Release notes

A rebuilt interface

The window has been reorganised around the way a design is worked through. Nothing about placement, routing or the energy model changed in this release; what changed is where things are and what they are called. Older screenshots and the in-app guide describe the previous arrangement.

• The New design window replaces the four start-up cards. Two segmented controls — MOUNTING and INVERTER — with a live summary card and one Continue button. The ribbon's design chip and File ▸ Move to String / Central Window… open a second window for a different design.
• The ribbon across the top carries the brand, the design chip, the access chip, and Docs and Support buttons.
• Five stage tabs — Site · Array · Electrical · Yield · Tools — replace the single long input panel, with Generate Layout (F5) pinned above them and a hint line saying why it is disabled. Every card is collapsible. The Tools tab, which holds obstructions, the main control room and the three studies, is locked until a layout exists.
• Five views of the plant on the right — Layout · Summary · Energy · BOM · SLD (Ctrl+1 to Ctrl+5) — with the current view's tools beside the tabs. The Summary view shows the per-plant figures as a sheet turned on its side, grouped under SITE, ARRAY, ELECTRICAL, CABLES and ENERGY, with Copy and Open in window; the Energy view shows the yield result with tiles, the monthly table and charts.
• The Layers popover gathers the drawing's ON/OFF rows — plant layout, legend, arresters, ICR blocks, the three cable layers, contours and plant totals. The legend is folded behind a Legend ▾ chip on the plot.
• Plant chips under every view carry the totals — DC capacity, site area, tables, modules, ICR blocks, arresters and year-one P50 energy — and open the Summary or Energy view when clicked.
• Three navigation tools — Home, Pan and Zoom — and the mouse wheel zooms at the cursor. The view you set persists across redraws until Home, a new layout or a new boundary file.
• The Cables card on the Electrical tab holds Calculate cables and three DC allowances: inter-module lead, the string return run and DC cable slack.
• String sizing opens from a Size… button beside Modules per row or Modules per string (N–S) — the Auto / Manual prompt after loading a module file is gone.
• The Export menu beside Save project: Export KMZ, Export DXF, Export ICR-Block DXF (one sheet per control-room block), Export Cable Schedule (Excel), Export Detailed Project Report, and Export Image (PNG) for the plot. Export PDF (with Piles) appears while the pile overlay is on.
• The report is now a Word document — cover page, methodology, design basis, results, energy yield and the drawing annexures — in place of the PDF layout-and-summary export.
• Rebuilt dialogs. Site reference for CAD and image boundaries, Check boundaries, String sizing, Simulation with AC Capacity, Robotic module cleaning, Shadow View and the Pile layout editor follow one pattern: inputs on one side, the answer on the other as it updates, and one primary button that names its effect.

The first documented release

This is the first release covered by this documentation. Rather than a list of changes — there is no earlier documented version to compare against — it records what the application does as it ships.

Design

• Four design modes, chosen at every launch: fixed tilt or single-axis tracker, each with string inverters or central inverters and string monitoring boxes.
• Three boundary inputs — a Google Earth file, a CAD drawing, or a traced image. The Google Earth file is the only one that carries water bodies, obstructions and line corridors along with the boundary.
• Automatic tilt and row pitch from the site latitude, with the no-shading pitch at winter solstice, and an override for each.
• Placement options for maximising table count against boundary edges, and for filling leftover ground with half units.
• Terrain-aware placement that keeps tables off ground too steep or too uneven to build on, from satellite elevation data or your own contour file.
• Keep-clear shadows around control rooms, placed objects and perimeter street lights.

Equipment and cables

• Inverter control rooms sized to a capacity block you set, placed by table grouping and movable by hand.
• Lightning arresters on an overlapping coverage grid.
• A main control room and, on multi-plot sites, a unit substation per plot.
• Routed DC, AC and medium-voltage cables with conductor and trench lengths reported separately.

Analysis

• Energy yield from an automatic weather service or your own hourly file, with a loss-by-loss performance ratio, a computed thermal model, computed row-to-row shading, bifacial gain, degradation over the plant lifetime, and exceedance probabilities you choose.
• Sizing from a target AC capacity and DC/AC ratio.
• Cleaning robot fleet sizing, with per-gap bridging decisions.

Drawing and output

• Sketch Mode for hand editing, with drawing, measuring and dimensioning tools, layers, groups and a typed command line.
• A pile pattern editor and construction pile report.
• A single-line diagram builder with a full switchgear symbol set, automatic build from the plant, and import of an existing diagram.
• An editable bill of materials, computed from the layout, with four built-in templates.
• Exports to a multi-page A3 PDF report, Google Earth, a layered CAD drawing, a spreadsheet, and an irradiance and energy time series.