Lighting Design & Code Compliance Tool
Answer a few questions and the assistant designs the job — it picks the fixtures, draws the plan, runs the point-by-point footcandles for every room and the site, sizes the emergency and exit units, and checks the whole thing against the code for that city. Or scan the room with your phone: drop in a LiDAR scan from Polycam, Scaniverse, Canvas or Apple’s RoomPlan and the dimensions fill themselves in. Every tab has the same assistant, and everything it produces stays editable.
Under it all: lay out a real project’s lighting and check it against the codes that actually govern it in Arizona: room-by-room footcandles, emergency and exit-sign coverage (IBC), dimming control zones with labeled percentages (IECC C405), and the outdoor lighting rules of fourteen Arizona jurisdictions — Tucson/Pima County, Phoenix, Mesa, Chandler, Gilbert, Glendale, Scottsdale, Tempe, Marana, Oro Valley, Sahuarita, Flagstaff, and Sedona, every number transcribed from the published code text. Draw on your own plans: open a PDF or DXF, place fixtures, calibrate the scale, and run point-by-point footcandle calculations from imported .ies photometry — grid, uniformity, and target checks on your drawing. Type a parcel number to pull up the site map and, in Pima County, auto-detect the lighting zone. Free, saves in your browser, prints a submittal-style compliance summary.
The assistant does the work — the rest of these are the same design opened up, for when you’d rather change something yourself.
Design assistant
Answer a few questions — get a finished design
Tell it what you’re lighting and where. It picks the fixtures, draws the plan, calculates every space and checks it against that city’s code — it chooses, the verified engine calculates.
Three ways to change it, and they all work on the same design: say what you want here (“make the poles 3000K”, “drop the office to 25 fc”) and it edits only that; drag fixtures where you want them on the Drawing and they stay put; or type into the tabs above. Anything you move by hand is left alone when you ask for another change.
LiDAR
Scan the room with your phone
Scan with any LiDAR app on an iPhone or iPad Pro — Polycam, Scaniverse, Canvas, or Apple’s RoomPlan — then export as OBJ or PLY and drop it here. The tool measures the floor and ceiling and fills in the room size. The scan is read on your device and never uploaded.
USDZ can’t be read in a browser — every one of those apps can also export OBJ or PLY, which carry the same geometry. Survey-grade E57 and LAS clouds aren’t supported yet.
Rather do it by hand?
Everything the assistant does is available manually in the tabs above — and anything it produces stays fully editable. Start on Project & site to pick a jurisdiction, or load the sample project from the button at the top to see a finished job.
Ask the assistant — tell it where the job is and it picks the jurisdiction, looks up the parcel and sets the lighting zone. It fills this tab in for you and the engine recalculates.
Job information
Jurisdiction — which lighting code applies?
Pick the city or county whose ordinance governs the site. NEC, IBC egress, IECC controls, and the Arizona shielding statute are always checked. Rule data verified August 8, 2026 against the published code text.
Site & parcel
Parcel data comes live from the county assessor GIS. Boundaries are for reference — not a survey. You can also skip the lookup and enter everything manually below, or design from your own drawing.
Ask the assistant — describe what you want to use and it writes the schedule. It fills this tab in for you and the engine recalculates.
Luminaire schedule
Every fixture type on the job — interior and exterior. Lumens and CCT come off the manufacturer cut sheet. “Shielded” means full cutoff / fully shielded (no light at or above horizontal) — it’s what the dark-sky budgets hinge on. Flag EM (battery/inverter) fixtures and exit signs so the egress checks can find them.
| Mark | Description | Location | Lumens | Watts | CCT (K) | Mtg ft | Shielded | EM | Exit |
|---|
Have the manufacturer’s .ies photometric file? Import it and the lumens, wattage, and shielding flag fill in automatically — including computed lumens for absolute-photometry LED files.
Ask the assistant — describe the space and it draws it, places the fixtures and runs the point-by-point. It fills this tab in for you and the engine recalculates.
Guided design
Tell us the room — we’ll lay it out
Don’t have a drawing yet? Describe the space and the tool draws the room, works out how many fixtures it takes to hit your footcandle target, spaces them on a proper grid, adds the room to the Interior tab, and runs the full point-by-point calculation. Adjust anything afterward.
From your Fixtures tab. Add one from a preset, the AES catalog, or an IES import first.
Leave ticked and you get the minimum number of fixtures that reaches the target — nothing padded. Untick to force an exact count.
Your drawing — place fixtures on the plan
Open the floor or site plan as a PDF or an ASCII DXF export (DWG can’t be read by a browser — export to PDF or DXF from CAD). The drawing stays on your computer; nothing is uploaded. Pick a fixture, choose Place, and click the plan; use Scale by clicking two points a known distance apart. Placements save with the project — re-open the drawing file after a reload to see the underlay again.
Move things by hand: in Pan mode, click a fixture to select it, drag to move it, arrow keys nudge (Shift = 5 ft), R rotates, Delete removes. Drag empty space to pan; scroll to zoom. A fixture you move by hand is yours — the assistant leaves it where you put it, and the footcandle grid recalculates around it.
Point-by-point footcandles
The real thing: horizontal illuminance computed at every grid point from each placed fixture’s photometry — manufacturer .ies data when imported, a generic downward distribution otherwise. Emergency mode re-runs the grid with only the EM-flagged fixtures at their battery output and checks it against the IBC egress minimums. Needs the scale calibrated and fixtures placed. Set mounting heights on the Fixtures tab; use Rotate fixture to aim Type II/III optics; draw a Calc area or let it cover the placements. Colors band from blue (dark) through green to red (bright); values print on the report snapshot.
Placed fixture counts
Tallied live from the plan. Push the counts into the exterior worksheet or a room with one click — the compliance math then runs on exactly what’s drawn.
Ask the assistant — name the rooms and their use and it sizes each one against the footcandle target. It fills this tab in for you and the engine recalculates.
Rooms & footcandles
Add each space, pick its type (the footcandle target and lighting-power allowance fill in — both editable), and assign fixtures. Average illuminance uses the lumen method: fc = lumens × CU × LLF ÷ area. CU (coefficient of utilization) 0.6–0.7 suits typical rooms; LLF (light loss factor) 0.85 is a common LED design value.
Egress & exit signs (whole building)
Ask the assistant — say how the space is used and it writes the control zones and dimming levels. It fills this tab in for you and the engine recalculates.
Control zones & dimming levels
Group lighting by how it’s controlled, then label each dimming level with its percentage — e.g. Occupied 100% / Vacant 50% / After-hours off. The checks flag the energy-code rules each zone type has to meet.
What the energy code requires
Ask the assistant — describe the site and it lays out the poles and wall packs inside the lumen budget. It fills this tab in for you and the engine recalculates.
Exterior lighting — building, pole, sign & EM
Add a row for each exterior fixture type and its quantity. Everything totals against the jurisdiction’s lumen budget for your zone and acreage (set on the Project tab). Internally illuminated signs are handled per the selected code — exempt from the budget in Tucson/Pima, but CCT-limited.
| Fixture | Qty | Total lumens | FS/US |
|---|
Ask the assistant — tell it what to change and it redoes the design behind this report. It fills this tab in for you and the engine recalculates.
Compliance summary
The report prints the luminaire schedule, room-by-room footcandles, the controls schedule, the exterior lumen calculation in the Tucson OLC §104.2.1 plan format, egress checks, and a certification block. Your work also autosaves in this browser.
Have AES review this design — free
We’re a Tucson design-build electrical contractor. Send the design over and a project manager will sanity-check the layout, the code path, and give you a real number to build it — fixtures and install.
What this tool checks. Interior: average illuminance by the lumen (zonal-cavity) method against editable IES-style footcandle targets, lighting power density against IECC-style allowances, occupant-sensor and daylight-control triggers, and dimming levels against the IECC C405 light-reduction rules. Egress: emergency illumination (1 fc average / 0.1 fc minimum, 90-minute source — IBC 1008), exit-sign count and viewing distance (IBC 1013), and the NEC 700/701 wiring notes. Exterior: total and unshielded lumens per net acre against the selected jurisdiction’s tables, per-fixture unshielded caps, color-temperature limits, sign rules, curfews, and Tucson’s special-inspection thresholds.
Point-by-point photometrics. The Drawing tab computes true horizontal illuminance at every grid point from each placed fixture’s photometry — real manufacturer .ies candela data when you import it, inverse-square with the cosine of the incidence angle, mounting heights, aimed optics, and your light loss factor — with a color-banded grid on your plan, average/max/min and uniformity ratios, and a minimum-fc target check. It models the direct component only (no interreflections or shadowing) and is planning-grade: for a stamped photometric study, our engineering team runs the full model. Codes also change: rule data here was verified August 8, 2026, and the 2025 Tucson/Pima revision is included as a clearly marked draft.
Which cities are covered? Thirteen Arizona jurisdictions in fourteen rule packs (Tucson/Pima County carries both its adopted 2012 code and the 2025 draft), every one built from the published code text: the dark-sky lumen-budget codes (Tucson/Pima County 2012 and the 2025 draft, Marana, Oro Valley, Sahuarita, Flagstaff’s narrow-band-amber standards, Sedona) and the Phoenix-metro shielding/trespass codes (Phoenix §23-100, Mesa, Chandler’s zero-foot-candle rule, Gilbert, Glendale, Scottsdale’s lumens tiers, Tempe) — plus the statewide ARS shielding statute everywhere. Each pack cites its sections so your permit reviewer can follow the math. Related: parking lot lighting in Tucson, LED retrofits, and our field guide on wiring exit signs and emergency lights.
Read the code you are designing to. Every rule pack in this tool has a plain page with the code’s own tables, curfews, sign rules and submittal requirements, cited and dated: all Arizona outdoor lighting codes · Tucson / Pima County · Marana · Oro Valley · Sahuarita · Phoenix · Mesa · Chandler · Gilbert · Glendale · Scottsdale · Tempe · Flagstaff · Sedona · Tucson / Pima 2025 draft (not adopted).
Designing lighting for a real building?
We design and self-perform interior, site, and sign lighting across Arizona — commercial electricians in Tucson who handle the photometrics, the permit, and the install on one contract.
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