Bill of Materials
Using PVcase you can easily export the bill of materials containing all necessary information pertaining to the project. To perform this action, we will navigate to the Layout information tab. Having done so, we will now select the PV areas that we intend to export - this can be done by clicking on the select PV areas button and selecting all PV area boundary lines that we want to export. To finalize, we press Space or Enter on the keyboard. Example below:
To generate the pole coordinates for the bill of materials, we click on the Piling information button to generate this information. Having done so, we are prompted to select the PV area boundary lines and finalize by pressing Space or Enter on the keyboard. Example below:
Now the pole IDs and lengths of all the poles are displayed on the drawing and will be incorporated into the bill of materials files.
For the Spot levels to be reflected in the bill of materials, make sure the Spot levels in the Ground grading window are activated before exporting the BOM.
Finally, to create the bill of materials files, navigate to the Bill of Materials section and click on Export to XLSX. We are now able to see a pop-up window where we will need to specify the directory where we want to save the file and have the option to rename it. To finalize the export process, click on Save. Now we are presented with another pop-up window asking if we want to open the BOM file; In this case, we will click Yes. Example below:
As we can see, we are presented with the exported Bill of materials spreadsheet file where we will find:
Project overview - this menu contains all the basic project information.
Piling information - this menu contains the table number, name of the preset, amount of poles, their coordinate and pole reveal lengths, table slope, table direction, and table fault which indicates if the frame was affected by collision or slope limits
Electrical connections - this menu contains cable lengths from device to device. The naming will vary depending on the electrical system type in a given design.
Spot levels - this menu contains coordinates with two different elevations before the grading and after the grading as well as how much earth was moved in that specific point.
Tips and tricks
In the Excel environment, we can identify cable sections that may be longer than a previously established value by using Conditional Formatting:
In the example above, we found several strings that had a cable length greater than 80 meters. Based on that, it's possible to go back to the design to identify the route done by those cables and optimize them if needed.
The cables that bridge motor gaps or several tables (in case modules of different tables are connected in the same string), will appear as Extension cables.