Lesson 2

Finding your way around

The window has only two halves and one bottom line, and everything you will use for the rest of the guide lives in them. Ten minutes here saves a lot of hunting later.

Two halves and a splitter

The scheme sheet is on the left, the data panels on the right, and the bar between them is draggable. Give the side you are working with as much room as it needs — the position is kept between sessions.

On a two-monitor desk the right half is better off on its own: View → Floating data panel puts it into a separate window and leaves the whole main window to the scheme. Closing that window docks the panel back where it was.

The left half

Above everything is the menu: File, View, Edit, Scenario, Preferences, About. While an object is selected, an Item menu appears between Edit and Scenario: turn, mirror, duplicate, delete, auto-signature, Pipe sizing… and Variant calculation… — mostly the commands of the right-click menu of the object. The title bar shows the program version and the full path of the open file; * after the name means unsaved changes.

File menu	What it does
New	An empty scheme; the undo history goes with the old one.
Load	Open a .gf9 file.
Recent files	The last eight schemes, newest first; the full path is in the hint.
Save, Save as	Write the scheme to its file, or under a new name.
Upload to WEB	Publish the scheme for a browser — lesson 17.
Launching a copy	A second EasyCAS with its own window, for two schemes side by side.
Export to MSVisio	A Visio drawing with live connectors — lesson 17.
Report (pdf)	The full report; a submenu chooses the scheme picture — lesson 16.
Air consumption data sheet (pdf)…	One page for a machine builder: the air the machine needs and the supply line it needs — lesson 16.
Exit	Close the program, asking about unsaved changes first.

The toolbar, left to right

Button	What it does
New	An empty scheme.
Open	Load a .gf9 file.
Save	Save under the current name.
Save as	Save under a new name.
Upload	Publish the project to the web — lesson 17.
Undo, Redo	Ctrl+Z, Ctrl+Y — lesson 4.
Find element	The list of IDs on the sheet; the binoculars next to it search by ID.
Source	The compressor the cyclogram and the per-compressor figures follow.
Cyclogram	The work cycle of the consumers — lesson 14.
Design | Audit | Dynamic	The calculation mode — see below.
Launching a copy	Starts a second copy of the program. Anchored to the right edge, so it stays reachable in a narrow window.

Two controls worth knowing now

Find element is a drop-down of every object ID in the scheme. Pick one and that object becomes current — the parameter tables follow it. On a scheme of two hundred items this beats hunting on the sheet.

Source is the compressor the rest of the program works from — in the scheme of lesson 1 it reads ID2, the one compressor there is. The cyclogram, the work cycle file and the per-compressor figures in the report all follow this field. A scheme may hold several compressors (lesson 9). Separate networks each have their own consumers and their own round, and switching Source switches between them. Two compressors joined into one network through a LOOP share its consumers.

The mode switch: Design, Audit, Dynamic

The switch next to the cyclogram shows the current mode — Design in every lesson up to 9. When the sheet half of the window is wide enough, the switch shows all three parts and you click the one you want. When it is narrower — as in the pictures of this guide — only the current mode is shown, and each click moves to the next one: Design → Audit → Dynamic → Design. View → Audit mode and View → Dynamic mode do the same from the menu. Three modes, three questions. Design works from the consumers back to the compressor and sizes the network — that is lesson 1 and lessons 6 to 9. Audit works the other way, from a compressor you already have towards the consumers, and is how an existing plant is assessed. Dynamic computes pressures, flows and cylinder strokes in time.

The same scheme serves all three; what changes is which rows you fill in and which rows the calculation writes back.

The right half

Two panels, one above the other, with a draggable splitter between them, and a row of buttons at the bottom.

The status bar is not just a readout

Four of its fields are switches, and this is where the sheet settings now live — there used to be a separate snap panel above the sheet, and it is gone.

Zoom without the menu

• Ctrl+wheel over the sheet — zoom; the Scale field follows.
• Ctrl+Shift+wheel — scale the current object, not the view.
• Right click on Scale — straight back to 100 %.

Only the visible part of the scheme is redrawn, so scrolling stays fast on a large network.

Developer mode

View → Developer mode adds two fields at the right end of the status bar with diagnostics about the object under the cursor, and makes a few extra checks visible in the View menu. It costs nothing when off, and it is the first thing to turn on when you want to report something odd.

When it does not work

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