Tablo

Tablo draws and checks the diagrams of Belgian electrical installations, from the survey on site to the file handed to the inspection. It is made for the residential and commercial installer — the person who, for every house sold or renovated, has to produce a single-line diagram and a position plan that pass the approved inspection body.

Today that work is done in CAD suites built for panel builders — powerful, expensive, slow to learn —, in free tools that draw but understand nothing, or on paper and in Excel. Tablo takes the other side: little to learn, and software that knows what it is drawing. It runs in the browser and as a desktop app (Linux, macOS, Windows) from the same code, and it is in free beta at tablo-app.be.

On site, on a phone

Everything starts with the survey, and the survey is done standing up, in the house, with a phone. Room by room: pick the type of room and the floor, and add the sockets, lights, switches and appliances in one tap each, with their quantity. Every point belongs to a circuit, picked or created on the spot with the usual values — a 30 mA RCD is offered by default for a bathroom or a washing machine.

The board is surveyed the same way: main switch, RCDs, breakers, cables and lengths, and the measured resistance of the earth electrode. The survey says what is still missing while you are still there, which is the only time that is any use.

There is no signal in a cellar. The app installs from the site and works fully offline: projects and photos stay on the device, and a cloud project opens from its local copy and syncs when the connection comes back.

The board, in a photo

Copying an existing board out by hand is the most tedious part of the job. You photograph it instead: the AI reads the devices — ratings, curves, RCDs, labels — and proposes the list of circuits, which the installer checks before it goes into the project. Circuits already surveyed keep their points.

The same way in takes a sentence, typed or dictated — "kitchen, circuit C, six sockets on 2.5 mm², 20 A" —, a hand sketch, or a request to the assistant that edits the project: "add an EV charger, then generate the multi-line diagram". Whatever the AI proposes goes through a review step, and nothing changes the project except through the same undoable operations the editor uses. The server can also run a model hosted on your own machine instead of Claude, with the same features and the same checks.

One model, two drawings

The heart of Tablo is that it does not draw two diagrams: it keeps one model and shows it twice. The single-line diagram, per board, and the position plan, per floor, are generated from the survey and tagged the same way — A1, A2, B1… as on the board —, so a point on the plan is always a point on a circuit. When the survey changes, the diagrams are regenerated in place, and a rule flags any that have fallen behind.

The same model gives the multi-line diagram, the control schematics, the board layout on its rails, wire and terminal numbering, and cross-references between sheets. The architect's plan can sit underneath: an image, a PDF, or a DXF file placed at true scale with no calibration.

The checks, while you draw

Because the software knows what a circuit is, it can check one. The RGIE rules run as you work: 30 mA RCDs in wet rooms, points per circuit, cable sections and ratings, voltage drop, maximum protected length. The calculations behind them are the trade's own — design current, current-carrying capacity by installation method, voltage drop, breaking capacity against the short-circuit current at the origin.

Every finding explains the rule and says how to fix it. And Tablo also says what it is not: an aid to preparing the inspection, not the inspection. That stays with the approved body.

What comes out

The file: sheets to size, with the RGIE title block filled from the project's details, as PDF, SVG, PNG or DXF; the circuit list; the board's labels; a handover pack with a QR code. And what comes right after the diagram in an installer's actual working life: the bill of materials and the quote — devices, cables by the diagram's own lengths, labour, prices from their wholesaler's list, VAT at 21 % or 6 %, as an Excel file with its formulas.

As a team

With an account, projects sync between phone, tablet and computer, live between several people, with team workspaces and a shared library of symbols and templates. A read-only link shows the project to the client or to the inspection body, as it is or frozen at a revision. The app speaks French, Dutch and English, with Flemish terminology on the Dutch side, and the language of the drawings is a project setting, separate from the interface's. The server is in Europe.

What there is, and what there is not

It is a free beta, online and as a desktop app; the iPhone and Android versions are waiting for their store listings. Belgium first, and the RGIE with it; other countries' rules are in preparation and marked as such.

As with Memojo, this page describes the app rather than how it was built: the source is private, and the choices behind it are not mine to publish here. The link above goes to the app itself.

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