The building has alreadybeen engineered.Why are we engineering it again?

Everyone is putting software on top of buildings. Who is getting the full record of the building first?

The backups, the controller programs, the drawings, the submittals, the sequences, the commissioning reports. They exist. They are scattered across contractors' laptops, old servers and email. When something changes nobody can say what, when, or who. That is the problem under every other problem.

Atoll is the record-keeper. You install one file on a server you already have on site. It reads the BAS devices, read-only. You ask everyone who touches the building for what they should be providing anyway, and Atoll keeps every version: hashed, timestamped, attributed, and compared with the last one. Missing deliveries are visible. The contractor is accountable, and protected, by the same record.

It is free, open source, and fully functional on your network forever. Connect it to a cloud instance you also own, or to ours, only if you want to. The record is yours, exportable in open formats, at any time. And it has an API and MCP tools, so whatever you put on top of the building next starts from the truth.

What the record holds and how intake works.

A controller application file lists every object the controller exposes, with its name, type, instance, units and states. A station backup is a complete description of every device, point, link, alarm and history on that supervisor, whichever brand built it. The network will tell you what is on it if you ask. The equipment schedule says what each unit serves. The drawings say where it is.

Archipelago reads those files and keeps track of where every fact came from. Every line in the model carries one of four labels: observed on a live device, imported from a file, inferred by a rule with a confidence, or confirmed by a person. When Archipelago is not sure, it asks you. It never fills in a blank and calls it a fact.

Templates. Relativized graphics. Macros. Bulk imports. Copy and paste. Building automation has plenty of tools for doing the same work faster. We are still doing the same work.

Take eighty VAV boxes. You can duplicate a good template across the whole job. Now account for the ones that are cooling-only, the ones with hot water reheat, the ones with electric stages, the fan-powered boxes, the exhaust interlocks, the different minimum and maximum airflows, the different setpoints, and the three AHUs that serve them. Make sure every point maps to the right box, every graphic shows the equipment that is actually there, and every alarm and history matches the application that is actually running. Then keep all of that in sync when something changes.

The engineering already describes most of those differences. The controller knows its own airflow limits. The program knows whether there is a heating valve. The schedule knows which AHU serves the box. So why are we recreating them by hand, one representation at a time?

Archipelago is built around a different idea: understand each piece of equipment first, then generate everything around it.

Not eighty copies of a graphic. Eighty equipment instances, each with its own verified parameters and relationships, rendered through one shared system that knows what makes them different. The heating valve appears because the box has one. The electric stages appear only where they exist. The AHU relationship lives in the model, so changing it changes the navigation, the graphic and the dependencies, not a file. When a value or a relationship cannot be established from the engineering, Archipelago says so and asks, instead of inheriting it from the box next door.

Less duplication. Fewer places to drift. More time for commissioning, troubleshooting, and making the building work.

Stop copying the engineering. Start using it. See the concept walkthrough.

In most buildings the graphics are a second drawing of the system. Somebody made them by hand, and everybody trusts them until the day they are wrong.

In Archipelago the interface is generated from the model, and the model is the record. Sure, there is still some abstraction. You know what we mean. But every value on a graphic traces back to a fact with a label: observed on the device, imported from a file, inferred by a rule, or confirmed by a person. When the graphic shows a reheat valve, it is because the record-keeper says the box has one, and you can see why.

Archipelago was started by ThirtyK, a controls engineering shop that got tired of building the same building twice, and of never being handed the record of the one it was asked to fix. It is a new, independent project with its own code, written from scratch on synthetic fixtures, and it sits beside the systems contractors already install rather than replacing them.

It is an independent open-source project. It is not produced, endorsed or supported by Tridium, Honeywell, Johnson Controls, Distech Controls or any other manufacturer. How to get involved.