ASNCAD

What a lift project drawing set contains

A lift project prepared for permitting and installation is never a single drawing. The shaft layout plan, longitudinal shaft sections, car layout, machine room plan and the full project sheet together form a set, each describing the same structure from a different plane.

When these are drawn by hand the hard part is not drawing but staying consistent. Change the shaft width and the plan, the section and the sheet all have to follow. In practice one gets updated and another does not, and the mismatch surfaces on site during installation.

One parameter set, seven drawings

ASNCAD generates the whole set from a single parameter set. Shaft dimensions, car size, door type, drive configuration and number of stops are entered once; the shaft plan, car and machine room plans, longitudinal sections and the full project sheet are all derived from that source.

Change one parameter and every drawing is regenerated together. A dimension mismatch between plan and section is structurally impossible, because both are drawn from the same number.

Form fields come from a schema and are validated as you type, so declared load and derived dimensions are computed while you enter data rather than after the sheet is produced.

What the verification calculations check

Design work is not only drawing; the design has to be shown to hold. In ASNCAD the EN 81 verification calculations are bound to the same parameter set as the drawings.

Traffic analysis evaluates whether the lift is adequate for the building population. Guide rail stress examines rail behaviour under load, and rope traction checks the friction condition between drive and rope. For hydraulic systems, buckling covers ram stability under axial load. The electrical installation calculation covers supply and cross-section selection.

Keeping these in the same model as the drawings matters: when a parameter changes, the calculation changes with it.

From a CAD add-in to the browser

The drawing engine was not written from scratch. An engine used for years as a ZWCAD add-in, proven in day-to-day office work, was moved onto a .NET 8 core.

The practical consequence is that drawing generation no longer has to run inside a CAD application. The core sits behind an HTTP API, the front end is written in Flutter, and the same application opens in a browser and on Windows. A machine without a licensed CAD install can still produce a project.

DXF output and fitting an existing workflow

Drawings are downloaded as DXF, the common interchange format between CAD packages. You can open the file in AutoCAD, ZWCAD or any other DXF-capable program and carry on working.

The goal is not to replace the office CAD habit but to remove the step where a drawing is built from nothing. Parametric generation finishes the bulk of the work; project-specific edits continue in your own CAD program.

The output reserves space for TSE label and certificate fields.