This is my opportunity to share my excitement about some new (okay, not so new) software in the Autodesk lineup, AutoCAD® Electrical. This product is used for control system design and, with it, you can draw using ladder style drawings or point-to-point wiring diagrams. (See Figures 1 and 2.) Before being purchased by Autodesk, AutoCAD Electrical (ACE) was owned and marketed by various companies since the early 1990s, including Cimlogic Toolbox WD and Via WD.

Figure 1: Ladder Style Example

Figure 2: Point-to-Point or Wiring Diagram Example

AutoCAD Electrical is based on AutoCAD® software and all commands and functions of AutoCAD are available in ACE. In fact, you can change the profile to the standard Vanilla profile and your mechanical counterparts won't know the difference.

Included with ACE are many different symbol libraries, including two different sizes of JIC (American), two different sizes of IEC (European), JIS, GB, AS, and P&ID symbols. And to keep your mechanical buddies happy, ACE comes with pneumatic and hydraulic libraries as well.

All of the symbols are created using very fundamental AutoCAD objects, namely standard blocks with specifically named attributes. For those who haven't used them before, attributes are information tags stored within standard blocks. Blocks and attributes have been around for a very, very long time. This means that drawings created in ACE are compatible and can be opened and edited with any product that can edit standard AutoCAD files.

While you can create custom blocks using standard AutoCAD commands such as Block, WBlock, and Eattedit (for defining attributes), ACE has a wizard, called the Symbol Builder, which makes the process very simple.

Figure 3: Symbol Builder Dialog Box

Required attribute tag names are pre-assigned and listed for you. Simply select the desired attribute and locate in the block. Wire connections, linking connections, and so on, are added the same way. The Block and Wblock commands and automatic block naming are also built in the utility.

Common editing and annotation tools are provided and many processes can be completed project-wide, updating every drawing in the project. Let's take wire numbers for example. Adding wire numbers to every wire in every drawing in the project is a very simple process. Simply start the Insert Wire Number command, choose the format for the wire numbers, select the drawings you want updated, and watch the magic happen.

Each drawing, in order, is opened and every wire network in the drawing is processed, adding a wire number. The drawing is saved and the next drawing is opened until all selected drawings are processed.

ACE has many tools to automate the many steps that are required to complete ordinary tasks when creating electrical drawings. For example, when inserting a symbol in AutoCAD, you have to start the Insert command, browse to the symbol directory, insert the symbol, edit the symbol attributes by typing, and breaking the line after insertion.

When inserting a symbol using the ACE tools, you select a symbol from the icon menu system, insert the symbol (automatically breaking the underlying wire), and fill out the attribute information, picking from lists and clicking buttons. Not only is the process easier, but the information selected from the lists reduces typos, improving accuracy.

Figure 4: Partial Image of the Insert/Edit Component Dialog Box

In the Insert/Edit dialog box, each white edit box corresponds to an attribute in the symbol being inserted. You can manually enter a value into the box, just like you would using AutoCAD and the Enhanced Attribute Editor or any other attribute editing tools.

What makes this so efficient are all of the controls available to help you fill out that information. For example, the tag value of the symbol, LS406 in the example shown, is calculated automatically and filled in for you. The Lookup button under the Catalog Data area opens a database with component part numbers you can select, greatly reducing typographical errors.

Once the drawings are created, ACE not only extracts the attribute information into reports, but provides easy tools to change the report format, place the report into drawings as a table, and export the report to any of five different file formats.

You can start a project by creating the panel drawings, the schematic drawings, or in any combination. No matter which drawing is completed first, you can extract the inserted components or footprints into a component list and select items from the list for insertion into a project drawing. After insertion, the component is automatically marked as inserted and can't be inserted again, maintaining a one-to-one relationship between components in the schematic drawings and those in the panel drawings.

Some notes to remember about AutoCAD Electrical are:

• Drawings are completely compatible with AutoCAD.
• All AutoCAD commands and functions are available.
• Many tools are available to automate tedious processes.

In upcoming articles, we will discuss various functions and utilities in detail and explain some tips on solving some common problems in electrical design.

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Submitted by Randy J. Brunette, owner of Brunette Technologies, LLC. Randy specializes in providing training, consulting, customization, and implementation services for AutoCAD Electrical software. He has been using Autodesk products since 1984 and AutoCAD Electrical since 1996.