Creating a Circuit in ACADe

In AutoCAD Electrical you can create component by using the Black Box Builder, but when it come to creating a circuit, we can definitely say the Black Box Builder doesn’t help. They’re some tools that our offered by ACADe, Copy Circuit, Move Circuit, Save Circuit to Icon Menu, Insert Saved Circuit and Insert WBlocked Circuit. My goal is to show you the concept on how to create a circuit with out the tools.

To begin, let’s start with a new drawing on the acad.dwt standard. Think of the Coordinate 0,0 (X,Y), as your insertion point. In your new drawing you will design your circuit, with the proper wire layer and component. Once the circuit created, make sure that your insertion point of your circuit is moved to the 0,0 coordinate. Then save your drawing file (DWG) to your hard drive. Now you have 2 locations possible that will make your life easier, you can save it in the user folder of AutoCAD Electrical or in the symbol folder that contains all the other component of ACADe. I’m offering you these 2 folders because the support file search path are already setup by ACADe, but you can put it anywhere as long you add you folder support search path (Drop down menu, Tools, Options… or type OP in command line). When you save this file the name convention does not come into consideration, You can name it what ever you want but to keep my circuit organize I always start with Circuit_*.dwg, that way I know that my DWG is a circuit and not a component.

Once all of these steps are done, you are ready to bring your new circuit in your drawing. I will show you in another post later on how to insert, the circuit, in the component menu with the Icon wizard, but for now let’s concentrate on inserting our circuit in our drawing. Use the command Insert WBlocked Circuit from the drop down menu of ACADe, Components, or you can also use the Icon too. Once selected browse to your circuit and select open.

A Circuit Scale window wills pop-up and all you need is to fill in the requirement needed to you circuit. Once all your requirements are selected, click OK and now all you need is to insert it in the desired location. As you can see you 0,0 in your original drawing is now your insertion point.

Why must we use the Insert WBlocked Circuit over the component insert? If you select insert component you are inserting a Block filled with other block inside. So Electrical will not be able to read those inside component individually. When you use the Insert WBlocked Circuit, you are actually inserting the circuit as an exploded block. That is why you can edit the component individually.

Enjoy your circuitry,

CADgneto