Flame is a desktop tool for designing and validating fire detection & alarm layouts to BS 5839-1:2025. Import a floor plan, trace the building, drop real catalogue devices — and watch 17 automated checks score coverage, audibility, call-point reach, zoning and escape routes as you work. Then export a report a competent person can put their name to.
Real screenshots from the current build — this is the tool you get, not a mock-up.
Four steps from a flat floor plan to a validated, documented design.
Load a floor plan — PNG, JPG, BMP or a page from a PDF — as a locked backdrop. Measure one known distance on the plan and the whole drawing snaps to real-world units: metres, feet, whatever you work in.
Trace walls over the backdrop with line, rectangle and polygon tools — snapping keeps you square. Then hit Detect Rooms and Flame finds every enclosed space for you to accept or reject, ready for categories and fire zones.
Drop detectors, sounders, call points and VADs from a catalogue of ~33 real devices — Apollo, Hochiki, Notifier, C-TEC, Eaton, KAC, Federal Signal — each carrying its EN 54 data. Compliant placement pulses green; a violation glows the room red, instantly. Stuck on a gap? “Suggest placement” proposes compliant positions as ghost markers you accept one by one.
Seventeen automated checks run across every room and the whole building, and a line-by-line table shows check / required / measured / status. Export a PDF report with an executive summary, per-room pages, zone plan, documented variations, a device schedule (plus CSV) and a designer sign-off block — under your logo.
One thing Flame doesn't do: read walls out of the image for you. The backdrop is a visual reference you trace over — auto-vectorising a raster plan is on the roadmap, not in the box.
Most spacing checks pretend a detector covers a perfect circle. Walls disagree. Flame casts 96 raysfrom every detector; each ray stops at the first wall it hits and passes through doorways. The result is the detector's true, wall-clipped field of view — a detector on the far side of a partition gets no credit for the next room.
The room is then sampled on a ~1 metre grid, and coverage is the fraction of points inside at least one detector's field of view — compared against your category's requirement, with any uncovered floor area reported in m².
What it is: a rigorous line-of-sight and range model — the right first-order answer for spacing and layout. What it isn't: a smoke-transport simulation. Ceiling-height effects get their own warning rule; stratification and beam obstructions stay with the designer.
No black box. Here is every rule the engine runs, what it measures, and how pass or fail is decided — the same detail we'd want before trusting a tool ourselves.
THE CORE PRINCIPLE —Flame is a design accelerator and error-catcher, not an automated approving authority. BS 5839-1 requires a named, competent person to own the design; Flame's job is to make that person faster and catch what a manual pass would miss. That's why every exported report carries a designer sign-off block, never an "APPROVED" stamp.
Does the room have the minimum count of each device type its BS 5839 category demands — smoke, heat, MCP, sounder, VAD? The most basic “did you put the right kit in” check.
Catches the classic slip: a room given a category, then left with nothing in it.
The wall-aware raycast model, sampled on a ~1 m grid, against the category's required coverage (e.g. ≥95% for L1). Turns “there are detectors in the room” into “the whole room is actually covered” — and reports the uncovered m² when it isn't.
Worst-case gap between same-type detectors against the standard's maximum spacing. Thresholds come from the standards library, not hard-coded.
Flags detectors inside the “dead air” zone where wall meets ceiling, using per-type minimum clearances from the standard.
Rooms that require a visual alarm are checked for actual strobe reach, not just the presence of a beacon — only devices with an EN 54-23 coverage code count. Spatial reach is modelled; photometric compliance stays with you.
The quietest point in the room against the minimum SPL (default 65 dB(A)), using inverse-square projection from every sounder. A sizing sanity-check, not an acoustic simulation — and the page says so.
Every door in a room that needs manual call points has an MCP within the standard's door distance — because people raise the alarm on the way out.
Genuine walking distance to the nearest call point — routed around walls, through doors — against the limit (default 45 m, tightened to 25 m for rooms flagged mobility-impaired).
A* pathfinding from every room to its nearest fire exit. A room with no route to an exit is a life-safety defect, and it's flagged on the canvas too.
Each detection zone against the standard's maximum floor area and device count — zones exist so a fire can be located fast.
BS 5839-1:2025 makes the zone plan a requirement in its own right: a multi-room system with zero zones fails, and the report withholds its zone-plan page until one is drawn.
Walkable distance to search a zone end-to-end against a recommended maximum (default 60 m), measured centre-to-farthest-room.
Point smoke above 10.5 m or point heat above 9 m draws a warning — beam or aspirating detection should be considered. A warning, not a fail: the designer makes the call.
A room flagged “occupants sleeping” that relies on heat-only detection is warned — heat responds too late for escape while asleep.
A device floating outside every defined room protects nothing and isn't counted anywhere — usually a drawing slip.
Kitchens, plant and boiler rooms relying on optical smoke only get an advisory — steam and fumes cause false alarms. Informational, never a failure: it's a judgement call.
A green room means every applicable check above passes — geometry, counts, spacing, coverage, audibility, call-point reach, zoning and escape routing all hold together. It is a meaningful bar. It is not a signed-off BS 5839 design — that signature is yours.
We'd rather tell you the limits up front than have you discover them later. These remain the competent person's responsibility — and the report says so.
Register and you'll hear when it opens. In the meantime, FOV, our CCTV coverage tool, is free to try.