Cable runs & lengths - AV Software Docs

Draw a cable on the floor plan and Avitly works out its true length: horizontal run, slack, and vertical drop.

Cables you draw directly on a calibrated floor plan get a real length, not just a line on a page. Avitly adds up the horizontal run you drew, a slack allowance, and any vertical drop between ceiling and floor devices that a top-down plan cannot show.

Before you start

The floor plan needs to be calibrated (see Floor plans) before any cable shows a length. Until then, the cable tool still lets you draw runs, but the panel shows a prompt to calibrate rather than a measurement.

Set up cable types

From the floor plan, open the cable type manager and add a type, for example Cat6 UTP or a speaker cable.
Give it a colour, a cost per metre (or link it to a product in your catalog so cost and BOM tracking come from there), and optionally a max length and an excess allowance.
Excess per end is a service-loop slack added at both terminations, so a 3 m value adds 6 m to every run of that type.
Max length is optional and only used to warn you when a run goes over what that cable type can realistically carry.

Draw a run

Select the cable tool and click from one device or point to another. Use the path tool first to draw a conduit if several cables will follow the same route.
A cable can ride a path: draw its two ends near an existing conduit and it snaps onto the path and follows it, instead of you retracing the same route for every cable.
Select a point on the cable and set its height above the floor to model a drop, for example a ceiling speaker feeding down to a floor box. The vertical length is the sum of the height changes along the run.
Pick the cable's type from the properties panel to price and colour it.

Read the length

The properties panel breaks a selected cable's length into horizontal run, vertical drop (only shown when non-zero), and a total. The total already includes the type's excess allowance. If the total exceeds that cable type's max length, a warning appears directly under it.

Tips

The horizontal run includes a fixed 12% slack for terminations, sag, and service loops on top of the drawn distance, in addition to any per-end excess you configured on the cable type.
A path (conduit) itself is never priced as cable and carries no excess allowance; only the cables riding it are.
Cable totals per type, including cost, feed straight into the bill of materials and the quote, so a change to a cable type's cost per metre updates pricing everywhere it is used.
Switch your organisation's unit system between metric and imperial in settings; lengths are stored canonically and displayed in whichever unit you have set.