October covers PVX.AI 2.11.0 (9 October), the 19 October release and the cloud services behind grading and cabling. Most of it is electrical design on drawings with several PV areas, plus editable roads and corridors, and grading that levels tracker rows together with the ground.
Highlights
Adapt Devices replaces Move Device. Move or rotate inverters, transformers and DC boxes with AutoCAD’s own MOVE, grips or ROTATE, then click Adapt Devices on the Electrical sub-tab. PVX writes the new positions into the design, moves labels left behind, re-seats devices on the terrain, warns about devices on a road, over racks or outside their PV area, and offers Regenerate cabling for the affected areas. BESS units and PCS skids are not covered by Adapt Devices yet. See Defining DC Boxes, Inverters and Transformers.
Electrical changes stay inside the PV areas you choose. On a drawing with two or more PV areas, Remove All Devices, Clear All DC Cables, Clear All AC Cables, Clear All Strings, Clear All Trench Assignments and Remove All Trenches ask Pick PV areas or Whole drawing, and each run is one Ctrl+Z. A new layout, Capacity Iteration or Clear Racks now removes only the electrical design of the areas it rebuilds, and Regenerate Cabling runs on one PV area at a time. See DC and AC Cabling.
Corridor pattern per PV area. Edit corridor… in the layout settings opens an editor with a live preview. For each PV area you list repeating steps between row blocks and between table columns: how many rows or columns, the width, and whether the corridor is a road or an open gap, so layouts such as 5-3-5-3 are possible. See Corridor Pattern Editor.
Tracker rows graded together with the ground. Adapt Terrain to Pile now solves each tracker table’s height and tilt together with the ground, keeping every pile in its reveal band and every joint between tables within 0.10 m, and re-tilts the tables in place. Terrain-following and multi-row group tables are kept as placed. See Adapting Terrain to Piles.
More changes
Terrain & Grading
- Contours & Spot Elevations (formerly Create Contour) can also draw a spot elevation with a three-decimal label at every terrain point. Existing contours and spots are redrawn after grading, terrain adaptation, collision fixes and Reset Terrain. See Generating Contour Lines.
- Create Specific Legend draws a slope legend for one closed polyline instead of the whole terrain.
- Adapt Terrain to Pile works to a reveal band for trackers and fixed racks: the ground stays as close to the original as possible while every pile reveal stays between its minimum and maximum.
- A grading slope limit of 1% or less now returns an exactly flat platform at the cut/fill balance level.
- Cut/fill labels appear at every grid point, with levels to the millimetre. See Cut/Fill Application Map.
- Grading seams stay watertight, and re-grading closes tears left by earlier runs.
Roads
- Manual roads keep an editable centerline. Edit it, then run Rebuild Roads from the Road dropdown in Site Layout; only changed roads are rebuilt, with rounded bends and rounded junction corners. Build Layout offers to rebuild out-of-date roads first. See Editing Road Centerlines.
- Road Setback sets each manual road’s rack setback, and racks keep that distance instead of a fixed 11.3 m.
Layout & Trackers
- Draw Alignment fills rows outward from the line on both sides, starting next to it.
- The PV module picker filters by Catalog or Custom. Hide catalog modules in Settings opens it on Custom.
- The Row Adjustment tab in Collision Analysis appears only on drawings with placed trackers.
- Automatic piles stay on the frame, and the motor defaults to the middle of the chain.
- Capacity Iteration predicts the DC power that Build Layout then places.
Electrical
- Transformer placement shows the real footprint while you aim, with the tables it removes in red and orange and the cost in the prompt. Nothing is saved until you accept; automatic suggestions are drawn as footprints you can move or skip.
- Manual transformers are placed one at a time: pick the strings, place the transformer, then draw or select its alignment line.
- With an alignment line, string inverters (and SDCIT DC boxes) go to the end of their own table nearest the line. SDCIT central inverters stand around the transformer instead of in one row along the road.
- Strings are numbered in layout order (top to bottom by default), and inverters and DC boxes sit on their own racks at the road-side row end.
- Electrical Configuration can be edited by hand: typed string counts stay as typed, a “+ TR” row adds a transformer, and string inverters have linked DC/AC ratio and strings-per-inverter boxes. See Editing the Configuration Panel by Hand.
- Custom strings: the new Pick modules (one by one) pattern draws a string in the order you click the modules. A U can now turn at a module you pick, and the stringing grid zooms with the scroll wheel. See Custom Stringing Options.
- Transformer numbers are unique across PV areas, and a new PV area numbers its devices after the ones other areas use. The Electrical Design panel shows No transformer: with a count and a Select button.
BESS
- Racks under a transformer, BESS unit, PCS skid or BESS Area are now deleted instead of hidden, so moving the device never brings them back. A Racks removed window lists what was removed per device, with a Zoom button.
Exports
- Design (Web) publishes the whole design to the web viewer as layers: Terrain, Electrical, BESS and Design, each object with its properties. See Exporting a Design to PVX.AI Web.
- The terrain and earthworks exports ask whether to read the rack-pad TIN or the grid when a current TIN exists. See Earthworks Export and Clean Copy Export.
- Design (KML) stops with a message when the drawing’s EPSG code is not supported.
- The PVsyst export snaps fixed racks to their nominal orientation.
Units
- Feet drawings work end to end: grading roads, lightning protection, BESS Designer, erosion check dams and 3D scene objects take input in the drawing unit, and electrical symbols are drawn at real size.
- Cable calculations in feet drawings are correct: strings are cabled, voltage drop is no longer about 3.3 times too high, and cable sizes show mm² with the nearest AWG or kcmil.
- Roads use US stations (“STA 12+50”), areas are in acres or ft², and the pile workbook reads in lb/ft and short tons.
See Imperial Units and Survey Feet.
Install & Licensing
- If your PC clock is wrong, PVX says so instead of reporting a connection problem.
- When the license refuses an action, PVX shows a message instead of an error.
- An update installs once per machine.
- PVX loads alongside other AutoCAD plugins that use the same UI library.
- Terrain imports check the boundary first and refuse one that is invalid, too large or cannot be built, before the import starts.
Fixes
- A long operation stays in the drawing it started in when you switch drawings, and closing one drawing no longer resets another’s project state.
- Cables route along the rows of a PV area placed at any azimuth, and a fixed-tilt area is cabled correctly when the drawing also has trackers.
- Cabling works on a drawing whose road outline crosses itself.
- Tracker corridors are kept when a manual road crosses the PV area.
- A turned transformer deletes only the racks it covers, not the ones beside it.
- The manual string picker stays open until you confirm, and Apply to Selection picks racks in overview mode.
- Capacity Iteration in GCR and shading-angle modes lays out the GCR you ask for.
- Converted racks stay centred on their 2D tables through rebuilds.
- Section profiles stop where the terrain ends instead of bridging the gap, and each rack column is cut once.
- The BoQ, cable schedule and Design Health Check count every PV area.