schematic dwg's

[sp4rky]

Hi guys, again i could do with some input i am starting to translate some layout drawings that we have for our electrical panels into schematics. In the past the schematics i have had were all paper based as i never got electronic versions. How would i be best laying out schematics on ACAD Lt !! Should i do all the rungs in model space and layout 10 rungs into a viewport ?? I really am unsure. I know its going to be a pain and i could/would be better suited getting ACADE or the like but to start with my boss is unlikely to shell out nearly £4K. Which system do most peeps prefer vertical rungs (similar to ladder logic) or horizontal (similar to many german/euro schematics) thanks again for any input cheers sp4rky

[TimWilborne]

Definately vertical rungs. The company I work for now does not have any electrical addin for Acad. The last part of our drawing number is something like C03. This means group C page 3. There are groups for main power distribution, Plc I/O, etc. We layout a grid in model space with rows being the pages and the columns being the group. Then we draw the schematic into the proper cell. This way you have all the drawings for the machine in model space just like many electrical drawing packages do and use the layout for each individual drawing. It was hard at first but once I had all my blocks setup and wrote a little bit of code to help me out I can draw in this quicker than I can with many drawing packages.

[GerryM]

I prefer vertical rungs. i also use ACADLT with Mr. PLC symbols. I don't draw in enough volumes to warrant ACAD Electrical. I usually use one dwg per schematic and use Ctrl-TAB to switch between. However, I can see some advantages putting multiple schematic pages per file.

[TERdON]

Vertical Rungs, no doubt. Most of the time there are only 3-4 different pieces of equipment between L1/L2/L3 and the actual motor/valve etc, so horizontal rungs (assuming landscape drawings) would be very ineffecient with the paper area. For electric CAD I used to work with AutoCAD R12 for MS-DOS until about 2002 (sic) on our old 486 computer (it broke down in 2002), with no add-ons other than a macro system. We used the same workflow as TWControls does, except there was only one common number series per drawing set (clever idea to divide it!). When the computer broke down, we bought some new software, ElProCAD (http://www.elprocad.com/english/index2.htm), which apparently is also available in English nowadays. There are variants for AutoCAD aswell as for IntelliCAD (an AutoCAD clone). I'm not sure what the cost was, but I'm pretty sure it was less than £4k at least, although perhaps not that much. Possibly if you already have AutoCAD as you suggest, it's cheaper though - we bought the variant with the IntelliCAD program integrated, as we hadn't been using AutoCAD for anything else than access to old drawings and ECAD for several years (mechanic construction had migrated to Solidworks several years earlier). ElProCAD has a quite high learning step, and it's really not very intuitive (it seems to have begun more or less as someone's macro collection and that is still very noticable), but when you've learnt its earks and quirks, you certainly save a lot of time with it compared to drawing everything manually (especially if don't know the AutoCAD keyboard commands by heart). Edited December 9, 2005 by TERdON