Solar panel layout on the aerial photo, filled as you draw

Five ways to draw a zone

• A ready-made square, about 8 m a side, to pull over a simple roof.
• Point by point: click each corner of an irregular outline, then the first one again to close it.
• The magic wand: hover a roof and its outline traces itself from its colour, with a sensitivity dial.
• IGN buildings: click a surveyed footprint to turn it into a PV zone, or into a 3D building at its surveyed height.
• Import: a Google Earth or GIS .kml lands at its true coordinates, a CAD .dxf after a placement preview, and a georeferenced image becomes the canvas where the aerial photo stops.

A layout that follows your hand

There is no layout button. While you drag a corner, the browser refills the zone on every frame; when you let go, the engine runs the same placer as the simulation and records its layout and the installed power. That power follows from the modules that fit, and the input is the zone’s power cap: the placer stops adding modules before the next one would exceed it.

Spacing, orientation and roof pitch

• Gaps between modules and between rows, 2 cm by default; wider rows cut the self-shading at the cost of density.
• Portrait or landscape, in one click, on the map and in the 3D view.
• The azimuth from the ridge: Auto (longest side) turns the panels square to the zone’s longest edge, toward the equator, and follows the outline as you reshape it.
• Tilt and azimuth sources: your own figure, the PVGIS optimum for the site, the roof pitch that IGN’s building survey implies, or a roof plane measured in 3D.

On a tilted roof the placer lays the rows out in plan, shortened by the cosine of the tilt, so the module count follows the slope.

Obstacles kept clear

Draw a chimney, a rooflight or a neighbour’s wall as an Obstacle: it is the one zone type that removes modules from the zones it overlaps, and it casts its shade on the array. Rectangle keeps a four-corner zone a true rectangle while you resize or rotate it.

Strings painted on the layout

With Draw strings on, every zone is wired into serpentine strings of the length you set, and rewired whenever the modules change. Switch it off to paint the strings by hand, in one stroke across many modules. A string left shorter than the rest at the end of a zone shows in the loss cascade if it falls below the inverter’s MPPT window.

From the layout to the deliverables

• The bill of materials: with a racking kit picked, the rails, splices, end and mid clamps, attachments, end caps and earthing clips are counted row by row from the packed layout, offcuts reused.
• The report’s site plan: the layout proposal the engine draws over the aerial imagery, with each zone’s power, module count and panel model.
• The permit plans: the block plan and the roof plan of the déclaration préalable are framed from the map.