Lighting a site used to need an expert. Now it fits in a browser tab.
Getting light right is harder than it sounds. Too few poles and there are dark corners where people trip or hide. Too many and the owner pays for power they never needed. Getting the balance right meant hiring one of a small group of specialists, and every parking lot, ball field, and warehouse had to wait its turn in their queue.
Light ARchitect hands that job to everyone else. Draw around the area you want lit on a satellite map, let the software suggest where the poles go, and see the real brightness numbers before you commit. Free, in a browser, and on your phone when you are standing on the site.
Three things stood between a site and its lights
You draw on your actual property
There is no blank grid to figure out. You type in an address, your site shows up from above the way it looks on a maps app, and everything you draw sits on the real place at its real size.
Numbers you can stand behind
Making it simple to use never meant making the math softer. The brightness is worked out from each light's real, measured behavior, not a guess. For every area you get the average brightness, the brightest and darkest spots, and a score for how evenly the light is spread. It all prints to a PDF that a professional reviewer will accept.
5,000 lights, no endless scrolling
Watch an expert pick a light and you notice something: they never scroll a catalog. They rule things out. So the list never opens as a wall of 5,000 options. You answer a few questions first, warm light or cool, how bright, how much power, how wide a spread, and what is left is the handful that actually fit.
Hand-picked is the important part. The maker's full catalog holds more than 250,000 options. This is the short list a real plan would ever choose from.
A lit ball field in one tap
Baseball, softball, football, soccer, tennis. Somebody has already worked out how many poles a field needs, how tall they should be, and how bright it has to be for a school game versus a televised one. Pick the sport, drop the ready-made set onto your real field, and turn it to line up. The way that drag-and-turn works is one of the three patents.
See it before it exists
This all began as a phone app, one of the first of its kind in the lighting business. You stand in the parking lot, hold up your phone, and a light pole that has not been built yet appears on the screen in the right spot, glowing onto the ground. Nothing beats seeing it. That camera-first idea is still in the product today.
What six years added up to
The job was never to hide the hard numbers. It was to make them easy to walk through, for the contractor and the expert, in the same app.
Three ways of working, new enough to patent
A patent is a public record saying nobody had done it quite this way before. Three of the ways you use this app cleared that bar. I am named as a co-inventor on all three, and the patents belong to the company. Anyone can read them at the links below.
The clever part moved to a bigger stage
The light library and the software that works out where poles go did not stay locked in one app. They became two features inside CORE, the company's main online system, so the sales team gets the same suggestions the designer does.
That part of the story has its own page: Enterprise AI.
The computer suggests. The person decides.
This is the project where that idea clicked for me. The software does the math, puts the options in order, and shows its reasoning. The human still makes the call. Show people their real site so they trust what they are looking at. Start simple and let the details unfold for whoever wants them. Never let the shortcut break the rules. I build the C2 and security work the same way.