For any EE who has ever watched the clock hit 4:30 with a fresh COMcheck on their desk.
Six months into my first job as an electrical engineer in MEP, I got assigned a COMcheck on a car dealership. At 4:30 PM. Due at 5.
Oh no.
Any EE reading this knows the feeling. That specific moment when the light leaves your eyes and the next thirty minutes (or three hours, or whatever you can salvage between now and the deadline) belong to COMcheck Web.
I opened the project. A ton of fixtures. Showroom downlights, service bay highbays, parts counter strips, exterior wall packs, parking lot poles, the whole catalog. I started clicking.
The saving grace was that this one was building area method. Not space-by-space. One row for the whole building's lighting allowance, fixture counts and wattages totaled in. Painful but mechanical. If it had been space-by-space, every room mapped one at a time to COMcheck's activity-category list, I might have quit MEP that afternoon. (Half joking. Mostly.)
Sitting there clicking, I had one thought.
What if I didn't have to do this?
Not "what if it were easier." Not "what if there were a better UI." What if the whole interpretive grunt-work part of compliance, the part that has nothing to do with engineering and everything to do with data entry, just wasn't on my desk anymore.
That thought is why Autometica exists.
The version of the product that's shipping today does both halves of what made that afternoon brutal.
For building area method projects like the car dealership, it reads every fixture from your Revit model, pulls quantity and wattage, totals the building area straight from the architectural link, and produces a .cxl ready to upload. The thing I was doing manually at 4:35 PM, the plugin does in the time it takes to walk to the coffee machine.
For space-by-space (the version that would have made me quit), it does the harder thing. It reads each room from the linked architectural model, proposes a COMcheck activity category, and gives you a review screen where you spot-check the mappings and the decisions the product makes. The interpretive call still belongs to a licensed engineer.
In both cases the engineer is still the engineer. Nobody is "automating compliance." Nobody is hitting submit on a calculation they haven't checked. The work that's getting taken off your plate is the data entry, not the judgment.
That distinction matters because the engineers I built this for are not looking to hand the project to a robot. They're looking to get the part that bores them out of their workflow so the part that uses their license stays interesting.
Six months in, on a Friday afternoon at 4:30, I had no leverage. I had a deadline, a fixture schedule, and a web form. The version of me that walked out of the office that night went on to build Autometica.
If you've ever had a 4:30 PM COMcheck land on your desk, this one is for you.