Release notes
What changed in each release, and where to see which version is installed on your machine.
This page records what changed in each release — new inputs, changed defaults, corrections, and anything that alters a result. Read it before you compare a new run against an older one, or re-open a project you last generated months ago.
Which version you have
Read the version from your own machine, never from a page like this one.
The application shows its version in the status bar at the bottom of the main window — that is the quickest place to check, and it is the number to include when you report a problem. The Microsoft Store's Library listing also shows it, and is the place to check whether an update is waiting.
How you get a new version
Updates arrive through the Store. Windows checks for them on its own schedule and installs them in the background, so there is nothing to download and no installer to run. Two consequences worth knowing:
- You can be moved to a new version without having asked for one.
- An update may wait until the application is closed. Close it if an update looks stuck.
You can also check by hand at any time, which is worth doing if you have been told a correction is out and it has not reached you yet — the Store's own schedule is not immediate. A copy that did not come from the Store receives no Store updates; the download page, solarlayout.app/downloads/solarlayout, always carries the current version. Your licence is not part of the package either, so an update never asks you to activate again. Both are covered in Updates and reinstalling.
Entries
Each entry names a version and its release date, and the newest carries a Current tag. A change to a default, a calculation or an export format is called out inside the entry it shipped in, because those are the changes that alter results between runs.
v1.0.0
CurrentThe 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.
Where to go next
Troubleshooting
Symptoms you can search for — nothing placed, missing cables, absent energy figures, empty export pages — with the setting or input behind each one.
Getting help
The guide inside the application, the pages in this documentation, how to reach a person, and what to include so a report can be acted on.