What's New Preview - The Next FireCAD Release

Preview. This article lists what has been built since the September 2026 release (FireCAD 2027 Standalone and the 2025-2027 Add-in, September 9). It is in beta now and is updated as the release is finished. When it ships, the final notes move to FireCAD Update - What's New. Items marked in progress are being completed for the release or the one after.

Several of these features already have full articles: What's New in FireCAD: Templates, Project Properties, Submittal Builder and Design Assistant, and two Design Assistant walkthroughs, A Project Start to Finish with the Design Assistant and Estimating a Job with the Design Assistant.

The release has two big pieces and a long tail of fixes. The Design Assistant, an AI assistant that lives in a FireCAD palette, reads your project and drawing, answers questions, runs reports and does drawing work on request. The Autocall and Simplex battery and circuit changes bring FireCAD's calculations into line with JCI's FQQ design workbook; they have their own article, Autocall and Simplex Update - Preview.

Design Assistant

A new Design Assistant panel on the ribbon opens the assistant palette. It is licensed as its own feature, with monthly credits per seat, and signs in with your FireCAD account.

For a guided tour, follow A Project Start to Finish with the Design Assistant; for bids, Estimating a Job with the Design Assistant.

What it does for you

• Ask about the project. The assistant has the drawing, the catalog, your attachments and every earlier turn of the conversation. Answers are formatted, stream in as they are written, and include links that zoom to the device they mention. Support questions are free; design work uses credits, and a usage meter in the palette shows what is left.
• Run reports without the report window. Battery calculation, Panel Summary, Point-to-Point, lump sum, lump sum summary, speaker schedule, decibel loss, cable legend, conduit fill, conduit schedule, segment label schedule, title block, inspection form and completion report, exported or placed on a sheet.
• Do drawing work on request. Define areas and rooms (FireCAD's own fill, door swings, stalls and xrefs are understood), place and connect devices, replace devices in place with another part, move devices without erasing them (their wires are rerouted), set addresses and lock or unlock them, change which input a device connects to, set segment conduit type and label display, show or hide coverage, select by filter, optimize wirepaths, draw the riser onto a sheet, and arrange device labels so they do not overlap.
• Design Precheck is the former Design Review, now inside the same drawer and available without an assistant licence. It reads the project's own battery settings and voltage drop method.
• Stay in control. Every drawing step waits while you are in a command or a dialog. Stop and Esc interrupt long work and keep what finished. A progress card over the drawing says what the assistant is doing. Each answer takes a thumbs up or down with a reason, and you can copy the response.
• Preferences. Options has a Design Assistant tab: voltage drop method, voltage margin, spare circuit and battery capacity the assistant designs to, speaker circuit voltage, mounting defaults, ceiling height, and anything else it should always follow.

In progress for the release

• Saved conversations you can reopen and search (chat history).
• A preview card for drawing changes: Preview, not applied yet, with Apply and Discard.
• Structured design review output as findings and next steps.
• Account sign-in with multi-factor authentication and one licence per person.
• Keeping AutoCAD responsive while the assistant works on large drawings.

Autocall and Simplex: battery calculation and circuit limits

Covered in full, with screenshots, in Autocall and Simplex Update - Preview. In short:

• IDNAC boost. Appliance alarm current on an IDNAC channel is multiplied by 1.57 (1.37 behind an IDNAC repeater) in the battery calculation; the report shows the boost as its own line. ES-MX loop devices take a 2.496 multiplier on standby and alarm. The multipliers are columns on the circuit type, the circuit template and the individual circuit, so any manufacturer can use them and any one circuit can be adjusted.
• Spare capacity. A project setting applied on top of the derating factor, printed as its own line.
• Unit loads. A second capacity per channel (139 on IDNAC, 250 on IDNet) counted alongside addresses; the palette's usage summary and the Design Precheck both report it. Each IDNAC repeater output keeps its own 139, as FQQ counts them.
• Repeater addressing. IDNAC repeater outputs continue the channel's 1 to 127 address pool, as FQQ assigns them.
• Voltage drop. Nested T-tap branches now count toward upstream current, and Class A circuits are checked from either end with the worse result reported.
• Branch numbers you can set. Pin a branch to the number on your drawing in the Project Circuits palette; new branches take the lowest free number.
• IDNAC design checks. The Design Assistant flags too many devices between isolators, a branch over 4,000 ft, a repeater fed from a repeater, too many repeaters or adapter modules on a channel, and communications voltage drop over FQQ's speaker-count limit.
• Warning voltage. IDNAC circuits warn between 24.2 V and the 23 V minimum, with an amber end-of-line cell on the voltage drop reports.
• DIP switch settings. A Device Schedule column and a [dip] label token show each IDNAC appliance's address as switch positions.
• Voice projects default to a 15-minute alarm time in the battery calculation.
• Catalog. 296 new and more than 300 corrected Autocall parts, and six 50 C wire types, in the online database now.

Device palette

• Grid mode is fast again. A refresh that took about 20 seconds on a large catalog now virtualizes its rows.
• Filter as you type, and keep your terms. Manufacturer and Category pulldowns, removable filter pills inside the search box, a match count, and every search term required. Works the same in Tile and Grid.
• Tile mode restyled. Card layout, autosized columns, and a Small / Medium / Large tile setting.

Project Properties, templates and submittals

• Project Properties gains occupancy load and occupancy sub-groups (H-1 to H-5, I-1 to I-4, R-1 to R-4), NFPA documents and editions chosen individually, codes and standards pre-filled from occupancy and jurisdiction, NFPA annex and SFPE/NFPA handbook references, and an Enhanced language option that writes a design narrative, references and a Basis of Design page for performance-based submittals.
• Project templates. The ARCH templates expand to D and E sheet sizes (NCS layout) and the sheet index is a report. The project wizard shows a template gallery with previews, a My templates folder, and Save as My Template.
• Save Project As keeps a revision log, and the copied project's drawing comes across cleanly.
• Submittal Builder gets report sections, part order, legend symbols, page fit and numbering; the table of contents page numbers now match the PDF reader's.
• Cover sheet codes and title block fields fill from the project.

Riser

• Auto-Align Vertical Runs now applies to multi-floor circuits, so an SLC no longer staircases across elevations.
• Separate Column Per Riser Circuit (off by default), and a suggestion when a riser comes out tangled.
• Draw Left works on networked panels.
• Wrapped circuits keep the circuits their devices originate (a module's zone, a duct detector's RTS) with the device instead of pulling them into separate rows.
• The Select Circuits pane shows and searches the origin's entity-property values.

Reports and Options

• Report options moved out of the Options editor into each report's settings dialog; the Reports tab keeps the common settings and the defaults.
• One voltage drop method for the project, named on the Panel Summary and in the Design Precheck.
• Panel Summary shows the card's used amps as the worse of standby and alarm instead of their sum.
• Battery calculation keeps amp-hours and battery sizes when Automatic Decimal Precision is off.
• Lump sum export no longer fails with Range is invalid.
• Excel import and export work on a project whose device handles look like very large numbers (for example 13E682); before, every import failed on such a project.
• Export Fireworks Drawing writes device labels as plain text in a copy of the drawing, with device blocks renamed to their part numbers, for FIREWORKS import.
• Speaker Schedule reads the card watt limit from the amplifier card inside a cabinet, not the cabinet row.
• Design Precheck checks each card's alarm current against that card's own circuits, instead of the whole panel's.
• The Master Template Editor's Add Card Current To Battery Calc column is hidden; no calculation ever read it.

Circuits, labels and data integrity

• Save never replaces a good project with a collapsed one. If a validate or purge has emptied the project, Save refuses instead of persisting it.
• Purge is split. Wirepath commands purge only their own segments; the real purge shows an itemized confirmation of what it will delete.
• Erased panels and modules that still own circuits are flagged on connect, with an offer to restore them from the connect flow and the purge dialog.
• Cancel while drawing a wirepath leaves the database unchanged.
• Device-originated circuits (a control module feeding an audio circuit) take their Panel name from the connection that feeds them, so labels stop flipping between the SLC and the amplifier label.
• Set Circuit Type Filters and auto-draw wirepath work again on the machines where Apply did nothing.
• Set Property Visibility no longer re-shows a hidden project-wide label property when you set a device property.
• Question marks on every device after Save Project As, Duplicate Project Drawing or a recovered drawing are fixed: Validate rewrites the stale drawing record.
• Attribute update opens device text and labels on locked layers instead of skipping them.
• Crash fix. A customer drawing that terminated AutoCAD on open or regen (a non-FireCAD block reaching the device overrule) no longer does.
• Device option listing shows the template's part list once and says which device is on which option.

Install, update and licensing

• FireCAD ribbon self-heal. If the FireCAD tab or menu is missing or stale after an install or upgrade, FireCAD reloads its menu itself on the next start; a stale menu file in the user's profile is replaced with the installed one.
• Check for Updates works on the installs where it could not start before.

Everything above is in the current beta.

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