When working with terminal strips AutoCAD Electrical offers a few different ways to display the information on our drawings. Of course we have the ability to display the terminal strip graphically and also with two types of charts. The video created for this post will show how to work within the terminal strip editor to create and place the charts onto our drawings.
Video link:
It can be very time consuming to constantly check your design each time you make a change. Fortunately Inventor provides tools to monitor your design limitations. This allows you to focus on your real job.
One of the central aspects of visualization with the Vault products is the usage of the DWF viewing format. You may not be aware of many of the capabilities available with DWF so I will just list some of them here:
If you haven't seen how this viewing technology works in action, you can find an interactive overview of the free Design Review HERE.
Also... for those who missed it, I recently presented a Data Management User group and covered the topics of Vault Security and DWF if you would like a more in depth look with demonstrations included. The DWF content is in the second half of the presentation that you can access HERE.
Contributed by Ben of the Tata Technologies CAD Geeks
As many of us are all aware the Autodesk Inventor product line comes with many great translators. We have found many companies today are switching to Autodesk Inventor as a primary design tool because of the powerful translators that allow them to import and export data from the so called high end systems. At the same time giving them the functionality these high end systems have at a much lower operating expense. With this comes the need to translate this data all at once or a batch process. Autodesk Inventor Task Scheduler allows us to batch process this data immediately or at a scheduled time. Lets take a look at the process and the file types Task Scheduler allows us to import and export.
Video Link:
Autodesk Inventor Translators - Batch Import and Export
Created by one of the Cad Geeks
Not a user of the electrical product on a daily basis, I find myself when working in a project opening up the wrong files often. This could be do to poor naming procedures, but I normally rename my files towards the end of a project. Thank you Autodesk for having the Quick View Drawings functionality, what a time saver. Lets take a look.
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Video Link:
http://www.screencast.com/t/ZGZlZDg4YzMt
Created by one of the Cad Geeks
The FEA capabilities in Inventor Simulation are great for determining design stress, deflection, and safety factor under static conditions, but in the real world temperature often plays a significant factor. Maybe you even have components of differing materials that must hold tolerances through a temperature variation. Autodesk Algor can give you the kind of digital simulation results you need to work within those constraints.
Here are two new video examples of Algor in use to solve these common thermal problems:
Thermal Expansion Video HERE.
Thermal Stress Video HERE.
Contributed by Ben of the Tata Technologies CAD Geeks
I just wanted to take a look at the Contour Roll command inside Inventor 2010. Of course this command will be found in the sheet metal environment, and by the way you can make some really cool shapes with it. So what is a contour flange:
A contour flange is defined using a profile sketch and a straight edge on an existing face. The profile sketch consists of lines, arcs, splines, and elliptical arcs. Contiguous geometry in the profile results in bends in the contour which honor the bend radius value of the sheet metal style. The contour flange can be offset to either side of the profile sketch.One more important item of note since it lives in the sheet metal environment let's not forget the automatic flat pattern that can be provided. Let's take a look.
Video Link: Created by one of the Cad Geeks
When it comes to designs and documentation electrical designs commonly have huge bill of materials not to mention the shear number of drawings associated to them. The electrical product has some great tools built in to help ensure every item has been ordered and contains manufacturer information. We basically have two options, one to run a missing bill of material report or we have a quicker option that allows us to visually check an active drawing for such critical information as well. Lets take a look at each.
It’s no secret – the challenges of designing and constructing factories and manufacturing plants in this day & age are tremendous. Because of the scale of these projects, it is necessary to use digital prototypes to visualize and optimize factory models well before construction begins. However, there are still significant issues to overcome, including:
•Difficulty in aggregating data from multiple CAD systems
•There are no easy ways to visualize large factory models
•There is a need to simulate the real-life experience and appearance of manufacturing plants and factory layouts using 3D digital review
•The need to check for factory model interferences before construction, and…
•The desire to give all stakeholders access to the complete factory model in a robust but lightweight format to promote collaboration
Today's post I take a look at building some simple templates for use in our electrical designs. The templates in use today are for common ladders we may have in our designs plus some tips and tricks that come along with it. Please enjoy.
We see a lot of manually drawn rectangular borders in Autodesk Inventor when we visit customers. The Drawing Border Wizard can aid in creating simple rectangular borders, not just ones with zones. These will also update parametrically with the sheet size, based on the margin offsets:
I have previously discussed the merits of saving searches in Vault for immediate reuse of any search conducted with the Vault "Find" command, but there are some interesting combinations that I have recently run across. If you are like most engineers or designers, you probably have multiple jobs or projects you are managing at the same time. This can make it really confusing to keep track of what has been completed, and what still requires additional work.
