Autodesk University I Feel the Need, the Need for Speed AutoCAD Electrical Automation

Transcription

1 Autodesk University I Feel the Need, the Need for Speed AutoCAD Electrical Automation Good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to I Feel the Need, the Need for Speed, AutoCAD Electrical Automation. Let me go ahead, start with an introduction of myself. My name's Brian Krystiniak. I've been doing AutoCAD since Started in Release 12. I've gone all the way through with AutoCAD. I've done some Inventor, AutoCAD Mechanical. So I've had my fair share of Autodesk material or-- oh, I just lost my train of thought. And Tiffany's here to really support me. I work at Dematic, which is a logistics company. And we started actually with AutoCAD Electrical when it was actually WD. And so since the beginning, I've worked on AutoCAD Electrical. I moved just from being a regular CAD operator to now running the standards, maintaining the database libraries, helping with development of some of the programs that we use to help assist us in the design that we do every day. And what we moved into is a little bit more of this automation, where this is just kind of the beginning steps of what we want to do with this automation. But we're hoping to, as you can see, really automate the entire process of schematic drawings using the PLC I/O Utility that's in there. And now to introduce Tiffany, who's helping me co-speak, and actually do a way better job than I do. That's not a true statement. Hi, everybody. I'm Tiffany Bachmeier. You may have just been in one of my classes right before this. Hopefully, if you did, you enjoyed it, and this will be a little redundant. But for those of you who don't know me, I a work direct for Autodesk. I am an AutoCAD Electrical implementation consultant. I've actually worked with Brian and the team at Dematic for almost a decade now. Yes. Yep. So working together on their Electrical, and getting it going how they want it to, and really

2 customizing it, and doing all the different things that they do very specific to their jobs. I, much like Brian, have been in the software for a very long time. I didn't use Electrical, though, when it was back in [? Via,?] so he has me beat on that one. But back when it started as 2004 in the Autodesk family of products, that's when I started with it. And I also have been using AutoCAD, regular AutoCAD, since R10. But much like Brian said, too, I have many different manufacturing products that I work with along with some of the AEC products, so some Revit and things like that, are in my background as well. But AutoCAD and AutoCAD Electrical are my main focus. So hopefully, you guys are going to enjoy this class. It's really cool. It's pushing the software to do things that haven't really been seen or done before. And it's pretty awesome what we're going to show you. And as she said, we've been working together for almost a decade. She helped us-- so what one of the goals in my company was to educate the engineers in AutoCAD Electrical. And so together, we wrote a 350-page manual. Big manual. And it turned out really well. We taught many classes together, teaching them the ins and outs of AutoCAD Electrical. And we've got very positive feedback from that. So I do thank her for helping me create that manual and teaching these classes. Anytime. Yeah, it was good stuff. Yeah, they have a really unique way of using the software, of needing very specific things, so that's why we really needed to make a custom training manual. And it has been really successful and a great way to teach and move forward. But this is a new avenue for us, too, do with it. So this is pretty fun to be able to show you guys this. Yeah, so we've probably been-- what did we start this last year, I think, is when we started looking into this. Yep.

3 OK, as I said in the introduction, we're just going to go through, and we're going to dive into the Spreadsheet to PLC I/O Utility, and we're going to show you how that we used that spreadsheet to create all of these schematic drawings, and not just the PLC drawings. So before we go any further, let me just ask you this, because we've been asking this in a lot of the AutoCAD Electrical classes that are in this track. I don't know if you guys realized you're kind of on a track if you've been taking more than one. How many of you are actually using AutoCAD Electrical today? OK. Those that aren't, AutoCAD, is that what you're using? Yeah? OK. All right. Good to know. So you're just trying to absorb. I like it. I know I said this in the last class too. I think Randy explained this in his very, very first class on Electrical that started yesterday morning. But if you've been going through it, you know it's kind of getting progressively from beginner, intermediate, to advanced. So those of you who aren't in it yet, you might be wondering what the heck is even the PLC I/O Utility? I don't know what that is. But you'll see some of the really cool things we can do, and you'll start to even get more ideas and more exposure to Electrical. So we're glad you're here, and that's awesome. And the handouts-- I don't know if you've downloaded any of them-- we not only walk you through what we're going to do in here, but there's also a ton of information-- I think it's a 45- page handout-- on just understanding what the tools are, even by themselves without doing the automation. You know, what is the Spreadsheet to PLC I/O Utility? How do you go in and just even insert PLC modules? How does all of that look? So we went through all of that. So there's lots of information in that handout if you guys download that and check it out too. If you've said that you're already using Electrical, how many of you have actually used the Spreadsheet to PLC I/O Utility? Wow. OK. One. All right. Well, hopefully, this will start you on the path to using this. So even if you don't automate everything, hopefully, you even just start to check out the Spreadsheet to PLC I/O Utility. Because while it's a mouthful to say, it's a great tool. And hopefully, you guys will enjoy it even from the out-of-the-box way that it's designed, but this is going to take it, like I said, just up that next level. That's awesome.

4 going to take it, like I said, just up that next level. That's awesome. So along those same lines, who's ever imported or exported just from a spreadsheet? Who's tried the import/export tools? OK. So even though we're not going to actually use those tools for this, when we actually get into this and show you the spreadsheet itself, it's going to kind of feel like editing and doing things via that. So that's why we're kind of curious who's dabbled in either one of those already. So all right. Cool. Well, let's get started. So some of the learning objectives that we're going to do is we're going to show you how to create the drawings and the modules that we're going to need to do the schematic drawings. We have to manipulate the WDI files so they're-- I guess, don't get too worried about the names. Right. We'll explain what all these are, too, if you've never used any of them. So yeah, the WDI files are kind of like the backbone of it. And we're going to manipulate those in order to create different types of sheets that we need for our drawing sets. We're also going to modify the original out-of-the-box demo PLC. We're not really going to show you how I manipulated it. There's a lot of information we put in to the new demo PLC, but that's what I started with. Out-of-the-box demo PLC. I took that spreadsheet, and I modified it in order to get what I needed for this drawing set. Those of you who don't know what that is, it actually comes with your software. It ships with it for you to even just be able to run the Spreadsheet to PLC I/O Utility out-of-the-box. So we were trying to really use things that you all would have access to that you'd be able to test and play with. We're going to also run the PLC utility, show you how it goes through the entire set, and also create the drawing. So in order to do a couple of these, the symbols that come out-of-the-box are great. You can use those individually. And we're also going to show you how-- I guess, not really show you-- we're going to talk about the circuits that we use to build the drawing set. Why we did this. So at Dematic, as Tiffany said, we use AutoCAD Electrical kind a little bit differently as it's been intended to be used. We do a lot of our own custom PLC-- or own tags throughout the drawing c So the tags are very customized. They're not anything that you

5 typically see in a typical schematic drawing set. We're not using line numbers. We're not using anything that's really easy to grab and manipulate, I guess Or not-- Basically, not being able to fully use of all of the automated tools that we have in Electrical, like setting your project and your drawing properties to automatically do tagging and wiring that follows a pattern, which is always the goal if you can do it, because that makes it a lot easier. But sometimes there are applications where that doesn't work like that, and that's what was occurring here. And so go ahead, I'll let you finish the rest of that. And so what we base it on was actually our PLC programming. And so the engineers really wanted the drawings to match what we're doing in the PLC program versus just being a line number or some kind of incremental number. We were really trying to match that. And also, the unit numbers we use on our conveyor systems within our drawing set. So that's why I really start looking into this. Because we went out of this format of what AutoCAD Electrical allows us to do, it was manual typing like crazy. I mean, all we'd do is edit tags all over the place. And so it was really very time-consuming to just create schematic sets. And so this is why we started really looking into this. And I believe after you see this presentation, you can see the benefit of the automation we did. Yep. OK. The first thing we had to do is-- Do you want to show it first? Do you want me to go ahead and show it right now? Yeah. OK. So let's just go ahead and run it first.

6 So we kind of wanted to show it first to you guys, just how it's going to run, so we could then break down everything, but you can kind of get a feel for what-- we didn't want to just walk you through it without knowing the whys and the seeing the end results first, so you could actually see it, and then we'll break it all down. And we'll talk about everything he's touching and adding here, and where he's going into. But he's just utilizing the actual Spreadsheet to PLC I/O Utility. Setting it up with some of the standard settings that we would normally do in a standard run of this, even if we weren't forcing it to do all sheets. And so with AutoCAD Electrical out-of-the-box, once again, it comes with a demo PLC drawing set. And so that's what I try to mimic here is I wanted to create the demo PLC. I added a little different look to it, but I almost-- Oh, the NFPA. Yeah, the NFPA demo PLC. Yep. So not only are we using the demo PLC spreadsheet, but what he's talking about is we're actually going to build the project, the NFPA demo project-- Sorry. Yeah. --that comes out-of-the-box. So that's what this is based off of. So if any of you even opened Electrical yet and you've looked at the standard projects that come in with it, that's what we're going to build live, so that you're seeing something that you're all familiar with, hopefully. Or if you're not, you'll be able to go back and look at it, because you'll have it on your Electrical. And so we're just going to go ahead and we're just going to run the program. And it's building this. As you can see, a lot of the symbols are coming in. I created a lot of circuits to mimic what we were seeing in the NFPA demo, and just in order to create what we're seeing here. And we'll break more of this down for you, but what you're already seeing is an extension of what this can do. Because like we said, what it's designed for-- the exact terminology, Spreadsheet to PLC I/O Utility-- it's designed to build your PLC sheets. So to actually insert the

7 PLC modules, place components in line with it, and then move on and build the next pages for however many you need. And what we did is we basically kind of worked the system and made it be able to create all drawings without it having to require an actual PLC module that you see on there. So that's what we're going to explain to you as we break this down, but we just wanted you to see it first. And if you're watching the project manager, you're seeing drawing after drawing get built there throughout that project. So it's pretty powerful. And even throwing in template sheets for the panels. We're obviously not going to place panel footprints. We want those to be linked to the schematics properly. But even having it already insert those templates automatically, you can do that to have that sheet built up. And this last drawing here is actually showing what we wanted to be able to do is we have a couple of our drawing sets that we do network drawings. And we really wanted the ability to be able to place the symbol anywhere on the drawing set. And so this last one is actually placing roughly about 2,000 symbols on this drawing. Well, it might not be that much. Yeah, it's got to be that much. Which is why it's thinking a little bit about it. And I use the half inch by half inch grid. We can actually use smaller than that. It's just going to manipulate the information, which we're going to show you after this a little bit more. But right now, I can put a symbol anywhere in this tile block in a half inch by half inch grid. Which just so you guys all know, even though it comes with the software as the template, I hope you all know that title blocks really shouldn't be in model space, right? We all know that. But we used the out-of-the-box templates, so you guys could use the same stuff that we were if you were trying to test this out with the handouts. And I did take a couple of the symbols off there just to show you that I can pretty much go into the spreadsheet, and modify the symbols, and take away and add as needed. But with all these symbols, it's a little time-consuming. It's about two minutes, I think, is what I timed it at. It might seem like it's taking some time. But if you actually were to think about placing all these individually once you see them and all the drawings we built, this is all pretty darn fast. And

8 you'll probably never place as many as you're going to see on here that Brian's talking about that he built to place in there. But that's ta-da! Well, it looks like a grid from Pac-Man to me. That's pretty impressive, that these are all individual child components for control relays that have all been automatically placed at that spacing that Brian was just talking about. And like he said, you can make it smaller, bigger. But the point is, he can throw a symbol on there anywhere he wants to, which is pretty powerful. All right. So now that you've seen it, now we actually went to break down how we achieved it. So the first thing we're doing here is we're actually creating-- I hate the word dummy, but a dummy PLC module. We are adding a PLC module to the drawing set in order to place these symbols. And in order so I didn't have to display it, first, we started with a drawing we copied from, once again, out-of-the-box symbol, and I just removed all the geometry from that symbol, and I also turned the tags to invisible. Yep. So all the attributes, all the things that make it what it is so Electrical still thinks it's there are there, they're just invisible, so that it never shows up on the screen and you don't have to worry about it, and it allows us to push this stuff through and still use that utility. And the next thing we had to do is kind of an extension to adding that invisible drawing is we're going to add the new modules to the system. And what I'm going to create is blank modules. So what we're showing here is the dialog boxes. And I can go back into AutoCAD and show you how we get to those. Who's ever actually built a PLC module or modified one? OK, just a couple of you guys. All right. So it's using all those same tools from-- go ahead, yeah-- the PLC database. And we're just manipulating it to basically be blank. Yep. And that's the goal. And so our first step was to create the new module. I added a manufacturer of Autodesk. You can name it whatever you want. What you're creating is a fake PLC card. So I wanted something that's going to be off from anything in there. I didn't want to call it Allen-Bradley. So

9 you could use your company name, whatever. I used Autodesk. Went with a series of Custom. The serious type is Special And then we just added the number of terminals that we wanted to actually use. And with most schematics, we're going to have the 16, just depending on what your drawing sets need. And so as a example with this blank one, actually, it's 44 rows. So I created 44 terminal points for that. The next step we had to do is once we added that new module and we named it, so we can name it blank, whatever we want to, so 56, I would actually add 56 terminals there. And then the last step with adding the new module is just making sure that we get rid of the box that AutoCAD Electrical automatically puts around it for you. And then that's just by calling it 0, and then adding a line property erase through all of those. And if I go back to that, we can see that that's what we did here. Yep. So you can see where you fill those out. So those are actually standard codes that you can always do, even for your PLCs. If you didn't want to see the bounding box on it, you can do that. The next thing we had to do is we actually had to go in and with that blank drawing that we created, we're going to add that to our terminal block settings. I keep switching back and forth. It's OK. And so from here, we're going to go back into the PLC File Editor database, and we're going to go into the Settings. And we added our new drawing in there, which I called Blank. And then we called it a category. We just gave it a category name of Blank Input. Description just same thing, Blank Input. And what we needed that for is that when we created our module here for Blank 56, I actually want to use that terminal type, Blank Input. And those dialog boxes will allow you to type whatever you want in there. So even though all you see from the dropdowns are the standard ones used, like input, output, and so on, we were able to just put in there whatever we wanted to kind of separate it from the other standard ones. And because Blank was already defined as, I believe, a space inside of the PLCs, we came up with a new one for Blank Input. So this is actually allowing us to use that hidden attribute with no geometry block that we're using.

10 And so now I just set my terminal types. And if we look at 44, we can see that there's 44 actual terminal types. And so I had to go through and just assign a terminal type to each one of those. So if you were to look at those as regular PLCs, those would be the kind of things that you'd assign as a this is the top input wire coming from the left, and then it would have all the module information of that PLC. And then the initial ones would be input, output, or terminal, or that's where you're putting your commons or your [? grounds.?] So it's using all that same idea, we're just blanking it all out, so that we can have it fake out and give us all the lines that we want. And really, the nice thing is that if you wanted to have [? run?] comments or anything on your schematic pages, you don't have to make the descriptions of your PLC invisible. You could actually leave them, and we could fill them in. And once we modify the PLC or the Excel spreadsheet, we can show you how to do that. And so I already talked about assigning the terminal type. The next thing we want to talk about is really the backbone, and what helped us accomplish this. So we did have to modify a little bit of code in the wdio.lsp routine and also the wdo.dcl. So what this allowed us to do was actually-- it was probably, maybe 20 lines of code that were added-- Yeah, it's small. --and it allows us to actually switch to those different drawing types that we saw when we were going through that. And so this allows us to create this drawing set. To go more into that, with the image that we're showing up here, this is actually the standard settings file for how you can define how you want the Spreadsheet to PLC I/O Utility to build out the drawings, standard, out-of-the-box. And you'd tell it how many ladders are on the drawing, and then what your spacing is. And we can put up to nine inline components along with all those I/O points. So this is all the different settings for that, that you would do even if you were still using this out-of-the-box for the PLCs. And what Brian's talking about, that Lisp routine, who's actually heard of the wdio.lsp? One. All

11 right. So that is actually what's running in the background that drives this whole utility. So even though we just see pretty dialog boxes, that's what's running in the background to do this. And what he was saying for that edit that we need to do is out-of-the-box, and we're going to go in and show it to you, you only assign one standard template and one standard set of how you want your settings file, that dialog box that we were just inside of there, for how you want, how many ladders, and all of that. And we needed to be able to fully do this how we wanted we needed to have different types of templates and we needed to have different types of ladder definitions and different options depending on what we were trying to achieve per page. Because some sheets, we actually wanted ladders, so we needed them to have rung numbers and actually have the ladders set up how they wanted, and other sheets were point-to-points, that we didn't want them to be defined that way. So we needed that switch to happen. And how we achieved it is through the code. So it's a very small piece. Go ahead. And that's how big the actual [? full of?] this routine is. And when we say it's tiny, it didn't take much. And so I'm using Notepad++ to really just compare the two Lisp routines. So what I have is the original one. And what I would fully recommend is I supplied this wdio.lsp routine in the additional materials, and I would really suggest saving yours in, and like I did here, original wdio. Yes. Remember to save it. Always have backups. Yep. So if you ever want to go back and have it work the original way, even though this really doesn't hurt anything, you can go ahead and run it, continue running it the way you always have. But if something messes up and it's not working exactly as intended, I'd definitely recommend having your original backup for it.

12 And so here I'm just seeing some green. Some of this was actually-- I'm running in AutoCAD Electrical And some of the differences that we're seeing between the original and the new one that I got is because who we got the Lisp routine from actually did this in 2016 Lisp. So they did that. And it worked just fine. I mean, I pulled it in. And it still functions. Yep, still functions just fine. I actually took this same Lisp routine, and I run it in 2012, 2015, I think you tried it in 2016, and it-- Yep. --obviously works in Yep. So all the same code. We also did some modifications to this Lisp routine in Dematic. And so I was able to simply just cut and paste or copy and paste this modifications right into our customized Lisp routine. And once again, it worked fine. So it didn't affect all those other customizations, which is great. That was a big key part as we were going through this. So let's see, is this one of them? No, this doesn't look like it. So right here, we have a little section-- where was that? I must have went too far. [INTERPOSING VOICES] Go ahead. No, go ahead. As he was scrolling for that, I was just going to say, so really the only switches that we needed

13 to do in here was have it be able to read that we wanted new templates, and to actually read those new templates and settings, which is that WDI file that we're going to show you next. So that was really the only reason for the code changes. And so just if you want to go into the wdio.lsp routine and see what's been changed, it's just what was done on July 2016 by [? Annie?] Holt. So that's the code you're going to look for if you want to bring it into your Lisp routine. So that was one section of it. This looks like more of an MDI change. So probably the new 2016 information. And then we have a little bit more down here. So as you can see, it was not many lines of code that was changed to make this work. And I think this is the last one. And so this was the biggest section of the change of that. So I just wanted to show you just the little bit of change that Autodesk changed for us in order to get this to work. Oops. Let's go to the right one. And what the DCL, as she was explaining before, what the DCL, all that allowed us to do is out-of-the-box, the rungs per ladder is, out-of-the-box, a six. Yep. The DCL controls that. And so there is just one line of code. Once again, you can use any comparison-- even Microsoft Word has a comparison-- and you can just change it to whatever you need. And so if you're actually going to go with an 1/8 inch by 1/8 inch grid, you might need a lot more than just 12. Yeah, and what we're talking about there is in that dropdown that he's showing on this dialog box, the DCL just manipulates, literally, what the dialog box shows you. So when we went to wanting more than six, obviously, in a standard PLC drawing, you would never want more than six ladders. That would be an intense amount of ladders on one page. But what we were trying to do, because, like I said, out-of-the-box, we can do up to nine inline components with that PLC module. So we're working the system a little bit, right? We talked

14 about that. So to get as many symbols in all the different locations, when he's talking about the grid, your 1/8 inch grid or a 1/2 inch grid or whatever you're doing, we had to think, OK, how many ladders would that actually mean if they were invisible in the background? And what would that need to be for how many symbols do I need to get across the whole drawing and down the whole thing? So that's why we created all those extra. That's why we went up to 12 with that. And I actually created a drawing-- let's see, where is the out-of-the-box grid? And I actually had to create a grid for myself. This helped me to place the symbol. So I had to match this up with the Excel spreadsheet. And so I created this little grid. And this told me how many PLC modules I'll need. And so here I'm using seven PLCs, and I'm using the nine inline component symbols with that. And then with the rows. And that's why I had 44. With our title blocks at Dematic, we only needed 38 rows, so that's why you saw a different blank module when we first started this. Right. So just to get a feel for why we were talking about grids. Because we were trying to lay out-- OK, if we wanted to place-- you saw at that last picture there, where he made that AU 2016 out of contacts, the key was, I want to be able to place a component anywhere on this drawing. How do I do that? And so we had to figure out those rows and columns to be able to come up with that. And so our next thing was to actually manipulate and create these WDI files. And so in order to create the NFPA demo, these are the-- what do I got-- eight WDI, nine WDI files that I use. So I started with the motor drawings. And so that was just the one drawing, schematics. And then I just wanted to show that I could switch between PLCs. Most of the time, you're not going to, but in Dematic, we use remote I/O boxes also. So we switch from-- in the same drawing set, we will have CompactLogix, and then we might switch over to a 1734 remote PLC box that's out in the field. This was something that we never had the opportunity in the past, and so now we're able to have that. And then it just created my operations station and my panel, and then also that blank one, so I could put the symbols anywhere on the screen. And as Tiffany said before, the last two is really nice, because what I can now do is now if I have several detailed drawings that I need inside my set, I can just make that into a template,

15 and now I can place it inside my drawings. I don't have to go find it. I don't have to worry about copying it and putting it into the project set. I can just run this utility, and put all of these templates right into my drawing set with one shot. And then after that, all you have to use is the schematic list, right, which if you were in the class before this, we were talking about the schematic list. But that populates a list of all the schematic components already in the drawing. And then you can automatically place the footprints off of that, and then they'll be connected. So that's the beauty of this. It's kind of automating that entire process. And what I'm doing here is I'm just going back into the PLC generator, and just how we modified that WDI file. And so from here, we got [? setup.?] And from here, this is where we look, and we find our origins, and we get all of our pieces that we need to really modify this. And then I can save it down into that WDI file. Yep. So again, the reason for the simulation and why there were eight different ones there is, as he was explaining, the motor sheets needed something different than the standard PLC I/O sheets needed versus the ones that we were putting in for templates for the panel. So that's why we needed to have different settings defined here, to be able to actually go through and say, how many ladders do we really want? What is the width? What is the spacing between components? How is the definition of all of that? Is it going to put rungs in or not put in? If you can see, there's even options for suppressing that. So you can suppress rungs, [? side BUS?] rails, whether or not you actually want your reference numbers to be inserted, all of that stuff was all something that we needed to change per each one of those drawings. So that's why we have all these WDI switches. Out-of-the-box, the spreadsheet was only set up to have six inline components. And so what I wanted to do is I wanted to utilize all nine. I wanted to get as many possible symbols on this drawing as I could in one swipe. And so this slide here is just showing what I had to do in order to do that. And so from here, the spreadsheet table columns. All I'm doing is mapping what I created in the Excel spreadsheet into this dialog box. And so we just go through, and it's just mapping in your columns as you need it. So again, this is something you would do even if you weren't going to do the automation we're

16 showing you, you just wanted to use this as the Spreadsheet to PLC I/O Utility, this is how you could map those different columns to work with your spreadsheets that you're producing. And just a little side note outside of what we're trying to show you here, the demo PLC Excel file is awesome to be able to go through and test this with, but there's even RSLogix tools in here that will convert your outputs out of there and bring them in, so that they can be used with this. And there are other utility options with it too. So there are some neat things to do with this. Those of you that might be looking at this thinking, well, maybe this is cool, but will I use it? Everything that we're showing you is still going to even apply to manipulation that you can do with just the standard Spreadsheet to PLC I/O Utility. And then here what I showed is just the circuits that I had to create in order to create the NFPA demo. Really what I found is working with-- what we do at Dematic is we're one-line diagram symbols. So we use those quite a bit. We don't use a lot of the three-phase wiring. We use it all as one-line wiring. So circuits are great, and we use them all over the place, but it's really, you can have the most control when you're actually placing a individual symbol on there. But just for the speed of getting ready for this class, I created a lot of circuits. But the great thing is with the PLC is out-of-the-box symbols work great. You can just use those. And you can really manipulate them. You can add your own special tag, if you want to call it. You can manipulate all the attributes on that component, and change anything you want. So it's a very powerful tool. And as I said, using the one-line diagrams, it really helped us to be able to manipulate that component any way we wanted to. How many of you have ever created a circuit in AutoCAD Electrical? A couple? OK. So just to break that down even further, a standard symbol is just the one individual block that we have. So the things that Brian's talking about being able to manipulate with a spreadsheet, we can automatically have the spreadsheet fill in the tag, the location code, the manufacturer, the catalog number, all that stuff. Because as you all know, if you've actually been in Electrical if you insert the symbol from the icon menu, it's blank, and it allows you to go into the Insert

17 Edit dialog box and start filling all that info out, right? But with the circuits that he was doing and talking about for especially the three-phase symbols, by building that as a circuit, it inserts the whole thing as one grouping, much like we do if we were to manually insert a circuit in AutoCAD Electrical. But circuits are pretty powerful too. What he's saying is, we don't have the ability on the spreadsheet to break down all those individual attributes within the circuit, because the whole circuit is being set up that way. But those of you who have ever built a circuit, and why I asked is, if you've noticed, you can actually save all of that attribute information into your circuits ahead of time. So a little different than standard symbols, where they come in blank. So you could prepopulate all of that, and not even have to fill out those columns. So it's kind of two schools of thought that we were showing you here. If you always do the same thing, same manufacturer, same location code, same information, that circuit can have everything in it and just be inserted that way, where the symbols, if you knew you needed flexibility with some things, that's when you're manually inserting the individual symbols as opposed to the circuits. And we can still do that in the spreadsheet. And then you can allow people to be able to fill out those columns for those individual things. So it's kind of two schools of thought. Yeah. Since you're on that topic, where is that information kept [INAUDIBLE] associated with it. Where is that multiple [? part number?] kept? [INAUDIBLE] So everything that we get saved into the circuit information is saved on the symbol itself in the attributes themselves. So what a circuit is, is it's basically a super WBLOCK. Do you guys all know what [? WBLOCKs?] Blocks are? The write blocks to a file. And when we bring them in as a circuit, AutoCAD Electrical automatically does-- and I know you guys all know that this is a dirty word in any of my classes if you've taken them before-- it does an automatic explode, but you're not invoking that explode, AutoCAD Electrical is, and it's breaking it down to all of the individual parts that it knows are being left, the Electrical intelligent parts. So it's all being saved into it just like a WBLOCK would. Good question. And so this is one of those circuits that I created for this. And so I wanted to have this entire string added to my symbol. And as Tiffany was talking about, and to answer your question,

18 that's exactly what I did here. I created this circuit, and I added my information to it. And we could modify the pins, we could-- Yeah, you could fill out a lot more even [? than--?] yeah. --everything you wanted in here. And as you said, with the multiple catalog, it would all be stored right in here. I totally lost my train of thought here why I opened this drawing. This is one of the circuits. Yeah. So what I broke this down into two [? is?] to two different circuits here. And so this was the first half of the circuit, and then the second half. And all of this information, based on how most people use AutoCAD Electrical-- not quite Dematic, but most people-- it came in, all of the tags were blank, but they had their Family Code associated to them. And they all filled in exactly how we wanted to see it based on the line number and the settings that we created for our project or with the NFPA, the one that came out-of-the-box. And you don't have to break this into two circuits. He did that. So if you have the flexibility of maybe the two different sections of it need to be something different. So if you knew that these pieces were always going to stay together. But if that's your standard, let's say, motor wiring, you could always insert that as just one big circuit. A circuit can be any combination of electrical components, wires, connection points that you need. So it can be all of that stuff combined. So again, that just kind of explains why we did circuits and symbols, so you could kind of see both. And so this brings us into the spreadsheet, and what we did to modify it. So I guess I could've showed the out-of-the-box one. But this is the spreadsheet. And what I'm doing is I'm adding my code. So because we created

19 inside of Autodesk and then we had the custom setting, and I had my code of Blank 16, that's the first thing I'm doing inside of this column here, is the Code column, I'm adding that Blank 16 that I created. Can you get to demo PLC quickly? Because it might be good to show that. If you can't, it's no big deal. Yeah, I think I can. So if we jump back in here, it might be good for you guys to see the standard demo PLC, so you can see what we basically modified to get to this point. [INAUDIBLE] or this was it. Yes. Oh, nope, that still has some of our blanks. Nope. [INAUDIBLE] I think I might have modified it. That's all right. [INAUDIBLE]. No big deal. We were just going to show you the one that's outof-the-box, but it's been modified. We didn't follow our own advice of backing up and saving. But that's all right. I'm sure you probably have it as one of the other versions. Yes. But just to show you, by default, what he's explaining there, that first column is actually the standard PLC I/O call for whatever your card is. So if it's an Allen-Bradley 1756, that's the module that it would insert. And then we have different filters. All those columns he was talking about with mapping are what do things like rack and slot, and things like that, to fill that in. And then Address would be your actual I/O address point. And then you've got the five lines of description that go with every PLC I/O point. And you can fill out things like voltage. But then as we move down here, these are our nine inline

20 components that we were talking about. And they're all labeled just with a D1, D2, D3, D4, and then whatever attribute you're trying to fill out. So even though we're not showing you every single attribute that a component could have, all you have to do is make additional columns, and you can fill out all of that, manufacturer, catalog number, location, installation codes, even the cross-referencing information, all of it. All of it can be filled out in these columns and automated by this. So just so you guys kind of get a feel for it out-of-the-box what we did, and then what we were doing to manipulate it. So it's still a very out-of-the-box standard spreadsheet. We're just filling in different need bases throughout this to be able to create those drawings. So go ahead. OK. As you can see with some of these, we're filling out a lot of the information. And then that's what I was kind of talking about with the circuits versus with the individual symbols themselves. With the individual symbols, if you have a circuit, you get to control one symbol on that circuit. So if I brought in this motor wiring, that entire string, and we have 18 different components on that motor string, I can only control one when I'm using it as a circuit. But if you bring it in as an individual component, you can control all the aspects of it. And so I'm adding descriptions. I'm using some of the coding. And I will tell you what really helps, and I don't know if they say it anymore, but the award-winning help-- Yes. --definitely allowed me to-- they had great information on how to manipulate your Excel spreadsheet. So that really helps you learn what you can and can't do with this spreadsheet. Yeah. What he's talking about, if you go into the Help menu in AutoCAD Electrical-- and if you guys all know how to do this, you can go right to Help right from the main interface, and you could search on it. But you can even go to the Spreadsheet to PLC I/O Utility in the ribbon. And if you're hovering over it and just hit F1, it'll automatically take you to that, and it'll give you all the information on manipulating it, using it, running it, all of that. So there's tons of information out there for you guys to be able to go through and see how all this gets mapped.

21 [INAUDIBLE] When you opened up that [INAUDIBLE] The insertion point for it? Yeah. So how does that insertion point correlate with the [INAUDIBLE]? So that was based off of where it-- let's see, that is the-- so the way I had-- let's try to get back to this. So that basically comes from here. So by saying what my input offset from the hot bus is, and this is a bad example, because this is a zero, but this is where it is pointing to. And so the way I set up this one is my spacing between the hot and the neutral bus line was 11 inches. And so I created I think it's a inch and a quarter, and then between each individual symbol's an inch and a quarter. So that's how I was able to do that. And when you're using just the symbol that you're just going to place that and where any-- It would automatically do it based off of that increment here. But when you're working with the circuits, it was a little bit of manipulation making sure I'm getting that in the right spot. So the key with the circuit would be that, like, that first point of the first one that actually connects on that bus line would actually be that the insertion point would be at zero right on basically the hot bus, and it would just be connected in there. And that's how it would then insert the rest of the block. So that's kind of the general. So our first circuit was actually these three phases coming down. And so that was the inch and a half off of the first, well, probably inch on this one. So we actually suppressed the hot neutral, but it's still an inch from that. And then this second component here was an inch from that. Well, so now we're going to run-- we have the slide to run the PLC I/O again too. But before that, as I was saying before, the nice thing is that the way most people use AutoCAD Electrical is we bring us into this system. With circuits, as I said, we don't get the control of every one of these. But because I put the symbols in, and AutoCAD Electrical uses the property set, we can go ahead, and now we can do all of our project-wide updates to this, and we will get exactly what we want.

22 So if we come back in-- I don't know if you want to expand on that. Sure. Yeah, what he's talking about there is if you've ever used a circuit, you've probably noticed that it automatically blinks out wire numbers and puts question marks on them. It's just the default way that the standard circuit insertion tools work with that. Move doesn't, but copy and insert both do. So if you wanted to run through this, even though we built it by the spreadsheet, you could easily run through the project-wide update and re-tag tools that we have that are so great, because they automatically use all the standards that you've put into your properties. And it'll cruise through, and it'll run all of that. So if you want to run it, you could even run it from just the [? project?] manager if you wanted to. [INAUDIBLE] So if you look at this, if you were to just checkmark those first three, that's just going to go through and make sure all your component tags are still following what you want them to, that your [INAUDIBLE] numbers are still following all of your standard things, your signal crossreferences are all updated. So it'll cruise through, and it's going to add all of that. So even if your circuit didn't have that in it, it would still add it then with this. So it's still going to automate that through the project file. And you can see down at the command prompt, it's running through all the drawings. It'll tell you which drawing it's on as it's cruising through. Sometimes it makes multiple passes if it needs to update one thing first, like a parent and then a child. And [? it's done.?] And now you've got all those updated. And one of the nice things that we really liked at Dematic was to be able to-- using the spreadsheet, I wanted to automatically connect the signal and the source and destination codes. And so by just putting in the code that I needed in the spreadsheet, it automatically updates those for us. And so because I added that code ahead of time in the spreadsheet, now when I ran through all of this, it automatically connected those for us. So now my signal wires are all connected. And we will see if I can go back and look at it. Because I added a special destination code to my PLCs, and I added those ahead of time, they automatically connect for us. So it's still utilizing everything that we've always celebrate inside of AutoCAD Electrical, we're

23 just being able to produce it and modify it via a spreadsheet as opposed to you manipulating, having to insert on every page. Or if you have a system that you can actually pull it out of as a spreadsheet utility that you can automate that in a different way. That, obviously, takes it even to another level of making it even faster. And what I'm talking about that is in this code. And actually, it's really nice, because you can add this type of code. And all I'm doing is adding a semi-colon, and then what I want to modify. And so this is just your attribute name. And so I'm modifying the attribute name to give it what I want. And so by inserting that code in my source, and then inserting that same code in my destination, they'll automatically connect for me. And as I said, with Dematic, because we are so custom with the way we do stuff, this really allows us to get down to almost every bit of what we need to do to connect everything and get this drawing set almost automatic. And to go back to some of the things we were talking about earlier, why did we do this? A big thing, many people I hear this from, well, our engineers don't have time to be working on these drawings, or they're in the field and then they're back in Electrical, and they don't really remember what they were doing, and they kind of go back to rogue ways or things like that. And so this can kind of reduce them really being in the software, and manipulating things, and just be modifying via spreadsheets. So it's an option. I know not everybody would do it. A lot of people like to design inside the software. But it's another manipulation way to be able to kind of help that facilitate making modifications in those things that your engineers or you guys are doing that will kind of-- it's just a different way, a different way to work through it, a different way to think about it, and a different way to manipulate it. Do we have any questions before we go ahead and show this one more time, now that we've kind of dived in, showed you all of what we updated? I have a little demo on just a mini type of interface that I created. Any questions? [INAUDIBLE] For checking in and checking out of vaults? Yeah, absolutely Yep, it would work exactly the same way as any of our Electrical-- nope, you wouldn't lose anything. Nope.

24 Yeah, so once it's on the drawing, it's on the drawing. So Yeah, you will not lose anything with that. Good question. Should I start from scratch for this or can you also modify this [INAUDIBLE]? I'd like to use this utility [INAUDIBLE] do you just have to run it again or do you have [INAUDIBLE] scratch? It's a good a question. I would think this is more of a building it. [INAUDIBLE] Yeah. If you wanted to be able to manipulate it, still be a spreadsheet, that's when I would use the export to spreadsheet tools that we have. And then that would just pull everything that you have content-wise on there out, and allow you to update it and push it back in. Yep, yeah. If you were going to do big changes, like you needed to insert all new things, maybe you would just delete a page and rerun that utility again. But this is really more for creating the full pages. The edits I would do as that export to spreadsheet. Good question. Yes. Does the sheet [? come?] connected, so that I can use the [? Surfer?] tool to connect all the [INAUDIBLE]? Yeah, good question. Absolutely. [? Does?] it come actually built in [INAUDIBLE]. So to repeat the questions, because I just realized that I should have been doing that the other ones too. So it was just asked, is the Surfer utility still going to be able to do that and still keep everything connected? So will you still be able to use the Surfer just like you traditionally would? Yes. The answer is yes.

25 There's nothing about this that is breaking the intelligence of Electrical We're using all the regular tools of Electrical to build this. So everything will surf. Everything will function. Everything will stay connected. Even the signal, just like you saw Brian just now show you, the source and destination arrows, those are all staying connected. And when you go to actually add your panel symbols in as well, obviously, those will be connected then to your schematics, just like they typically always would have been. So yep. Good question. Anything else? All right. So as Tiffany kind of said before, is what we're really looking at doing is using this as an engineering tool versus as a drawing tool. And so what-- just this tiny little interface-- the nice thing is with this spreadsheet is even when you're using function codes in Excel, it will still recognize the output from that. So even though, in some of these instances, I have an actual coding here, it will still recognize it, and it's not going to hurt the integrity of the drawing. So even though I'm creating a formula within the spreadsheet, it's still going to work just fine. And so what we're looking at doing, we actually have an out-- let's see, out of the Excel spreadsheet proprietary program that we use that we actually fill in the spreadsheet. But if anybody has any knowledge of Excel, they could easily come up with just this front page, I guess you'd call it, dashboard type of thing, where you can manipulate the information and actually fill in your spreadsheet for you. And that's my ultimate goal with this whole spreadsheet. It's once we're done with this, we will not be going in and manually updating the spreadsheet. I will have everything mapped out. We're going to automatically create these drawings from this proprietary system that we have. And then we'll have the spreadsheet. We'll go into AutoCAD, maybe spend five minutes in it, run the generation-- or I should say more than that, because then once we have all of the schematics, then we can create our panel symbols from there, and possibly our layouts. So the goal is this in what he's saying about not manually doing it, would be that you're not having people have to hand type what they want as the manufacturer and catalog numbers and what symbol types, but you'd get to pick it from dropdown lists or other interface tools like this, where, again, if you were looking at that as, like he said, an engineering tool or something that you didn't want-- I would still call AutoCAD Electrical an engineering tool. It's obviously more powerful than vanilla AutoCAD in that sense.