokes the whole session family. There is no self-service signup today, so we set your organisation and its first accounts up with you.