AutoCAD Electircal Best Practices Series 1...

I am back from my South / North Carolina trip, and I have to say I had a productive trip and flight back. I had the opportunity to sit in first class where I actually have the room to use my laptop on the plane. It was great, so anyway below you will see my work from the flight back.

As with many software packages and design tools, there are many ways to accomplish the same task.  This can add a load of confusion to novice and veteran users alike.  In addition to the countless ways to accomplish the same tasks, there are similarities between AutoCAD and AutoCAD Electrical that can add confusion.  Along with these hurdles, AutoCAD might provide a manual process to accomplish the task, where AutoCAD Electrical, being an electrical design tool, may provide an automated process for the same task.

Over the past three years working for INCAT I have had the opportunity to work with numerous customers with several CAD design tools and engineering issues.  During my time at INCAT I have found several best practices when using AutoCAD Electrical and I want to share some of that content with users like you. Over the next few weeks I will be adding to this series different “Best Practices” that I have found over time as well as any new ones that I find in the coming weeks.  Read on and enjoy. 

We will start this series with some of the items that users need to think differently about when using AutoCAD Electrical, such as components.  AutoCAD Electrical uses core AutoCAD technology with scripts/programs built on top to automate daily even hourly tasks. Components are nothing more than AutoCAD Blocks with attributes. The reason we need to think differently is because the tools within AutoCAD Electrical views these blocks as an intelligent object, so why shouldn't’t we think of them this way, having said that I will get started with a few of the specifics that we need to think about.

Insert Components Not Blocks

As a former designer for both Mechanical and Electrical engineering in the Automated Machinery Industry I have been using Autodesk products since the mid ninety’s including AutoCAD, AutoCAD Mechanical and Autodesk Inventor.  Back in the day when I worked on AutoCAD doing electrical schematics I wish I had a tool to automate some of the daily tasks such as inserting, tagging, annotating and trimming the wires. It used to be a tedious task to get the block symbol in even for the most advanced users.  By changing our thinking from inserting AutoCAD blocks to inserting Electrical Components it will help us old school AutoCAD users to remember to use the tools designed for AutoCAD Electrical.  I have listed several of the benefits of inserting a component below.

Insert Component Benefits:

• Automatically Trim Wires
• Automatically Assign Device ID/Component Tag
• Automatically Prompt Users for Annotation
• Automatically Re-locates Existing Wire Numbers

Check back often for more in this series. I hope you will find this series useful to yourself and co-workers.