Introduction
In order to smoothly get your Solar Construction site ready, simply follow the guide below and you'll be up and running in no time!
The following items are required to use this data product:
CAD Plan Overlay: This is needed in order to have a reference point for the location of your results and as a verification construction is progressing as it should.
High Accuracy Images: This is needed to process the results and make sure that they are delivered in exactly the right place, matching your CAD plan and multiple scans of the same area.
Some additional information that you can add to the platform that will provide additional insights and activate extra features on the platform are:
Adding regions to your site
Adding targets to the site
This article will provide more details on each of these topics as well as explaining how to carry out each point.
CAD Plan Overlay
To get the most benefit from the platform you should upload a CAD layout plan for the site, there are some specific requirements for the CAD plan to be compatible with the platform, these are:
The CAD drawing should be georeferenced as the EPSG needs to be provided on upload to the platform which ensures the CAD plan will sit underneath the aerial data.
Xrefs are not supported, any Xrefs should be inserted in to the main CAD file.
There can be no hatches in the CAD file as the platform cannot display hatches.
It is recommended to only have the CAD file contain the layers you want to be visible on the platform, this is to keep the file size as small as possible.
Assets should be on separate layers. Ideally these would be using the following naming:
Piles
Structures
Panels
The drawing should be purged before saving to remove un-required layers.
The CAD file needs to be provided as a DXF 2010 version.
The DXF should be <500MB.
There is more information on how to upload your DXF in this support article.
High Accuracy Images
In order for the Fusing to be carried out on operations which cover the same parts of a site over multiple operations, then high precision imagery is required.
This means all flights carried out require to have an absolute accuracy of 5cm in both the horizontal and vertical to a known coordinate reference system (CRS). This is to ensure that the that the data from differing weeks will sit perfectly on top of previously captured data, so that site progress can be accurately monitored.
As a consequence high absolute accuracy and repeatability are crucial and for this we recommend flights are carried out with RTK corrections relative to a CRS.
Regions
There are many benefits to setting up regions on your platform, especially for larger sites under construction. Some of these benefits include:
Region based reporting/targets
Order operations based on your regions
Facilitating locating objects in the platform and in the field
For more information on how to create regions and some of the benefits of setting them up can be found in this support article.
Targets
It's often easier to work with completion percentages, rather than the raw number of elements detected.
To enable target-based statistics, you can navigate to the site that you wish to add them too. In the overall construction progress tab on the right hand side of the box you can click the targets button. Fill in the respective information for the pile, pole and structure targets to have these progress reports added.
If you would like to have these progress reports on a region level as shown below, first make sure your regions are set up. Then you can follow steps for setting up overall construction progress above to add in your targets.
