Introducing: “ADyoU”, a tool to serve the needs of homeowners exploring the feasibility and early-stage conceptual design of an Accessory Dwelling Unit (ADU) on their property. ADyoU is a simple design assistant that allows users to see the impacts of their design decisions and changes for their proposed ADU. It takes user’s inputs and performs a structural design of the roof system, providing outputs including: structural member types, QTOs, embodied carbon estimates, and even checks against local ADU-related code restrictions.
It is set up as a proof-of-concept that can be expanded to perform full structural designs, cost estimates, and mock-ups of ADU design ideas. All user inputs are categorized and passed into a custom node that returns a host of design-related outputs. Input categories include:
- ADU Geometry (footprint dimensions, desired interior ceiling height, etc.)
- Structural Member Geometry (roof beam overhang, beam spacing, etc.)
Some other categories are: structural loads/limits, structural material properties, and ADU code restrictions.
Here is an example of a few of the tool’s typical outputs (results):
TUTORIAL VIDEO:
The structural framing section data excel file used in this example is in the linked Autodesk folder on this post along with the main Dynamo graph and custom node.
In order to see the output Revit roof beams, users need to download the microllam LVL structural framing family and load it into their Revit file (the family file is in the linked Autodesk folder on this post).
Here is the main Dynamo graph workspace, with just the user inputs and outputs and the custom node that performs the calculations.
Here are the user inputs that help perform the structural design calculations:
Users select their desired section that is the sheet name on a referenced excel file, called “sectionsData” in this example. The excel sheet includes the following data about the section:
Here is the code that performs the structural design:
