OpenCADIrrigation Open the app

Five-minute start

  1. Open opencadirrigation.com and press Open the app (or open an example or the tutorial straight from the page). The app opens by itself on later visits, on an empty project, with a start screen that asks two things: where the area is (an address found on OpenStreetMap, or coordinates; the project is georeferenced there, on the satellite map) and whether to design with the AI assistant.
  2. Draw the area, let the assistant design it, or open a ready example: Help → Welcome and example gallery (with the interactive tutorial, 90 steps) or File → Examples. The tutorial opens in a tab of its own; its card has a menu of chapters and tracks (the full tutorial, a short track for touch screens and quick tracks for drip in a field, a landscape and a centre pivot) and continues where you stopped. Ctrl+K (Help → Search commands…) finds any menu, command or setting by its name, and Help → Manual (F1), or the ? of a window or panel, explains each part of the program with its chapter of this manual one click away.
  3. Press F5 (or the ▶ button at the top right). The calculation runs off the interface thread; a progress card shows the current step (zone by zone, mainline, flushing, water hammer, materials). The screen stays usable while it runs.
  4. Read the results in the Reports panel (F2): zone summary, pipes with diameters and pressures, emitters, mainline and supply duties, bill of materials, water requirements, hydraulic grade line, messages.
  5. Hover a pipe to see diameter, flow, velocity and head loss; select a lateral and open the Hydraulic grade line tab; switch the drawing overlay in View (velocity, pressure, diameters, minimum and maximum pressure, densogram, terrain slope and aspect). Every overlay draws the same items and changes only their colours: the emitters of drip lines are small dots on the line (one in a few when zoomed out), in the colour of the line or, with the pressure overlay, of their own pressure.
  6. Export: File → Export drawing (PDF sheets, DXF, DWG, PNG…) or Export report (PDF, Excel, CSV, TXT). Save the project with Ctrl+S (.oci.json), or send it as a link (File → Share by link…).
id Project Contents Zones
orchard Orchard Micro-sprinklers on citrus and drip on grapes, well, pump and filter, sloping ground 2
garden Residential garden Pop-up sprays on the front lawn, rotors at the back, drip in the beds; mains supply with meter and backflow preventer 3
sportsField Football pitch 105 × 68 m, impact sprinklers in five rows with matched nozzles on the lines, reservoir, pump, night-time shifts 5
rowCrop Drip row crop Four tomato blocks on tape, submains with valves, screen filter, pump, 1 % slope 4
pivot Centre pivot 300 m pivot on maize, mainline, well and pump; tower, span and nozzle report 1 pivot
greenhouse Vegetable greenhouse Four pepper tunnels on pressure-compensating dripline, tank, small pump and disc filter 4
nursery Plant nursery Three beds under overhead micro-sprinklers on a 4 × 4 m grid, elevated tank, small pump and disc filter 3
coffee Coffee on contour lines Three hillside blocks with curved laterals following the contours (guided block), PC dripline, well and pump 3
bananas Banana plantation Two blocks under pressure-compensating micro-sprinklers at 5 × 5 m, well with submersible pump and disc filter 2
sugarcane Subsurface drip sugarcane 20 mm PC dripline buried 0.3 m deep, 180 m laterals, buried submains, screen filter and air valve 2
gravity Gravity-fed drip Reservoir 40 m above the blocks, no pump: gate valve, pressure-reducing valve and filter on the mainline 2
pasture Sprinkler-irrigated pasture Three paddocks with impact-sprinkler lines at 12 × 18 m, reservoir, pump and check valve 3
golf Golf hole Tee with sprays, fairway with rotors on a triangular grid and green with rotors around the edge, pond and pump 4
sectorPivot Sector pivot with end gun 250 m pivot sweeping 270° with a 12 m³/h end gun, pond, 20 hp pump and gate valve 1 pivot
linear Linear move 392 m lateral-move machine travelling 800 m along a canal, intake with a 30 hp pump 1 linear

Every example with valves also has its electrical part: a controller by the pump (or the control head) and the wire routes beside the mainline to every valve. The design gives each valve a station and a wire size, checks the solenoid voltage and adds wires, controller and connectors to the bill of materials (Electrical tab). The pivot and linear examples have no solenoid valves to wire. The drip and micro-sprinkler areas take the ground cover of their crop (Agronomy and irrigation scheduling).

Examples open from the welcome screen (Help → Welcome and example gallery…), from the File → Examples menu and from the URL. The same projects are in examples/ as .oci.json files, one folder per interface language (examples/de/, examples/ja/, … 20 in all): the same drawing everywhere, with the names, crops and catalogue items in that language.

URL parameters

Parameter Effect
?example=garden Opens the given example (orchard, garden, sportsField, rowCrop, pivot, greenhouse, nursery, coffee, bananas, sugarcane, gravity, pasture, golf, sectorPivot, linear).
?design=1 Designs on load.
?ai=1 Opens the AI assistant beside the drawing (the site's "Open the AI assistant" button and the app shortcut).
?tutorial=N Opens the interactive tutorial at step N (1 to 90).
?lang=pt (any code of Languages and site) Language for this visit (does not change the saved preference).
/pt/, /es/, /de/, … Entry page of each language under its code (all 20), with the same effect as ?lang (the root page is the English one).
#p=… A project shared by link (File → Share by link…): it opens as a copy in a new tab. The part after # is never sent to any server.