NoE Maker Toolkit
v1.0.0
The commissioning paperwork, done by three desktop tools.
On a large-scale industrial commissioning project, commissioning engineers lose hours to energization documents and drawing markup, all by hand. We built a Windows toolkit that does the busywork: it generates the documents, batch-repaints the drawings, and finds any subsystem across a huge drawing tree.
Industrial commissioning · case study
Commissioning a plant means proving each subsystem is ready to energize, and that proof is paperwork: a Notice of Energization per subsystem, marked-up drawings showing what is live, and the constant hunt for which drawing a tag even lives on. Done by hand across hundreds of subsystems, it is slow and error-prone, and a wrong drawing or a missed tag costs real time on a live project.
The NoE Maker Toolkit takes that work off the engineer's hands. A single launcher opens three focused tools, each running as its own crash-isolated process so one tool falling over never takes the others down. It is packaged as one NoE.exe with PyInstaller, so an engineer installs nothing and just runs it. The UI is bilingual, so it fits a Spanish-speaking field team as well as an English-speaking one.
One launcher, three focused tools
NoE Generator
Notices of Energization have to exist for every subsystem, and writing them by hand is slow and repetitive. Give the Generator a COMM number, the subsystems, and a signer, and it produces the finished .docx from templates.
Drawing Plan Painter
Engineers mark up Visio drawings per subsystem and export PDFs, tediously and one shape at a time. The Painter drives Visio over COM to batch-repaint the subsystem shapes and export per-page PDFs in one pass.
Drawing Finder
Finding which drawing and page a subsystem or tag lives on, across a deep folder tree, is painful. The Finder searches Visio and PDF drawings by subsystem or tag, scanning subfolders automatically, and reveals each match in Explorer.
How it works
- One launcher, three tools, each spawned as its own process so a crash stays isolated.
- Python + CustomTkinter UI on a Catppuccin theme, dark and light.
- python-docx renders the energization documents from templates.
- pywin32 drives Visio over COM to repaint shapes; PyMuPDF and OpenCV handle the PDF and image work.
- Packaged as a single NoE.exe with PyInstaller, so there is nothing to install.
Outcomes
- Energization documents that were typed by hand now generate from a template in one step.
- Drawing markup that was shape-by-shape in Visio is now a single batch repaint-and-export.
- Finding where a subsystem or tag lives went from manual hunting to a searchable lookup.
Shipped at v1.0.0 and used on the project, then parked as a clean, documented skeleton with a roadmap. It may be revived; the bones are kept ready.
Co-developed with a colleague.
If it gets revived
- One shared window hosting all three tools instead of three separate processes.
- Unified history across the tools, so recent COMM numbers and subsystems carry over.
- Live cross-tool subsystem sync, so picking a subsystem in one tool sets it in the others.
Real field work, taken off engineers' hands by code.
The code stays private. The capability is the point. See the rest of what Lucas builds.