SPOT Overview
Overview 
The Sensor Placement + Optimization Tool (SPOT Pro™) is a user friendly yet robust daylighting design tool. It is intended to help Architects, Engineers, Commissioning Agents, Owners and any other interested building design or maintance individuals in evaluating the annual daylighting characteristics of a space, refine and optimize daylighting designs, quantify existing or intended electric lighting performance and help establish the optimal photosensor system placements and settings. SPOT Pro is commonly used as a daylighting design and analysis only engine and can produce high quality renderings and produce a number of standard daylighting metric reports including LEED, CHPS, UDI, and IgCC.
SPOT Pro consists of a series of screens that the user navigates sequentially, as illustrated in the flow diagram below. The sequence of input and output screens is designed to minimize user wait time. Wait time is reduced by running required calculations behind the scenes before they are needed. Hence, much of the calculation time in the program occurs while the user is interacting with another input screen or reviewing a results screen. Re-calculation of results occurs only when necessary depending on user changes of input parameters. This sequential staging of the interface screens also provides a coherent structure to the process of designing a daylighting, electric lighting and photosensor control system. This results in two main functions of the program: Daylighting Design Tools and Photosensor Analysis Tools.
The Daylighting Design Tools consist of all geometric and site inputs, and calculates electric lighting performance and annual daylighting results, and performance metric reports. The final stage of the Design Tool provides recommended photosensor placements for the analyzed space. These recommended placements provide good starting points for analysis, but do not necessarily represent the absolute optimal photosensor placement. Further iteration with the Analysis Tool is required to fine tune the photosensor system design.
The Photosensor Analysis Tools consists of two screens and reports. The first screen allows the user to mix and match photocell placement and controller settings with the defined luminaire zones, and analyze the resulting correlations and estimated annual performance. The second screen takes the set photosensor scenarios, analyzes their performance throughout the year using annual hour-by-hour weather data, and provides a variety of annual results allowing for an in-depth review of the system from both a qualitative (light levels) and quantitative (energy savings) standpoint. From here you can export both DOE-2 (Equest) and EnergyPlus schedule files that represent the lighting controls throughout the year for that space. There are also commissioning reports available that provide a printable version of the photocell placement and photosensor controller commissioning settings as they relate to the specific product selected.
Flow Diagram
Screenshots Pro v5.X
Screen shots of SPOT Pro will be updated here soon... In the meantime, screenshots can be seen in the SPOT Pro manual.
Screenshots v4.2
The following screen shots demonstrate the user interface and technical capabilities of SPOT™.