August is about buildability: collision analysis with one-click fixes, a design health check, three ways to grade, and IEC-compliant trench engineering.
New
Collision analysis. Scan every rack against the terrain it stands on: per-family clearance limits, a persistent overlay with a dated legend, an inspector window, and pile schedule and run report exports. Racks a shift can save get a one-click fix; the rest are classified as grading-required and hand off to terrain adaptation. The scan solves against the cloud site design, judging each rack by its measured pile heads.
Three ways to grade. Area grading smooths a whole PV area to slope targets and can generate roads in the same run. Pad grading cuts a real pad under each rack and seats the rack on it. Targeted terrain adaptation moves only the ground under out-of-band piles while the rest of the site holds still.
Design Health Check. A read-only scan of the drawing produces a 0 to 100 score with an HTML and CSV report.
Lightning protection. Place lightning masts and analyze rolling-sphere coverage to IEC 62305-3.
Multi-row tracker groups. Rows linked by drive shafts move, settle, and validate as one group, with motion constraints respected.
IEC trench engineering. Cable separation per IEC installation method, trench lanes with derived clearances, live cross-sections with duct labels, parallel banks for oversized groups, shared trenches per road parcel, and manual cabling routed along the trenches you author.
Road-aware placement. Road-rack setbacks, devices aligned to the road that serves them, and corner rounding at every junction.
PV areas as independent units of work. Each PV area owns its electrical plan. Edits regenerate only the area you changed, and never touch a neighbor’s cabling, labels, or colors.
Rack exchange. Export rack specs as .pvxrack files and import racks from another drawing.
F1 help. F1 in any PVX window or on the ribbon opens the PVX.AI online help.
Improved
PVcase import. Trees convert to shading objects, projects keep their unit system, trackers import at true length, and conversion coverage was extended across real customer projects.
Piles. Dynamic pile rows for fixed and east-west racks, with automatic pile positions derived from rack geometry.
Ribbon. Panels reorganized around the design flow, with a new Reset Terrain command.
Installer. The setup wizard was redesigned.
Fixed
- AutoCAD 2027 crash on color overlays resolved.
- Custom and tenant inverters appear in the design picker, and .OND spec fields carry through import.
- Pile reveal labels print with three decimals and stand perpendicular to the rack.
- Unicode text renders correctly in all PVX labels.
- Imperial imports: frame handling and ftUS EPSG units corrected.
- Service roads stay connected across rack-free ground.