Floor plans
Draw the building once and everything has a place in it: rooms, doors, screens and lights, a standing-up cutaway view, a read-only view to leave open, and a Floor plan tile that shows a wall display where it is.
What it is for
A list of screens answers "which screens do I have". It cannot answer "which screen is the one by the lifts", and on a site with more than about six displays that is the question people actually have.
A floor plan is the answer. You draw the walls once, name the rooms, drop each screen where it hangs, and from then on the plan is the way in: a marker is green when the screen reported in within the last ninety seconds, its label says what the schedule has it showing, and clicking it opens a panel with Open this screen on it — which takes you straight to that screen and its scenes. Finding "the one by the lifts" and then editing it is one path rather than two. The same drawing can then go on a wall display as a tile — with the screen showing it ringed, which turns any panel into a wayfinding board.
Drawing one
Plans live under Plans in the bar. New plan makes an empty one with a single level called Ground floor; open it and you get a canvas with a measured grid, and a strip of tools across the top.
One tool at a time, and the strip always says what clicking will do. Escape puts any tool down.
Right-click the drawing for the same tools with the point already chosen: start a wall here, name this room, put a screen here, and — when you clicked near a wall — add a door or a window to it. While a run of walls is going it offers the three ways to stop instead: finish it here, undo the last corner, or cancel the wall altogether. Undo the last corner is the one worth remembering, because it is the only undo there is: it drops the wall just drawn and steps back to the corner before it, rather than making you start the room again.
Wall
Click corner to corner. Each click continues from the last, so a rectangular room is five clicks rather than eight, and clicking back on the first corner closes the loop and ends the chain. The line you are about to commit is drawn as you move, with its length in metres. Corners snap to a 100 mm grid, and to the axis of the corner you are drawing from when you are within 300 mm of it — which is what makes hand-drawn rooms come out square. Hold Shift to lock it square outright rather than merely preferring it. The grid button beside the tools turns the snapping off for a building that was never built to a 100 mm module, and the menu next to it is what new walls are drawn at, from 75 to 300 mm; a wall already drawn is changed by selecting it.
Split line
Click corner to corner, exactly like a wall — same snapping, same chain, same way of closing a loop. The difference is what it is: a split line bounds a room and builds nothing. It is drawn dashed here and does not appear at all in the standing-up view. It is for the open-plan floor whose kitchen end has its own name, which without it you could only express by drawing a wall that is not there or by calling the whole floor one room. It has a length and nothing else, because a thickness or a height on something that is never built would be a setting that does nothing.
Door and Window
Click on a wall. A door is 900 mm with a swing drawn on it, a window is 1.2 m. They are stored as a position along the wall rather than a pair of coordinates, so moving or stretching the wall later takes the doorway with it. Click somewhere that is not a wall and the strip tells you so rather than doing nothing. Once placed, an opening can be dragged along its own wall, given an exact distance and width, and given a sill and head height for the standing-up view. A door adds Other hinge and Other side, which between them cover all four ways it can be hung. See Changing what you have drawn.
Room
Click inside a space you have already walled in. The room appears straight away, named Room, with the name box in the properties panel ready to type into — there is no dialogue to answer, because a browser is free to suppress those and the tool would then look broken rather than blocked. Rooms are not shapes you draw: the shape is worked out from the walls every time it is drawn, which is why the area figure is always right and why moving a wall reshapes the room with no further work. Click a space that is not closed yet and the room is still made, with a line saying it has no shape until the walls around it meet. Drag the name tag to move it out of the way — or into the space next door, which moves the room there. That is the way to correct a name applied to the wrong space. Selecting a tag lights up the floor it belongs to. If you later delete the walls around a room, it says so rather than disappearing.
Screen
Set the size in the box beside the tools first — the diagonal in inches, the way screens are sold — then click where it is mounted. It takes the next screen that is not on the plan yet; the Screens panel underneath lists every paired screen and marks the ones still missing. Screens are drawn at their real width, so a 75-inch board in the foyer looks like one beside a 24-inch monitor by the lifts, and portrait or landscape comes from what the screen itself reports rather than from anything set here. Drag one afterwards to move it. Near a wall it lands flat on the face of that wall, on the side you dragged it to, rather than on the line the wall is drawn along — a screen is fixed to the surface, and snapping to the middle buries half the panel in the masonry. Away from any wall it stays exactly where you dropped it, because a display on a stand in the middle of a room is a real thing. Select one and a panel over the drawing shows whether it has reported in and what the schedule has it playing, with its size and a Turn 90° button.
Light
Click where the fitting is. It takes the next light in the household that is not on the plan yet, and the panel that appears lets you change which one it is, so the order it offers them in never matters. Lights do not snap to walls — a pendant is in the middle of a ceiling, and dragging it to the nearest wall would be wrong for the ordinary case — so one goes exactly where you drop it. The box beside the tools says where new ones are fixed: ceiling, wall, or floor and table. That is the only thing it changes, and it changes it in the standing-up view, where a pendant hangs just under the ceiling, a wall light sits at picture height and a lamp stands about waist high. The height follows the walls around it, so raising a storey raises its pendants with it.
Right-drag to move the view and scroll to zoom, anywhere, with any tool held. Fit, in the controls over the bottom right corner of the drawing, frames the whole thing again. The left button is kept for the work: a click places a corner, and a drag takes hold of whatever is under it. Left-dragging empty floor deliberately does nothing, because when it moved the drawing every mis-aimed click while drawing shoved the building sideways instead. The view never re-frames itself while you are drawing — being zoomed somewhere is a decision, and a canvas that undoes it every time you place a corner is unusable. Nothing is stored until you press Save, and Save says so plainly: if it fails, your drawing stays on screen and the button stays lit rather than pretending. With the Select tool, clicking a wall, a split line, a screen, a room tag or an opening selects it, and Delete or Backspace removes what is selected — as does the Delete button in the panel. Deleting a wall takes its doors and windows with it.
Changing what you have drawn
Select is the tool for everything already on the drawing. Click a wall, a split line, a door, a window, a room tag or a screen and a panel appears in the corner with everything about it that can be changed. Lengths along the drawing are in metres and everything else is in millimetres, because this is a drawing tool and somebody who knows their door is 838 wide should be able to say so.
A selected wall gets a square handle on each end and its length written along it. Drag a handle to move that corner — and with it every wall meeting there, which is what keeps a room closed — or type an exact length in the panel. Setting a length has to move one end, so the panel says which: Move start or Move end, and clicking a wall picks whichever end you clicked nearest, so the box is usually already about the end you were looking at. Pinning the wrong end walks the building across the page instead of stretching the one wall. A solid wall also has a thickness and a height; the height changes nothing in plan and everything in the standing-up view. A split line has neither, because it builds nothing.
A selected door or window can be dragged along its own wall, or given an exact distance from the wall's start. Width, sill and head are in millimetres — the sill and head are what make a window a window rather than a doorway once the drawing stands up. A door has two more buttons, and they are separate on purpose: Other hinge changes which jamb it hangs on, Other side changes which way it swings through the wall. Between them they cover all four ways a door can be hung; one flip alone gives you two of them at random. An opening is kept clear of both ends of its wall and can never be made wider than the wall it is in, so there is always something left holding it up.
A selected room is renamed in the panel, and its floor lights up so there is no doubt which space the name belongs to. A selected screen or light gets its own panel on the other side of the drawing — a screen with its size and a Turn 90° button, a light with which light it is, how it is fixed, and whether it is a spot or a strip with a length.
Delete removes whatever is selected — the button in the panel, or the Delete key. The key is deliberately ignored while you are typing in a field, so Backspace in a room's name corrects a typo rather than deleting the room.
Tracing an existing drawing
Most buildings already have a plan somewhere — a PDF from the architect, a fire plan by the door, a scan in a drawer. Import a drawing on the plan page puts it under the canvas and you trace the walls straight over it.
You are asked how wide the image is in real life, in metres, because nothing in an image file knows: DPI is missing or wrong on most scans, and a PDF exported to fit a page lost it long before it got here. Measure the whole image, edge to edge, including any white space around the building — it only has to be close, because the walls you trace are what get measured afterwards.
Fade and Turn adjust it while you work. Remove takes it away once you are done. It is never drawn on a screen: a wall display shows the model, not the scan.
The standing-up view
The standing-up button, in the controls over the bottom right corner of the drawing, stands the same drawing up: walls at their real thickness, doors and windows as actual holes in them, rooms as floors, screens as panels at mounting height and lights as discs at theirs. Drag to turn it, right-drag to move it, scroll to zoom — the same two buttons as the flat view, so neither has to be learned twice.
Walls are cut off at about waist height by default, and that is on purpose. A building drawn at its true 2.4 m is a closed box — the walls facing you hide everything the plan exists to show, and turning it only changes which rooms are hidden. Full height is there if you want it, on the wall-height button in the same cluster, and the same button cuts them down again. Beside it, one button turns the model a step at a time and a vertical slider sets how far above the building the view sits.
Drawing always happens in the flat view. Picking up a tool switches back to it, because a click in a standing-up view is ambiguous by construction: the same pixel is a point on the floor, a point up a wall, and a point on the roof behind it.
Putting a plan on a wall
Floor plan is a tile like any other: add it to a scene from the widget palette. It is available to every plan and needs nothing connected — only a plan with this screen placed on it.
The setting that matters is Plan, and its default is "The plan this screen is on". A screen resolves that for itself, so one scene with one floor plan tile can be deployed to every panel in a building and each will draw its own storey with itself ringed. Naming a specific plan instead is for the case where a lobby board should show a floor it is not on.
The tile reloads the plan once a minute. That is slower than the read-only view on purpose — the drawing hardly ever changes, and what does is which screens are alive, which is only good to about ninety seconds anyway. It does mean a screen you have just plugged in can take a minute longer to turn green on a wall board than it does in the portal.
The tile shows the building and changes nothing. There is no Open this screen on a wall panel and no switching lights from one, deliberately: a wall display is unattended and often public, and the person in front of it has not signed in to anything. A route from a foyer board into the scene editor would be a route from a foyer into the account. Both live in the portal, where somebody is signed in. A screen that has not been placed on any plan says so on the tile rather than drawing an arbitrary floor. That is fixable by whoever reads it; a plan of the wrong storey is not. A tile people can move puts itself back. Two minutes after the last touch it drops whatever the last person did — pan, zoom and angle — and returns to what it was configured to show. An unattended panel gets used by people who then walk away, and a building left dragged off the edge of the tile looks exactly like a broken one to everybody who comes past afterwards.
Lights on the plan
Lights go on a plan the same way screens do, and for the same reason: a list of forty lamps cannot answer "is anything still on upstairs", and a drawing can. Place them with the Light tool, and from then on the plan shows which are lit — in the editor, in the read-only view and on a wall panel.
Every lit fitting is the same bright orange, whatever colour it is showing, and every unlit one is grey. That is on purpose. Lights used to be drawn in the colour they reported, which meant a bulb sitting at white — which plenty of them do, and every tunable-white one does by default — came out almost the same shade as a lamp that was switched off, while the one next to it went orange because it reported nothing at all. Same state, two appearances. On or off is the question the drawing exists to answer, so it gets one answer.
Where a light does report a colour, that colour is drawn as a ring around it. Where it reports a level, there is a dial around the outside showing how bright it is — a small gauge alongside, if it is a strip. Most lights report neither, for the reason in the note below.
A light is drawn where you put it and does not snap to anything, because the common case is the middle of a ceiling. How it is fixed — ceiling, wall, or floor and table — decides how high it hangs when the drawing stands up.
A fitting can also be a strip rather than a spot: a batten over a worktop, a cove above a bulkhead, a run under a counter. Pick Strip beside the Light tool, or change one already down in its panel, and set a length in millimetres. A strip is the one thing on the plan drawn to its real size, because the whole point of setting a length is to see where the run starts and stops — everything else is a symbol drawn larger than life so it can be found. Turn 90° lays it along the other wall and +15° nudges it round for anything in between. You can grab a strip anywhere along its run, not just in the middle.
Any light the household has can go on: Home Assistant, WLED, Govee and Hue all arrive in the same list, and it is the same list the light widgets and the assistant use, so a lamp renamed in one place is renamed everywhere.
Click a light and you can switch it from there, in the editor or in the read-only view. The plan changes colour as you press rather than waiting for the house to answer, and puts itself back if the answer is no. There is no dimmer: the plan usually does not know the current level, so a slider would start from a number we invented — dimming lives in the light tiles on a screen, which do know.
On or off is usually all there is to show. Home Assistant keeps brightness and colour in entity attributes, and attributes stay on your own network — so for a Home Assistant light the plan can say lit or not and nothing more. A lamp dimmed to a tenth is drawn exactly like one at full, and the panel says which of the two you are looking at rather than leaving you to assume. Where a light does report its colour and level, the plan draws them — as a ring and a dial around the fitting rather than by recolouring it, so a light that is on always looks like a light that is on. Switching one usually needs a screen. Home Assistant, WLED and Hue all live on your own network, so the portal reaches them by asking a screen to pass the message on — with every screen off, those lights cannot be reached at all and the plan says so rather than pretending the switch worked. Govee goes through Govee's own cloud and works either way.
A light that is removed from the household stays on the plan, drawn as missing rather than quietly disappearing. A fitting that vanishes off a drawing is one nobody removes from the drawing, and the plan stops matching the building one lamp at a time.
Sharing a plan without letting it be edited
View, at the top of the plan page, opens the same drawing with nothing that can change it: no tools, no properties, no save. It is the one to leave open on a desk, on a spare monitor in reception, or on the screen somebody watches during a drill — a plan that cannot be edited cannot be edited by accident.
It turns, pans and zooms exactly like the editor and refreshes itself every twenty seconds, so screens go on and off the drawing as they come and go. Edit takes you back.
It is read-only, not public. Whoever opens it still has to be signed in with access to floor plans, which is deliberate: a plan of a building shows where the cameras and the exits are.
The editor deliberately does not refresh on a timer. A drawing that reloads under somebody's hands is a drawing they lose.
Screens during an emergency broadcast
While a broadcast is running, every plan — the editor, the read-only view and the tile on a wall — turns a screen bright red once that screen has confirmed the message is actually on its glass. A banner above the drawing names the broadcast, so a plan of coloured screens with no incident never happens.
Anything not red has not confirmed. It may be off, it may be offline, or it may simply not have checked in yet, and the plan says that under the banner rather than leaving you to guess. A screen that goes dark part-way through an incident stops being red within a few minutes rather than staying red on a drawing nobody is watching closely.
This is the one thing on the plan that is not the portal's opinion. Everywhere else the drawing reports what was sent or what was scheduled; here the screen itself reports back, from the code that paints the message, and repeats it every minute for as long as it is up.
It is not a promise that anybody read it. Nothing can promise that. Red means the message reached the glass — checking that somebody was standing in front of it is still a job for people.
What the plan does and does not know
The dot beside a screen means it reported in within the last ninety seconds, not that it is on right now. A screen asks the portal for its configuration about once a minute, and that poll is the only signal there is — one unplugged forty seconds ago still reads as connected.
The scene named under a screen is what the schedule says should be showing, not what is. Only the screen itself knows the latter: a scene can be overridden from the portal, that override lives in the screen's own memory and is never reported back. The tile says so on itself for the same reason.
Areas are measured to the middle of the walls, which is the convention every drawing package uses and about two per cent larger than the carpet.
Rename and Delete are on each card in the Plans list. Deleting a plan deletes its levels, everything drawn on them, and any imported drawing. It does not touch a single screen — a placement is a position, not a pairing — but a Floor plan tile pointed at that plan will say it has nothing to show.
Related
- The scene editorThe scene editor is where you arrange a screen's widgets on a twelve-column grid, watch the real widgets render behind them, and push the result to the wall.
- Every widget there isThe complete list of widgets Mirra ships with, grouped the way the scene editor groups them, with what each one shows and what it needs before it will show anything.
- Pairing a screenHow a display joins your household: the six-character code it shows, what to type into Mirra, what pairing creates, and what happens when you unpair.
- Screen settingsEvery setting on a screen's own page that belongs to the screen rather than to a scene — its shape, which way up it is, its camera and gestures, the commands you can send it, and unpairing.