The following is a list of both the commercial and free software produced by Square One research.

ECOTECT

ECOTECT is the most user friendly and fully featured building performance analysis and design tool on the market today. It combines an interactive building design interface and 3D modeller with a wide range of environmental analysis tools for a detailed assessment of solar, thermal, lighting, shadows & shading design, energy & building regulations, acoustics, air flow, cost & resource performance of buildings at any scale. ...and even more importantly, it has been written and developed by designers for designers, to be as useful at concept stage as it is during final design development.

Solar Tool

With its interactive user interface, the Solar Tool makes the process of accurately sizing and positioning overhangs, shading devices and louvres easy. You will never use manual methods again. This software is a must for architects, planners and building services engineers, anyone who needs to consider the extent of solar penetration into buildings, overshadowing or the most appropriate means of shading a window.

Weather Tool

The Weather Tool is a visualisation and analysis program for hourly climate data. It recognises a wide range of international weather file formats as well as allowing users to specify customised data import formats for ASCII files. It also provides a wide range of display options, including both 2D and 3D graphs as well as wind roses and sun-path diagrams.

Free Software

Conversion Tool

A quick Window's conversion utility for all types of units of measure from all branches of physics, engineering and architecture. Based on a customisable data file with an extensive list of even the most obscure units, it allows multiple, simultaneous conversions and automatic inference from entered units abreviations. The customisable data file also allows the definition of complex formula for conversion to and from a unit, significantly increasing the range of possible conversions.

A wide range of units of every type has already been covered, however, if you know of a particular unit that hasn't made it into the list yet, please contact us with details and we'll make it available to all.

Location Tool

Provides access to a searchable database of latitude, longitude and time-zones for over 160,000 towns, cities and geographic features around the world. Locations can be searched by name, by clicking on a map or by entering a latitude/longitude pair.

By selecting an item from the list or by clicking on the map, the Location Tool can communicate location details directly to ECOTECT, The Weather Tool and The Solar Tool (this tool is included with these commercial software downloads).

Notes Tool

The Notes Tool provides a useful multi-page rich text editor with OLE support, a built-in multi-month calendar, a range of date and time stamping functions and context-sensitive ShellExecute features for automatically launching applications, commonly edited files, URLs and email addresses embedded in documents.

Basically I needed a quick and easy electronic scrapbook to hierachically store ideas, links, notes and to-do lists in, and then be able to quickly access them later. There didn't seem to be much around that suited my needs so I wrote this. I use it pretty much everyday so it's a bit eclectic in its features, however it is flexible and adaptable to a wide range of uses so it may prove useful to other people as well.

PMV Tool

The Predicted Mean Vote Tool is another implementation of ISO 7730-1993 (E) for calculating human comfort based on environmental conditions. This tool has the advantage of being able to input a required comfort setting and it will automatically calculate the environmental factors required to achieve it.

Psycho Tool

The Psycho Tool is an interactive graphical Psychrometric Chart. Psychrometrics is basically the study of moist air, based on the relationship between air temperature and absolute humidity. In this tool, the various axis are explained as well as various thermal processes. Multiple points can also be plotted and the resulting values stored.

The Psycho Tool also contains an implementation of ISO 7730-1993 (E) for calculating the Predicted Mean Vote (PMV), a predictive measure of human comfort. The application allows for the interactive manipulation of all factors that affect the PMV comfort vote.

Radiance Control Panel

A user-friendly interface to RADIANCE, an excellent, freely available command-line physics-based lighting simulation tool from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratories in the US.

The Radiance Control Panel provides a syntax-highlighted editor for .rad and .rif files which includes interactive context help for all RADIANCE objects and in-line commands. It also features a visual interface to the current .rif file settings and, when loading a project, it generates an index tree of all project files and the location of all settings, materials and objects within them.

Radiance Image Viewer

This is a replacement for the original 'WinImage' viewer that came with Desktop Radiance, an implementation of RADIANCE for Microsoft Windows. The Radiance Image Viewer allows you to view multiple RADIANCE PIC files as well as performing a range of scaling, false-colouring, information-gathering and overlaying of contours, etc. Simple controls allow you to set scale values and units, whilst useful command-line processing lets you load multiple files at once using wildcard characters or even just the rif file name.

Ruler Tool

The Ruler Tool is a great little utility for accurately measuring anything on your computer screen. This includes images, font heights, dialog boxes, etc. This can be very useful for web work and graphic design - allowing you to avoid having to screen-grab and view in an image manipulation package.

The ability to make the ruler semi-transparent and then drag a line or region exactly over the area you are interested in makes lining things up extremely easy and accurate. Moreover, you can set your own custom scales and even reverse and rotate the whole ruler. Best of all, it is completely free.

Teaching Tools

Teaching Tools are a series of utilities and applets initially developed to explain and demonstrate important building analysis concepts through animation and interactive play. Their graphical nature makes them useful to individuals interested in the field, in demonstrations by teachers, lecturers and academics or to student groups used as part of structured workshops. Over the past few years they have been gradually refined through use in a range of different courses and are now available for public download.

Wave Tool

This is a simple tool that animates and demonstrates principles of planar and spherical longitudinal wave propagation. Users have interactive control of frequency, amplitude, displacement and fluid viscosity, as well as a range of display and animation properties. The source position can be repositioned anywhere within the grid and the animation paused and stepped through to explain the process.