CADgneto

Surf the Bill of Material a.k.a. BOM

I offer you a quick article on a new feature in AutoCAD Electrical 2008. ACADe has great tools to help you travel from page to page in your project. You may move one page at a time or surf, by searching specific attribute (Component Tag, Catalog Number and Wires Number), and find a schematic or panel component. For this tool to work we had the option to right clicking on a specific component or activating the surfer tool by selecting the icon or drop down menu and type what we were looking for.

Now in 2008, you can do all these plus search in the BOM inserted in a drawing created by ACADe. The steps are simple please read the following:

1. Activate the surfer tool
2. Browse in your BOM and select the appropriate text
3. Then the surf box will appeared as followed
4. Select the component then “Go To”

Keep in mind, the selection that you do will grab more then the tags you selected.

Surf’s up

CADgneto

Manage your revision number

Autodesk Inventor 2008 now offer us a better option on how to manage the revision number with out having it repeating on all the sheet in our drawing file (idw). In the earlier releases, when a revision table was inserted the revision number would end up on all the sheets with the same number, why, because the revision number would be attached to the iProperties of the drawing. See Image below…

Now in Autodesk Inventor 2008 you may choose your revision number to be controlled by the sheet and not the idw. How do we manage individual sheet revision number, look at the following steps?

1. Select the revision table icon

2. The following pop up window will be as followed,

3. Select Active Sheet with Auto-Index, and also you have the option to go with Alpha or Numeric.

F.Y.I. You’ll notice now that the revision number doesn’t affect the original title block. Why, because the text parameter selected is still the drawing revision iProperties you must update or create a new title block with the sheet revision text parameter. As seen below,

4. Now your revision number is sheet base and not drawing based. If you select on edit sheet you will see there is a new section for revision number. (That where you can manually change the sheet number)

Extra information, this was the before…

This is the now…

Revise it,

Cadgneto

User specific vault working folder

Being an Application Specialist for the Mechanical Division of Autodesk software, you must know and learn Vault. Lately I’ve been implementing Vault and I’ve come to an interesting challenge. Here is the scenario of Company “A”, most of there employee had multiples Hard Drive and to challenge me they didn’t have the same letter drive for them to set up the working folder. I could not set the working folder to a specific lettered drive because not every body had the same one. A co-worker mentioned to me in the pass that he read something about it on the discussion group. I did a search on the subject and of course the answer was there, “Environment variables”. I created a variable on every users computer called Vault and specify the desired location, specified by the user.

Once the variable was created on all the users, I’ve log as an administrator of the vault and set the working folder to %Vault%, as seen below.

Multiple working Folder, it can be done.

CADgneto

AutoCAD Electrical 2008 is out (My new is late)

Why am I putting this article now? For some reason I can’t manage my time properly but I felt that I’ve been lacking in putting article. This week I will try to put a couple article plus this article will show you what is new in 2008. The list might seem short on the new command in AutoCAD Electrical 2008 but one thing is for sure, Autodesk finally have the terminal block working with the panel layout. Here are the new features:

- Autodesk DWG Product Recognition
- Surfable Reports
- Inserting Spare Terminals
- Direct to Terminal Wire Sequencing
- Multi-Level Terminals
- Terminal Jumpers

Check out the Autodesk website What's New

More to come,

Cadgneto