When inserting terminal strip symbols in the schematic, the red arrow designates which side is pin 1. In the final terminal strip drawing that gets produced, if you have it draw vertically, pin 1 ends up on the left; if drawing horizontally it is on the bottom. That means for horizontal strip drawings, the red arrow indicates the load/field side, while for vertical strip drawings it indicates the opposite. How can we change that so the red arrow still indicates […]
Within SOLIDWORKS Electrical Schematic under the Project tab<Configurations<Project, you will find the Attribute tab. The functionality under this tab allows you to globally, across your entire project, change Custom attributes, Symbol attributes, and Title Block attributes properties. You also have the ability to create global Layers, Linetypes, Text styles, and Leader styles accessible throughout your project. Lets take a look. Add custom attribute This gives you the capability to set the Text style, Height, Color, Visibility, and Layer of custom […]
SOLIDWORKS Electrical has a robust terminal strip manager and terminal strip drawing generator; however, there is not a lot of training or reference content on the many functions and features available within the tool. In this blog, we will dive into some common features of terminals in SOLIDWORKS Electrical. Above you can see several terminals in a terminal strip. These are grouped by different use cases that we will work through. In SOLIDWORKS Electrical, we have a terminal strip manager […]
In SOLIDWORKS Electrical, inserting a picture (rather than attaching one) requires the photo to be of type BMP or DIB. Inserting is a better method than attaching because if the original image gets moved to a different location on your hard drive or network, and you’ve merely attached the image, your document will no longer show the picture. Traditionally, we have always thought that the only way to insert non-supported pictures was to convert the image types by opening the […]
Continuing with my twisted pair theme from my last blog, Twisted Pair in Electrical 3D, let’s talk about how to document twisted pairs within a cable. When you add a cable to your cable library within SOLIDWORKS Electrical Schematic, that has twisted pairs, under the Cable cores section of the Cable reference properties, you will notice a Group icon. This icon is greyed out until you “Ctrl” select a pair of wires to group. So, you simple select all the […]
SOLIDWORKS Electrical is a great tool for collaboration, standardizing schematic documentation, and saving time in project creation, but all these benefits rely on a developed environment and library. This puts increased value on ensuring our environment is secure and backed up should the worst happen. Not a problem. We can just back up the server applications folder and SQL database, right? Not quite. If a server were to go down, a simple restore of that server would not be sufficient […]
Generating reports and the automatic generation of tables is one of the more widely known uses of the information in SOLIDWORKS Electrical Schematic. I feel one of the most underused and most useful applications of the same schematic information is in a connection label. The ability to display information in any form desired is a powerful tool. A connection label is a representation of a device in terms of connections and various other pieces of information desired to be shown. […]
Sometimes the need arises that your SOLIDWORKS Electrical Server needs to be moved to a new machine. We get questions about how to migrate the electrical database. SOLIDWORKS Electrical makes it pretty straightforward to backup/restore the database environment, so we will use that to make the server move as painless as possible. Open SOLIDWORKS Electrical on any client machine that is connecting to the existing server and run the environment archive command, selecting to archive all objects. The time it […]
Within SOLIDWORKS Electrical Schematic 2D you can specify wires are a twisted pair with a symbol. But how do you show a twisted pair within SOLIDWORKS Electrical 3D if you need to take it to that level? I came up with a couple methods that may work for you. When you route wires, SOLIDWORKS Electrical 3D creates a routing subassembly for each wire style. The above methods will work for showing a twisted pair of same wire style or wires within […]
With SOLIDWORKS Electrical Schematic and SOLIDWORKS Electrical 3D, we can autoroute the wires in our panel. This allows us to report on all the lengths of our wires, confirm inventory, and even balance out duct ratio fill as needed. The question becomes how we use this functionality to standardize and communicate how a panel is routed. We could certainly suppress wire styles and show color coded snapshots for every wire style, but this is not enough information to communicate each […]