CAD drawing export

The CAD drawing export writes the plant as a layered drawing: the boundary, the exclusions, the tables, the equipment, the cables, the trenches and your annotations, each on a layer of its own. It is the deliverable for a drafting or engineering team — the people who will take the layout apart, dimension it, add their own details and issue construction drawings from it.

It is not a picture of the layout. The report's drawing page is that. This file is geometry a drafter can work in, at true size, with everything separable.

Two companions sit beside it in the same menu: an ICR-block drawing set, which breaks the plant into one sheet per inverter control room, and a cable schedule as a spreadsheet. Both are covered at the end of this page.

Who it is for, and what they get

Anyone who only needs to look at the layout is better served by the Google Earth export or the report — neither needs CAD software.

Coordinates are real, in metres

Every coordinate in the drawing is in metres, in the site's own projected coordinate zone — the local UTM zone. The application works in that zone internally and converts only at the edges, so nothing is scaled, fitted or normalised on the way out.

Three consequences, all of them the point:

• The drawing is at true size. A distance measured in CAD is the distance on the ground, in metres. No drawing scale factor has to be applied or remembered.
• It can be referenced against a survey. Open the drawing alongside survey data in the same UTM zone and the two overlay directly, with no fitting step.
• It can be set out from. A coordinate read off the drawing is a coordinate a setting-out crew can use.

The layers

Grouped below by what they belong to. The layer names are exactly as they appear in the drawing's layer list.

Site

The kept-clear ground arrives as separate layers rather than as one. OBSTACLES and WATER are treated differently on site — a building or a substation is an obstacle to be worked around, a pond is a water body with its own consequences — and OBSTRUCTIONS holds what you drew by hand rather than what the boundary file declared, so a recipient can tell the two apart. See Obstructions.

PERIMETER_ROAD is the band between the plant boundary and the usable area, and it comes across as two outline polylines with no fill — the outer edge and the inner edge. A drafter therefore receives the road reserve as boundaries to work with rather than as a solid to delete, and the same band is the one drawn on the plot and in the report. See How placement works.

Array

One layer for the whole array. Switch it off and the site, the equipment and the cabling are all still there — which is how a drafter works on anything other than the modules.

Tables are written as block references, not as individual outlines. Every table of a given size is an insert of one shared block definition, so editing that block in your CAD program updates every table in the plant at once. The block's own geometry sits on layer 0, so each insert takes the properties of the layer it is placed on, which is standard CAD practice. Tell the drafting team: a change to the table detail is one edit, not tens of thousands.

Equipment

The equipment layer name follows the inverter choice. In a central-inverter design the layer is named SMB and carries the string monitoring boxes, because the central inverters themselves sit inside the control room rather than out among the tables. See Inverter control rooms.

Keep-clear shadows

Three layers a recipient will otherwise mistake for stray hatching. Each one is the ground a structure shadows across the shadow window — and with Clear tables in shadows on, which is its shipped state, that is the ground the tables were cleared from. The shadow layers are therefore the justification for the gap in the array beside every building, object and pole. Keeping them separate means a drafter can show that justification or switch it off, and a civil engineer can see which cleared ground is shadow rather than obstruction. See Structures and shadow.

Cables

Three layers rather than one, because the three are different cables with different sizes, different burial requirements and usually different contractors. All three are written only when cable calculation was on for the run — see the conditional layers below.

Trenches

A trench and a cable are not the same length, and that is why they are on separate layers. Several cables share one trench, so trench routes are the de-duplicated routes on the ground while the cable layers carry the conductor runs. The trench layers are what a civil contractor prices and excavates. See Cable routing.

Drafting

Three layers that may be absent

Most of the layers above are written on every export, whether or not they have anything in them. Three are conditional, and a layer that is not in the file is usually a setting you chose rather than a fault in the export.

The first two settings are off by default and no pile pattern exists until you define one. So a first export, produced from a first run at the defaults, has no cable layers, no arrester layer and no pile layer — and that is correct behaviour rather than a missing export. Piles are defined in the Pile layout window; see Piles.

If the recipient needs cable and trench routing, tick Calculate cables on the Electrical tab and generate again before exporting. Cable calculation is the slow step on a large plant, which is why it is off to begin with — the recommended order is to review the layout first, then enable it for the final run.

Your annotations come across

Everything you drew in Sketch Mode — the lines, polylines, rectangles, circles, arcs, splines, fills and dimensions — is written to the SKETCH layer, and the labels and text land on ANNOTATIONS.

Keeping them on their own layers is deliberate, and it is worth telling the recipient: your working notes, sketched intent and markup are separable from the plant. They can switch the layers off and have the plant with none of your commentary on it, or leave them on and read what you were pointing out. Neither requires them to delete anything.

See Annotations for the drawing tools themselves.

Before you export

The ICR-block drawing set

Export ▾ ▸ Export ICR-Block DXF writes the plant as a drawing set rather than one sheet: sheet 1 is the whole plant, then one sheet per ICR block. An ICR block is the group of tables that feeds one inverter control room — the grouping the ICR blocks row of the Layers popover colours on the plot. See Inverter control rooms.

Use it when the plant is going to be built or reviewed one block at a time, with sheet 1 keeping the whole plant for orientation. The status line confirms with "ICR-block DXF exported (n block sheets + plant): …".

The cable schedule

Export ▾ ▸ Export Cable Schedule (Excel) writes a workbook with one sheet per ICR block. Each sheet lists the DC strings — table and row to inverter or string monitoring box — and the AC feeders (or the DC-trunk feeders in a central-inverter design), with recommended conductor sizes.

It is available after a layout, but the lengths are only real when cable calculation was on for the run; export it after the final run with Calculate cables ticked. The status line confirms with "Cable schedule exported (n ICR-block sheets): …". See Cable routing.

Limits

• It is geometry, not a drawing set. There is no border, no title block, no drawing number and no revision block. Those are the recipient's, in their own template.
• Nothing is dimensioned unless you dimensioned it. The dimensions in the file are the ones you drew in Sketch Mode.
• It carries no quantities. Take those from the bill of materials rather than counting entities in CAD.
• The single-line diagram is exported separately. It is not part of this file. See Exporting the diagram.

Where to go next