Designers will often utilize company standards in the drawings and CAD specifications they create, and as such, customization is an important aspect in a good CAD tool. In Electrical drawings for example, how a designer numbers their wires differ from company to company, and also depends on the requirements of the assembler.
In this blog piece we will take a look at the various numbering styles available to us in SOLIDWORKS Electrical and how to create a number formula to use throughout a project.
We begin by first accessing the Wire styles manager from the Configurations drop down menu. Items listed under configurations impact properties at the application level of SOLIDWORKS Electrical.
The Wire Style Manager allows us to create, edit, and view all wire styles listed in the application. By selecting a numbering group, we can see all wires listed in the main window as well as their details, such as Equipotential Formula, Wire Formula, Line Color, Description, etc.
To edit properties for multiple wires, we can select multiple wires at a time, and then select Properties.
The Wire Style Properties window becomes visible, and through this window we can edit multiple properties for 24 elements, including the Equipotential Formula. We can edit this field, by clicking the “” symbol.
The formula manager gives us access to all formulas defined at the application level, and these formulas or equations are used for numbering various elements in SOLIDWORKS Electrical, including document numbers in a project, Origin & Destination symbols, etc. By selecting the Variables and simple formulas tab, we can view all variables that we could use in SOLIDWORKS Electrical. By double clicking on these variables, we are able to add them to the formula. In this case we would like to define a formula that references the “row number + column number + equipotential number”. We will also use the “STRZ” command to define a the length of the variable, where most signigficant elements are defined as “0”. We can test the formula by clicking on the calculator symbol at the bottom right of the window.
To test the formula, we can place values for each variable and view the result at the bottom of the window.
We also have the capability of saving this formula for future use, and to do this, we can go to the Predefined Formulas Tab, and click on “Save formula” at the bottom of the window. We can then add a description for the saved formula. We can now click on “OK” to accept the formula change.
We can now see the new formula defined next to “Equipotential Formula” field, and by clicking “OK” we will apply this change to the 24 wires selected.
