Representing cables in AutoCAD® Electrical is a team effort. Two different tools are used to complete the tasks involved.

The first is the Wire Fan In/Out tool that is used to show a group of individual wires joining together to form a single cable and when the cable separates to form the individual wires.

The second tool is the cable marker symbols. These symbols are placed on wire or cable lines to identify cables and hold the cable information such as manufacturer, part numbers, and conductor colors.

Wire Fan In/Out Markers
Let's start with the fan in/out markers. The basic functionality is the same as when using Source/Destination arrows. Both provide a link between wire segments located in different locations to form a single wire network. Source/Destination arrows are designed to be placed on the end of a wire.

Fan In/Out markers are placed in–line with a wire. Fan In/Out markers also place the outgoing or destination portion of the wire segment on a special non–wire layer. Because the segments are on a non–wire layer, AutoCAD Electrical doesn't process the joined lines as wires connected or shorted together.

The Fan In/Out tool provides the ability to place multiple source or destination markers in a single operation. If both the In and Out markers are on the same drawing and in relatively close proximity, you can also place the matching marker in the same operation.

You choose the marker style and the wire connection orientation. The orientation determines which part of the underlying wire is going to remain on the wire layer and which part is placed on the multi–wire layer. Don't be concerned if the arrow representation is in the wrong location—the arrow simply indicates the side of wire that will be changed, for example, right, left, top, or bottom.

When the Fan In/Out symbol is placed, the underlying wire is broken and the destination side is placed on the multi–wire layer (described later).

Use the description field of the fan in/out markers to list the wire colors. These labels help to identify the individual cable wires on the schematic but do not show up in reports.

Multi-Wire Layer
The multi–wire layer is necessary to display the connecting wires of the Fan In/Out. This layer is not a common wire layer and is ignored by the standard wire processing utilities. Without moving the lines to a non–wire layer, the fan wires would appear to be connected together and give undesirable results.

Layers to be used as multi–wire layers are set in the Drawing Properties dialog box under Styles. The default layer is _Multi_Wire.

This layer has some special properties when relating to cable and fan in/out markers. When a cable marker is attached to multi–wire network, all of the wires attached to the Fan In/Out markers are associated to the cable. The Cable From/To report will list the cable name in addition to the wire from/to information.

Cables and Cable Markers
In AutoCAD Electrical there is no actual "cable" object. A cable marker symbol contains the data that is listed in reports. All of the Bill of Material and other information are stored on attributes in the cable marker.

Cable markers are usually placed on wires that show the cable routing. This allows the cables to use the wire routing utilities to create connection lists, etc.

The conductors in a cable can be listed in the catalog database table "_W0_CBLWIRES". Enter each conductor for a cable in the order you normally want to insert them. AutoCAD Electrical uses both the W0 table, which lists the cable part number and the _W0_CBLWIRES table together to provide error checking similar to the use of pin lists.

With this information and the use of cable markers, you can track which conductors of a cable have been used. Cable colors are automatically entered in the order listed in the table. When you try to insert more conductors than are available, a message box appears. Dismissing the dialog enables you to bypass the error checking and insert a generic marker.

Cable Report Information

There are several methods available for having wiring information appear in reports.

Method 1: Cable parent only, wire layers, local destination
This example has the Cable marker parent placed on the Multi-line layer. Wires going into the Fan In/Out markers are use a standard wire layer for each cable wire. For example, you might use layers named BLK_18GA_Cbl3Cond, RED_18ga_Cbl3Cond, and WHT_18ga_Cbl3Cond. The destination markers are shown locally (on the same drawing).

Remote destination
This example will show the same report results as above but illustrates the solution to a different problem.

Source/Destination arrows do not recognize a multi-wire layer as a wire. A solution is to place a wire segment attached to the multi-wire lines. You can label this wire with a fixed wire number to identify the cable as shown. You can also hide the wire number if desired.

Method 2: Cable children, cable wire layer
This example shows the use of a cable marker and its children to identify the wires of a cable. Insert the cable markers on only one side of the circuit. The description fields of the Fan In/Out markers are helpful here to identify wire colors on the schematic. Using this method, individual wire layers are not required. The cable wire colors will appear in reports as the CBLWC field.

Bonus Example
This example shows the use of a cable marker and its children to identify the wires of a cable and the use of individual wire layers. Some information such as CBLWC and WLAY1 can be similar.

Conclusion
To effectively represent cables you need to use both the Wire Fan In/Out tool and Cable Marker symbols together for the data to display in reports. Wire Fan In/Out to create the cable from the individual wires, and Cable Markers to label the cable and carry the data. Teamwork is the answer here. Good luck!

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Submitted by Randy J. Brunette, owner of Brunette Technologies, LLC (www.brutec.us). 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.