FireCAD Update - What's New

FireCAD 2027 — Built For the Future of Fire Design!

FireCAD 2027 Standalone is now available, built on the latest AutoCAD OEM 2027 engine. It installs side by side with FireCAD 2026, so you can move to 2027 on your own schedule; your existing activation code works with both.

To upgrade, request FireCAD 2027 Standalone through support@cadgen.com and we will send you the installer and instructions.

The FireCAD Add-in for AutoCAD is fully compatible with AutoCAD 2025, 2026, and 2027. FireCAD 2026 Standalone remains available and supported.

For common installation issues see this article — FireCAD 2026 - Common Installation Issues

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Update — September 2026

Submittal Builder — Your Product Data Sheets, Compiled

A new command, ATCREATE_SUBMITTAL (also on the Reports menu and the ribbon), gathers the product data sheets for every part in your project and compiles them into a single PDF with a designed cover page and a table of contents showing real page ranges.

The part you'll actually spend time in is the pre-flight dialog, which opens before anything is built and lists every part with the sheet it resolved to — a manufacturer link, a local file, or missing in red. From there you can:

• Browse… to point a missing part at a PDF on your disk or network. That path is saved into the project catalog, so it sticks for later submittals and for everyone else working on the project.
• Untick Include to leave a part out of this particular book.
• Add Parts… to pull in catalog parts that aren't placed in the drawing — accessories, spares, anything the submittal needs but the plan doesn't show.

Parts still missing a sheet are skipped and itemized in the summary at the end, so nothing disappears quietly.

Book options. The group at the top of the dialog controls the front matter. You can place your own custom cover PDF first — a web link, a file on your disk or a network path — and switch the FireCAD title page, the table of contents and the part/section counts line on or off. Open the book when complete opens the finished PDF in your default viewer. Every choice is remembered per project.

Type a data sheet link directly. The Data Sheet cell is editable: type or paste a manufacturer link or a network path instead of browsing for it. Anything you change is saved to the project's device catalog, the same as Browse…, so it holds for the next book and for everyone else on the project.

CSFM listing sheets. Tick Include CSFM listing sheets and the official California State Fire Marshal listing sheet for each part is added right after that part's data sheet. The sheet is chosen by the CSFM listing number already in your project's device catalog — the same number the Device Legend prints — and FireCAD hosts every active listing (about 2,870, refreshed yearly), so nothing needs to be downloaded by hand. The contents page gains a CSFM Listing column showing the listing number and either sheet incl. with the listing's approval expiration date, or sheet n/a when the listing has expired or been withdrawn. Parts whose listing has no active sheet are itemized in the summary.

Find the right listing without leaving the dialog. The Find… button in the CSFM Listing column searches FireCAD's index of every active listing by listing number, part number or model words, narrowed to the manufacturer. Preview the sheet, then Replace listing or Add to listing for parts that carry more than one. The change goes into the project's device catalog only, exactly as if you had edited the listing number in the Project Device Editor — the master catalog is never touched.

Reports — Reorganized, Faster, and More Reliable

The Reports menu is now grouped. It went from 26 flat entries to three top-level items — Device Legend, Bill Of Material, and Submittal Book — plus four cascades: Circuit Calculations, Summaries, Schedules & Legends, and Export to Excel. Every command is unchanged and still named exactly what it was; only the nesting is new. The ribbon is deliberately unchanged.

Excel reports now render outside AutoCAD. All reports and exports run through a bundled report writer instead of generating inside AutoCAD. This fixes the System.IO.Compression.Brotli failure that blocked exports entirely for some customers. You may also notice a few tidier details: exported files no longer leak an internal placement marker, wire resistance shows trimmed (4.89 rather than 4.89000000), speaker wattage is trimmed the same way, and project title lines capitalize consistently.

Report options moved into the report dialogs. Battery standby, alarm and derating values, the panel-summary calculation method, decimal precisions, and Ignore Spare Circuits now live in the settings pane of the report that uses them, rather than in the global Options editor. The Options editor's report section is down to "Add Reports and Risers to Current Drawing" and the wire overage percentage. The separate Include-Existing-in-BOM and Include-Existing-in-Legend globals are retired — those reports now follow the Include Existing Parts checkbox in the report's own dialog.

"Generate Legacy Reports" is gone. The buried Options toggle and the pre-Excel report tier behind it have been removed; battery calculation and panel summary were broken on that path. If you had it switched on, you now get the current formats.

First-run report error fixed. The once-per-session "vw_CircuitData contains a self-reference" message that appeared when running certain reports no longer occurs.

Circuit Hierarchy exports work again. Export Circuit Hierarchy Table previously failed for everyone with an "Invalid object name" error. The plain Circuit Hierarchy export also has its Device Label column populated again, where it had been blank.

Connecting and Disconnecting Devices

The copy-connections prompt can now be answered once and remembered. When you copy devices and run Validate, FireCAD asks whether to also copy their circuit connections. That prompt now carries a Don't ask again for this project checkbox — whichever button you click becomes the remembered answer. To bring the prompt back, set Options > Circuits > Copy Device Connections When Validating to "Ask each time". The remembered answer only ever applies to a Validate you started; background validation still never copies connections on its own.

What answering Yes actually does depends on whether you copied the panel along with the devices:

• You copied field devices only. Each copy is added to the same existing circuit its original belongs to, appended at the end of that circuit. The end-of-line designation moves to the pasted device, and addresses and voltage drop shift for the devices already on that circuit. This is worth knowing before you paste into a finished circuit.
• You copied the panel (or a passthrough that originates a circuit) too. The circuits it originates are cloned onto the new panel, and the copied field devices attach to those clones. Your original circuits are untouched. Copying a selection to several locations in one operation gives each copy its own set of circuits.

Only the circuit membership is copied. The wirepath lines themselves come across with the devices as normal, and their labels and lengths refresh on the next Update Wire Labels.

Assemblies now offer all of their inputs at once. When you connect to a panel or assembly that exposes several internal inputs — eight loop cards, for example — the connection dialog now lists every free input as its own row, rather than making you select the device once per connection. Untick the ones you don't want. Generic inputs such as junction passthrough and surge arrive already unticked, so they're offered without being connected by default.

The connection dialog is easier to read. Declining a connection is now a Do Not Connect checkbox on each row instead of a choice buried in the dropdown, and it works even on devices with a single input. The first column shows the specific assembly card being connected rather than repeating the assembly name on every row, and there's a new Type column showing the connection type.

Disconnect fixes. Disconnecting from the connected-device list now removes exactly the rows you selected — previously it removed the most recent connection regardless of your selection. And with the Disconnect command, selecting a device several times now removes that many connections, where before only one was ever removed.

Erased panels no longer hide behind their circuits. When a panel, assembly or module that originates circuits is erased from the drawing, its circuits used to stay in the project with nothing to tell you. Devices you connected afterwards were addressed through a device that no longer existed, and a later Delete Orphans could take the whole circuit tree with it. Now:

• The Project Circuits palette shows Origin erased or Origin missing in red beside any such circuit, and a warning under the selected circuit names the device and the drawing it came from.

• Connect, Insert and Branch stop and ask before adding anything to one of these circuits. Yes puts the erased panel or module back into the drawing — un-erasing it if AutoCAD still has it, otherwise re-inserting the block where it was — re-validates, and then continues with what you were doing. No proceeds as before. If the origin belongs to a different drawing, you are told which one.

Wirepath Updates and Delete Orphans Are Now Safer

Three commands that redraw wirepaths — Draw Circuit Wirepath, Update All Circuit Paths and Optimize All Circuits — were reaching for the same cleanup routine that Delete Orphans uses, which is able to remove devices, panels, circuits and assembly configurations. A wirepath redraw has no business doing that.

• Wirepath commands now only remove wirepath segments. They cannot delete a device, panel, circuit or assembly configuration under any circumstances.
• Delete Orphans shows you what it will remove, first. You get an itemized, reviewable list — assemblies named individually, modules grouped by part — and anything you untick is kept.
• Delete Orphans can now restore instead of delete. Each row has a Restore tick that puts the erased device back into the current drawing before anything is purged. Rows whose circuits still carry live devices are flagged — "12 live devices on 3 circuits are still addressed through this" — and start out as Keep rather than Delete, so an erased panel that your live circuits still hang off is never removed by accident. The button at the bottom says exactly what it will do: Delete, Restore, Restore and Delete, or Keep All.

• A backup is written before any purge, and if that backup cannot be written the purge stops rather than running unprotected.
• The cleanup is now all-or-nothing. Previously an interruption partway through could leave a project half cleaned; it now completes fully or rolls back.

Performance — Intermittent Freezes Fixed

Placing a device, refreshing labels, or opening a device list could occasionally stall for 15 to 45 seconds and then run instantly a few minutes later, with no relation to project size. The cause was the local database engine releasing its memory back to Windows under memory pressure and then having to rebuild. FireCAD now holds a working memory floor and re-primes it through the session. If you have seen unpredictable pauses that you could never reproduce on demand, this was almost certainly it.

AutoCAD 2027 — Older Drawings Read Correctly Again

On AutoCAD 2027 only, drawings saved by earlier FireCAD versions stored their embedded settings in a format the newer .NET runtime no longer reads. Every attempt to read one failed silently, so FireCAD behaved as though the settings were simply absent — coverage display, device-type associations and wirepath segment links all missing on those drawings. AutoCAD 2025 and 2026 were never affected, which is why opening the same drawing in 2026 appeared to fix it.

FireCAD now reads that older format directly. After upgrading, expect coverage areas and device links to reappear on affected drawings — that is the data that was always stored there.

The FireCAD Palette

• New installs get a sensibly placed palette. On first run the palette places itself docked at a usable width rather than wherever AutoCAD last left it. This happens once per Windows user per product and never fights you afterward. If you're upgrading from a much older build you may see a one-time re-dock.
• FireCAD 2026 / 2027 Standalone: the palette stays where you put it. The standalone products run on a fixed AutoCAD profile that discarded palette geometry at exit, so the palette reset to its default on every launch. FireCAD now remembers the position itself. Geometry is saved on a normal exit, so a crash still loses that session's move.

FireCAD 2026 and 2027 Standalone

• The FireCAD menu now appears in FireCAD 2027. The 2027 installer was writing its menu file to a folder the product never reads, so no FireCAD menu or ribbon appeared. FireCAD 2026 was never affected.
• The FireCAD ribbon tab repairs itself on install. If the FireCAD Tools tab had ever gone missing from the standalone ribbon, it stayed missing through every fix and restart, because AutoCAD had saved a workspace without it and that saved state outranked the menu itself. Installing or updating now repairs the menu header and sets the stale saved workspace aside, for both 2026 and 2027, so the tab is back on the first launch with no manual menu loading.
• Uninstalling the wrong entry no longer breaks the next install. Removing the FireCAD® 2026 or FireCAD® 2027 component entry from Apps & Features stripped the standalone's core program, and the next install then failed with error 1603. The installer now detects the missing core and repairs it in seconds instead of failing.
• Installer and uninstaller reliability work: leftover components after an uninstall, a collision between the two product versions during uninstall, and several build and packaging issues are resolved.

What You May Notice on Existing Projects

These are correct results, but they can differ from what a project showed before the upgrade.

• Spline wirepath lengths increase. Wirepath runs drawn with splines were silently dropped from length measurement. They are now included, so on affected drawings circuit length, resistance and voltage drop all go up — and a circuit that previously passed can correctly fail. Placed reports will be flagged out of date. The new numbers are the accurate ones.
• Projects with multiple cards per cabinet renumber. Passthrough current and addressing are now routed per card. On the first label refresh after upgrading, device addresses and passthrough currents change on these projects — before you edit anything. The currents come out lower and the SLC address labels renumber, and both are correct.
• Wire fill counts drop on drawings with erased devices. A device erased from the drawing but not yet cleaned out of the project was still being counted as a conductor in wire fill. It no longer is, so wire fill percentages on affected drawings come out lower.
• A one-time label and report refresh. Entity properties that share a name now all display, so some labels show more text. Leader label masking and attachment sync to your style settings on the first refresh. Speaker Schedule and Point-to-Point no longer list devices marked Exclude From Report — their lengths fold into the next visible device instead. Each of these correctly flags placed reports as out of date, once.
• Potter exports include booster-hosted loops. SLC loops hosted on a P-LINK expander now fold into their parent panel's export rather than being omitted. The summary shown before writing lists which loops were folded and flags any it could not parent.

Bug Fixes

• Panels added by bulk insert now get their default cards. A panel brought in through bulk insert and then validated with Validate Drawing came out with no cards at all, so it originated no circuits and every device meant for it went unconnected. This often looked like "my circuits disappeared." Validate Drawing now gives a newly inserted panel the same default cards as one placed by hand. Panels you have already customised, including ones you emptied on purpose, are left exactly as they are.
• Wire resistance in metric projects and the resistance column header now use the correct units.
• Title block settings no longer grow on every save.
• Assorted report text and formatting corrections.

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Previous Releases

See Previous Release Notes for updates from July 2026 and earlier.

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