by Miles Nicholson
In some industries, it is quite popular to draw the rack or base unit along with a repeated graphical representation of the slot or module in a “top down” view of the rack (base) with slots (modules). Repeating a component can potentially duplicate the part within your reports, so it's imperative that the symbology is defined correctly as you don’t want to duplicate the I/O or indeed the part quantities.
So how can this be achieved without duplicating the I/O and the slots (modules) for reporting purposes?
The PLC Database File Editor was selected to create the new part number as this didn’t exist within the already extensive parametric PLC database (refer to: Creating a New PLC Part within the PLC Database)
For terminology purposes, a rack is also a base and a slot is also a module.
The slot that’s displayed in the schematic representation of the rack (not footprint) is drawn as a child “DN” category component. This is linked to the parametric parent “PLCIO” category slot above:
The rack being drawn as a parent DN category component but with the tag being specifically unique to the rack:
With the slot being positioned, our schematics now result in:
AutoCAD Electrical automatically adds intelligence on the fly to dumb graphics for a footprint. Simply associate a footprint that you have downloaded. It is recommended to save your footprints in the same existing structure that is defined by AutoCAD Electrical out of the box, as there is little point in reinventing the wheel. I.e. ...\Libs\Panel_mm\{manufacturer}\{component category}\{file name}.dwg
Selecting Choice C in the following article Associating a Manufacturer’s Footprint, ensures you don’t have to associate a footprint for the specific part again.
Resulting in…
The sample project can be downloaded from:
For further training on AutoCAD Electrical, please visit our training website: https://training.cadline.co.uk/autocad-electrical/
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