PVX.AI Updates: September 2026

September covers PVX.AI 2.9.6 (9 September) to 2.10.0 (25 September) and the cloud services behind grading and cabling. Most of it is tracker steel: the torque tube is modelled on every tracker type, piles can be entered the way a vendor drawing lists them, and tables in a row are levelled at their joints.

Highlights

Torque tube and pile schedule. Every tracker type (single-row, multi-row and terrain-following) now models its torque tube from the Torque Tube group in Tracker Settings, including a separate Tube Extension, Left (m) and Tube Extension, Right (m). The Pile Schedule button opens a table laid out like a vendor pile drawing, with + Pile, + Motor gap, + TFT joint and Paste distances for a column copied from Excel. See Torque Tube and Pile Schedule.

Level the joints between tables. Tables that meet end to end in a row are now settled together, so the joint lines up instead of stepping. For tables already in the drawing, the Row Adjustment tab of Collision Analysis has Level rows, which levels them and names the constraint that keeps a joint open. See Row Adjustment: Level Rows.

Separate north and south slope limits. In Grading, tick Separate North / South limits to set a North-facing limit (%) and a South-facing limit (%), for example almost nothing toward the north and a steeper limit toward the south. See Terrain Grading.

Contours of only the ground that grading moved. After grading, generating contours also draws the graded zone: contours of the changed ground on their own layer, with a closed outline around it. A civil engineer can take that region and keep their own survey everywhere else. Contour smoothing is now off by default, so contours follow the terrain exactly. See Generating Contour Lines.

More changes

Terrain & Grading

  • Import Contours has a search box above the layer list. Layers you already ticked stay ticked while filtered out of view.
  • Min Pile Reveal is now a floor: when a frame’s reveal spread is wider than the band allows, every pile stays at or above it and the surplus goes out through the top of the band.
  • Adapt Terrain to Pile uses each rack’s own embed depth instead of one depth for the whole drawing.
  • Bulk operations such as fixing collisions and Adapt Terrain to Pile finish when the rebuild finishes, instead of waiting on the progress screen afterwards.

Roads

  • Draw Road now does everything Convert to Road does: an open pick is a centerline (PVX asks for the width), a closed pick is the road outline, and both get corner rounding, the road hatch, the 3D drape and the dashed centerline. See Defining Roads.

Layout & Trackers

  • The rack is seated on the torque tube axis, so the ground clearance you enter is the clearance you get. Cross-sections draw the pile head, bearing, tube and panel.
  • A live readout beside Reference Height shows the pile length it implies, so you can check a vendor’s pile length against your spec.
  • Terrain-following trackers: piles at separators add the drive pier at each hinged break, and that shared pile is drawn, counted and exported once. The frame now measures tube end to tube end, as the vendor drawing does. See Setting Up Terrain-Following Trackers.
  • Rigid tracker frames are anchored at the tube end. Against one customer’s surveyed pile points, the mean offset fell from 174 mm to 3.5 mm.
  • Mirror Tracker works on terrain-following racks, and carries the tube extensions with the frame.
  • New placements and conversions level against tables already in the drawing, including tables in a neighbouring PV area or on a frozen layer.
  • 2D to 3D conversion turns a terrain-following spec into a full articulated rack, and continues the drawing’s rack numbering instead of restarting at R-1.
  • The pile schedule export and sections report frame articulation and the drive pier.
  • PVcase import piles every rack from the pile schedule PVcase wrote for it. See Importing a PVcase Design.
  • The Min/Max Pitch boxes in the layout settings are now labelled Min Row Gap (m) and Max Row Gap (m), which is what they control.
  • The Racks window shows rack power in kW.

Electrical

  • Manual cabling now considers every trench you draw and picks the entry by the cost of the whole route. Before, a cable could only enter on the trench its device sat on, so extra trenches you drew could stay empty. See Trench Engineering and Cable Generation.

Exports

  • On a drawing with several PV areas, the cable workbook writes one worksheet per area (“DC Cables (PV-1)”, “AC Cables (PV-2)” and so on), and the cable tables on the sheet split the same way. Single-area drawings keep their sheet names. See Exporting Cable Data (XLS).

Units

  • Drawings in US survey feet or US survey inches are treated as imperial. Before, they were read as metric. State Plane coordinates are converted with the exact survey-foot factor.
  • In feet drawings, the layout length boxes, Capacity Iteration row spacing, the Convert to Road width, the grading Max Fill Height and shading objects now use the drawing unit. Before, some of these values were placed as if they were metres.
  • Grading a feet terrain keeps its points where they were, so contours and the graded zone survive grading.

See Imperial Units and Survey Feet.

Install & Licensing

  • The installer now ships a working Claude Desktop extension. Double-click pvxai-solar-design.mcpb in the PVX.AI plugin folder to add it to Claude Desktop. See Claude Desktop Extension.

Fixes

  • Cloud grading applied the north-south limit to the east-west axis and the reverse. Each limit now acts on its own axis.
  • Editing a standard tracker no longer clears its torque tube settings.
  • A pile in a separator gap is counted once in the Racks window, the drawing, the pile export, the BoQ and the collision scan.
  • Terrain-following pile counts on the info screen and in the BoQ agree with their own length breakdown.
  • Strings still assigned to a transformer that was replaced are reassigned, so every string reaches its inverter.
  • An azimuth offset of 180 in the layout settings is accepted.
  • One open polyline on the exclusion, BESS or road layers no longer stops a fixed-tilt or east-west build.
  • A shading hour typed as “9:00” is accepted.

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