No two electrical blueprint sets look the same. I knew this going in, but after running VAWN through two preview rounds with real construction drawings, the degree of variation is staggering. The way one firm draws a panel schedule bears almost no resemblance to another’s. Sheet numbering, scale conventions, symbol libraries — every set is its own dialect. We ran these previews to see how our automated electrical blueprint analysis holds up against the wild diversity of real-world plans, and we learned more than we expected.
Preview I happened in fall 2025 with a handful of real sets. The goal was simple: get a bare-bones proof of concept into people’s hands. It could detect lights and receptacles — that’s it. No panel schedules, no stitching, no sheet classification. But even that minimal functionality, running against real construction PDFs, exposed an initial wave of issues we never would have found on our own data. It confirmed the approach had legs, and gave us a clear list of what to build next.
Preview II ran for two weeks in February 2026, and this time we invited a much bigger pool of people to try it. We added sheet identification, automated panel schedule extraction, lighting fixture detection across more symbol types, and multi-sheet electrical plan stitching to reconstruct full floor plans from tiled drawings. The sets that came in were far more diverse: hospitals, correctional facilities, schools, a fan-shaped building, South African drawings, multi-building campuses. We encountered single-column and dual-column panel schedules, diagonal grid lines that confused the blueprint stitching alignment, metric scales on international projects, and drawings where voltage specifications got mistaken for scale ratios. One set used decimal sheet numbering while another used NCS prefixes with multi-building codes. Every set taught us something new about how engineers actually produce electrical plans.
The breadth of what’s out there is the real story. NCS versus decimal sheet numbering. Imperial versus metric. Multi-building prefixes that change the entire sheet naming scheme. Image-heavy scanned pages sitting next to clean vector PDFs within the same set. Dual-column panel schedules versus single-column. Rectangular floor plans versus arc-shaped layouts. Some drawings had so many non-electrical annotations that isolating the electrical layer required filtering through mechanical, plumbing, and architectural noise. This is why manual electrical quantity takeoff and panel schedule reading is so time-consuming — every project is a new puzzle, and the person doing the electrical estimating has to re-learn the drawing conventions before they can even start counting.
Each preview round pushed us to handle more of this variety automatically. Construction drawing digitization isn’t a one-model problem — it’s dozens of edge cases that each need their own solution. The goal remains the same: upload your electrical construction PDFs, get accurate fixture counts, panel data, and stitched floor plans back, regardless of how your engineer drew them or what region the project is in. MEP pre-construction automation only works if it handles the full range of what estimators actually encounter.
We’re planning the next preview round now. If you’re an electrical subcontractor or estimator who deals with electrical plan reading and wants to see how VAWN handles your drawings, reach out. The messier your drawings, the more we want to see them.