Autodesk AutoCAD Electrical 2010: Basic Concepts Course

Welcome to the AutoCAD Electrical 2010 Basic Concepts course. Now when you first open up AutoCAD Electrical 2010 you'll see it does look different to a normal AutoCAD installation. There are lots of different tab names, for example, on the Ribbon there you'll notice, so you see you've got Projects, Schematic, Panel, Reports, Import-Export Data, Conversion Tools, Express Tools. You'll notice here as well on the Application Menu things look very much like AutoCAD here. There's no real difference. All you're doing with AutoCAD Electrical is creating an AutoCAD drawing that basically has a database attached to it, so what you're doing is you're tagging everything that you draw so that it all links together in, for example, an electrical schematic or component view or panel view. So let's have a look at this in a little bit more detail. If I go to the Project tab here, for example, there's Manager. Now I've got the Project Manager open here already so you can see here, look, I can Create a New Drawing in a project, Refresh a project, I can actually work with a project here, Project-Wide Update and Retag and I can also do a Drawing List Display Configuration as well. So basically, where does this Project Manager come from? It's very similar to what you've got in AutoCAD Mechanical and Autodesk Inventor. That's where the technologies come from. So I've got a blank drawing open at the moment called 01-INTRODUCTION. However, if I go to this project here on the Project Manager, IECDEMO, that's the name of the project. If I right-click there you can see that I can add drawings, reorder drawings - the Properties there of that project are all in here, so this has got wiring numbers, cross references. I'm not going to bore you with all that right now. This is just the introduction after all. We'll look at that later, but if I open up, let's say, the first drawing of the DEMO there, 001, you'll see there that it's got the Autodesk logo on it because this comes with AutoCAD Electrical 2010. All of these drawings have been generated by Autodesk as DEMO drawings for you to look at. But what I really like, look, I've got these arrows here, Previous Project Drawing, Next Project Drawing, on the Quick Access Toolbar at the top of the screen there. I've also got them here on the Project tab on the Ribbon, Next Drawing, so if I click there it opens up the next drawing, 002, in the Project. So what I've got there now is the ability to flick between drawings in my AutoCAD Electrical project. I can Copy projects, Delete them, Zip them, Update them, work with Utilities and Mark and Verify drawings. I can also Migrate, there's a Language Conversion, Title Blocks and so on. So what I'm going to do now is look at the Schematic tab here. You can see, again, more electrical tools for you specific to AutoCAD Electrical. So there's a Panel there and as you can see I can insert Panels, Components, Terminal Footprints, I can Edit those Footprints. I can build Symbols, I can create Icons Menus, I can create Configurations. It's all tools that work specifically within AutoCAD Electrical itself. So as you can see there, lots of new tools available. I can Generate Reports around my schematics and my panels. I can generate Automatic Reports, I can Import and Export data from other electrical software application or just from plain spreadsheets. So, Unity Pro, PLC - I can bring all this information in to AutoCAD Electrical. I can use RSLogix 500, I can Export to Autodesk Inventor or Unity Pro. I can also Export just to a straight XL Spreadsheet. I can use Conversion tools to convert information from other electrical software applications such as Promis-e. I can also Tag components, I can tag Footprints, I can link descriptions, so all of this information can link together. It can become an intelligent electrical drawing. I've also got the standard AutoCAD Express Tools to help me as well, things like Exploding Attributes, Arc Aligned Text. I might have a curve, for example, with electrical components - things like that that you don't normally think of that could be useful in an electrical drawing. So, there's your Introduction there to AutoCAD Electrical. All of the things I've mentioned we'll cover in a lot more detail as we work our way through the course.  

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