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Using AutoCAD Electrical for More than Just Electrical Schematics

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説明

AutoCAD Electrical software is more than just an electrical schematic design tool. It also includes symbol libraries and functionality for panel layouts, one-line, hydraulic, pneumatic, and piping and instrumentation diagram (P&ID) drawings. Within AutoCAD Electrical, all types of drawings and the included components are linked and update each other automatically. Attend this class to learn the simple requirements for creating the links between drawings and how you can capitalize on this capability to improve your efficiency and the quality of your design package.

主な学習内容

  • Learn how to access various symbol libraries, including hydraulic, pneumatic, and P&ID
  • Learn how to create your own drawing type
  • Learn how to link different types of drawing components
  • Learn how to create reports based on drawing type

スピーカー

  • Randy Brunette
    Randy Brunette is the sole proprietor of Brunette Technologies, LLC, a consulting firm specializing in AutoCAD Electrical and related products including Inventor, Vault, and the Substation Design Solution (SDS) Toolkit. As an Electrical Subject Matter Expert, Randy’s duties include helping channel partners and customers through mentoring and understanding their business issues, and finding solutions that solve their challenges. Randy has been in the design field using Autodesk products for over 33 years, with experience across many different segments of the manufacturing industry. He has been in an application engineer role for 22 years, traveling through out the world providing consulting services. Randy is a top-rated speaker at Autodesk Universities, Technical Academies, and seminars. He has authored AutoCAD Electrical software training manuals, videos, and other materials.
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      Transcript

      RANDY BRUNETTE: Welcome, everybody, to Using AutoCAD Electrical for More Than Just Schematics. Thank you, all, for coming. I got to say thank you. This is one of my bigger classes in a while. The one on Thursday that I'm also teaching has over 130 people signed up. I am just shocked by that. It'll be my biggest class I've taught in many years here. This one's is kind of normal, but thank you all for coming, especially this afternoon. How is AU going?

      AUDIENCE: Woo.

      RANDY BRUNETTE: Woo, huh? Huh? How was the food? Weren't those desserts delicious? How many tried the S'mores thing with the bacon? Oh! You guys that didn't-- and I see a lot of you didn't raise your hands-- you missed out. Oh, those were awesome. They were all good, but that one was really awesome.

      I want to thank-- I see many of you have come back that have taught classes for me before. This is my 20th year teaching at Autodesk University. Look at that, 1990--

      [APPLAUSE]

      Thank you. [LAUGHS] Thanks. I started in 1997 in Los Angeles. And at that time, they were moving it around. So we went to Philadelphia and Orlando. I remember that thing was not the best, but been to all those different ones in there. So thanks to all for coming back to the classes each and every year. You're the reason I'm here. Without you guys voting and making me a top-rated speaker, I got that award. I felt really nice about that-- all thanks to you guys.

      All right. Let's get started. Here's our agenda. Introductions-- I'm going to tell you a little bit about myself for those that don't know. And this specific class, we're not going to talk about basic AutoCAD Electrical functionality, inserting components, that kind of stuff. We want to use it for more than that, right? That's what the class name is about.

      And both of my classes this year followed a theme. We're going to think outside of the box of AutoCAD Electrical, doing it for more than just doing schematics. I'm trying to get your imaginations flowing on what you can do with it. Because it's really pretty cool, as long as you follow some of the rules and some of the things that happen.

      So what are peer components? With AutoCAD Electrical, it comes with four different standards of symbols that are not necessarily AutoCAD Electrical ones. The one-lines are-- that's kind of an outlier. That's why I included them and kind of kept them a little separate. We have one-line symbols. I'm going to talk about the library access to get to these other types, which are pneumatic, hydraulic, and P&ID.

      And then specifically, we're going to be talking about two little fancy attributes, WDType and WDTAGALT. How many people have heard of those attributes? Only three or four of you, OK. So this is going to be eye-opening for everybody else.

      How many people are using AutoCAD Electrical now? Hands up. That's it? Only a few? Oh, this is going to be a-- you're going to be a little bit above what you're used to thinking about it then. But I'll try to explain it as I'm going along. But that's mostly what the class is going to be about, those two, and then of course, linking different types of symbols and pieces that were going on in there.

      And we're also going to create our own custom category today if we have time at the end. What do I mean by that? We're going to make a symbol that you guys are going to make up? How many saw that street magician out on the floor out there in the vendor thing? He was having the whole audience just make up their card things and stuff. We're going to do that, too. I'm going to have you make up a new kind of symbol. We'll see how that works. OK, so that's our goal for the day.

      Technical stuff about me, 11 years as owner Brunette Technologies. And I took a job last week, eight days ago, with Spatial Business Systems. They specialize in substation design tools and things like that. So I'll still be around doing all this stuff. But now I'm a little more focused with it. I've been 34 years in the industry, AutoCAD since '84. How many people are younger than that? [LAUGHS] You're bastards, every one of you. OK. [LAUGHS]

      AutoCAD Electrical since 1996. From those two dates, you can tell I was involved even with getting people to move from the drafting board to AutoCAD. So that's how long I've been using around it and that kind of thing. So a long time. 23 years as an application engineer when I started-- not doing actual design work, but helping other people do it.

      And I even wrote the-- Tiffany mentioned the morning thing-- I wrote the AOTC manuals for Autodesk back when they purchased the software in 2003. So literally, I can say I wrote the book. The puns don't get any better. And if you like puns, you come to my Thursday class. It is going to be awesome, OK? I'm telling you, it's awesome. If you don't like puns, probably not, OK? Just warning you ahead of time-- probably not.

      Here's some personal stuff about me. I am from Wisconsin. You can probably tell from the way I say Wisconsin-- the thing in there. I live in a small town called Chilton. I know some of you think small towns are like 60,000 people. Chilton has 4,000. OK? And I actually grew up in a small town-- smaller town, 150 people-- called Forest Junction, Wisconsin, 30 miles south of Green Bay in the shadow of Lambeau Field. You got to say it that way when you throw it out there-- shadow of Lambeau Field.

      Married with two daughters, two son-in-laws, one grandchild, and a dog. So there's my whole family-- these guys over here-- oldest daughter, youngest daughter, and grandchild. Yay. And my dog over in the corner there as well. OK? Let's see. I also fly radio controlled aircraft, everything from indoor planes-- it's indoor season now in Wisconsin, right? For those of you that don't know, I left, it was 26 degrees, I think-- something like that-- an inch of snow on the ground kind of thing.

      So we fly indoors. Those are outdoor planes, but from little guys about this big to-- you can see some of the planes I have there-- to this bad boy. This is my latest one, 40% of scale. So yeah, 120 inch wingspan, 170 CC motor tuned pipe. [LAUGHS] That bad boy weighs about 40 pounds, and it will go straight up as long as you want it to. So it has all--

      AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

      RANDY BRUNETTE: What?

      AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

      RANDY BRUNETTE: I guess I could. Yep, it could carry him. It could carry a lot of things, actually. But it wouldn't be necessarily the safest, right? Radio controlled stuff, but yeah, that bad boy will go for a long ways. That wingspan there, you can see I am standing like this, holding the plane up. It's 120 inch wingspan, so it's 10 feet, so almost double that. It's big. Here's just some things I did when my wife was gone, when I point that out. [LAUGHS] Yeah, and when I posted them, she was not happy. But she was visiting our grandchild in California, so she complained too much.

      And if you ever get involved in flying, [INAUDIBLE] you flew here, first rule of flying, takeoffs are optional. Landings are mandatory. And you can see some of the results of my landings that didn't work out quite so well. I want to point out-- notice the same color shading in the grass. Those two happened within two days of each other within 20 feet.

      Yeah, that was not a good week. I was not happy that week. Yep, I was doing the same maneuver, made the same mistake. The second one, which was this one, I recognized that-- the first time, it happened so quick, I didn't even know what I did wrong. The plane did something. It was totally unexpected, and it crashed.

      And second time, I recognized it halfway through it. And I needed like 4 more feet, right? 4 more feet, I would've saved it. 4 more feet were not what I had. All right, so that's all the stuff just about me. If you come to Thursday, you'll see it a lot again, but I'll go through it even quicker. Probably the same jokes, though, so be aware of that.

      So what are peer components? That's really what we're going to be talking about today. They are the same component displayed differently on different drawings. So I'm showing an example up here. Maybe the one example you might be familiar with is the electronic solenoid over here. But if you do pneumatic drawings, or P&ID drawings, or hydraulic drawings, right, you could be showing that same device again on a different drawing, right? It's the same device. It's just now it's on a pneumatic drawing. And over here, I have a schematic drawing.

      What about if I make a machine layout? Oh, now it could be showing up on three drawings. There's devices that can show up on four or five different drawings, just because of the type of device they are. They're showing up in the-- like a breaker, a three-line breaker. It could show up in a one-line drawing, and a three-line drawing, and on the schematic, and on the panel layout. But it's still all the same device. So we have to keep track of that in electrical, so that when we're doing bill of material work and that kind of thing, it doesn't count them four different times for the same part, right? So that's what's really happening with the peer style component.

      You guys in the front row, if I am wandering around back there-- I'm a pacer-- let me know. I don't want you have to crane your necks and looking back here. [? I finally ?] realized that I was halfway through the room. All right. They're matching components on the same level of hierarchy. So when you think of a parent-child relationship, like a relay coil and context, right? That's a parent, the coil, and the context are throughout there. Parent, child-- they're different hierarchies.

      These are all the same level. That's we're talking about here, that they're all parent type relationships. They're all that main component piece in there. Not the parent-child, right? And it's similar to the schematic panel relationship that links TAG1 and the P_TAG1 attributes, right? So again, for those that aren't using Electrical now, that might seem a little confusing to you. But it's two different attributes-- one for the schematic, one for the panel.

      And the reason that this is a little bit different-- it's similar to that, but different-- I think because of the evolution of AutoCAD Electrical, they started out with just a schematic tool. Then they added a panel tool. Then they realized that, hey, this tool would work good for hydraulic, pneumatic, and other types of drawings. So they had to come up with something else other than P_TAG1 because that would have just kept getting more and more confusing. So they added this other attribute called WDTYPE that we're going to use today.

      If they could have seen into the future, my belief is you wouldn't have P_TAG1. You would just have WDTYPE attributes on those panel symbols, and it would go off and do whatever they needed to do with it. It's really pretty flexible. But because of the history, that kind of thing, we have those attributes going on.

      All right. We're going to associate these two pieces together with those two attributes, WDTYPE and WDTAGALT. WDTYPE is the biggie. That's the most important one. TAGALT is kind of a convenient piece. And I'll describe where that's really being used in another slide here.

      And the symbol styles that are included with AutoCAD Electrical are the one-line. Still Electrical, so I'm kind of blasé going past that because this is more than Electrical. They include pneumatic, hydraulic, and P&ID. Those are the ones that AutoCAD Electrical comes with, that come with a default installation. You don't have to select them or anything. They're just put right in there for you.

      How many people know they're there? Oh, wow. That seems like more people than are using AutoCAD Electrical, [LAUGHS] which is great. Yeah, that's great. Back when I started with Electrical, they didn't have those libraries in there. And people would come in and go, well, that's great. But can it do hydraulic, pneumatic, and P&ID things? And I'd go, sure, it can. But you have to create your own symbols, right? And people would go, oh, well, then, we can't buy it. And now it's there, and I never hear anybody asking and telling me they're using it. It was just an excuse back then. Or maybe they are, and they're just not saying it. They're trying to keep it as an advantage, right? That competitive spirit.

      Here's the key one we're going to talk about today. Anything else you can think of, right? In my two examples today I'm going to show you, one is about putting notes on a drawing. Ooh, notes. Everybody just uses text for notes. Well, interestingly, I had a customer ask me about a month ago, when I was preparing the class, and they said, hey, we want to put notes on a drawing. And I want to put them over here on this drawing, and I want them to show up over there in that drawing. Oh, hm. How could we do that? And so I pulled this bad boy out and started doing it with this.

      And the other one I'm going to show you came from a customer I did a long, long time ago. They were designing prisons. Prison, why would they want AutoCAD Electrical? I'm not sure. I thought there might have been something else, but they convinced me they wanted AutoCAD Electrical. So we created little electronic scanners, and monitors, and things, and put those in with Electrical. And we were able to create building materials and things. And I'm going to show you that today with the home security system, smart home devices. So you'll see how that works. So those are the two that, I thought, outside of the box. And I'm going to try to get you guys to help me make a new one.

      All right, the WDTYPE attribute. Trust me, we're going to be doing a lot of this in AutoCAD Electrical. But I'm starting out with the PowerPoint. I'm going to get you lulled into complacency first. You can boo or ooo or anything, too, if I say things. By the way, if you have questions, make sure you ask me. I don't like that waiting till the end stuff. I know it's the professional speakers always say that we're supposed to do. I'd rather have you ask the question as we're going through the class. OK?

      So this WDTYPE attribute that we're going to put on the symbol is a special little attribute. You can see this little mini guy up here because it is usually invisible. Right? It's just another one of those information tags that's going on there. And it identifies the style or category of the symbol, right? These are the ones that come with AutoCAD Electrical so far. You can see it has pneumatic, hydraulic, PI for P&ID, and 1- for one-line.

      I know this was probably pretty simple. Some of you probably picked up on that right away. But I looked at that for a long time until I realized 1- represented one-line. Wow, somebody was clever-- much more clever than I would have been. But it took me a year or two before I realized why they used 1-, right? One-line in there. So those four there.

      And you'll notice when we're creating schematic reports or doing other things, you can see here's one-line, hydraulic, pneumatic, P&ID. And I took this image when I had my other guys on there, the note device and the smart home device. That was the letters I made up. The only rules about making these WDTYPES is they can't be any more than four letters. Electrical cuts them off if they're more than four letters. So it doesn't pay if you type anything more in or not.

      And AutoCAD reserves-- I'm putting air quotes around that-- the first two characters. That doesn't mean that you can't use them, but it--

      Oh, look at that. Ooh. Ooh. Oh, ho, ho. Oh, wow. Are we back on? Oh, yeah. That's even better, isn't it? Did anybody have a problem hearing me before? Now you really won't have a problem. I always love that, that all powerful voice from above. All right. We're back to this. Now I was distracted. Whoops. And here we go.

      This first part, I just want to show you. These are sample drawings that you can find anywhere come with AutoCAD Electrical. This is a pneumatic drawing. First thing is where do we find those new magical symbols that come with Electrical-- pneumatic, hydraulic, P&ID? If we go to our Schematic tab, down here, notice this little button? They're around all over on some of these other ones as well. When you click on that, you will see a different set of menus.

      Here's your first little hint from Uncle Randy. If you're going to do these, hit this little pin right here. So now it stays open, right? You just go back and grab them again. Here's the three menus-- pneumatic, hydraulic, P&ID. I'm going to go first to the pneumatic one. And here's the menu. Again, this is the standard stuff that comes with AutoCAD Electrical, just whole different symbol libraries.

      But the real key to making this all work-- and I want you to think about this, especially when we're going through this with these three styles of drawings-- AutoCAD Electrical was designed using wires, and electrical components and footprints, and that kind of thing, right? That's what it's designed for. And then somebody said, well, it's a schematic. Well, hydraulic schematics are schematics [INAUDIBLE].

      So if we just put on our little imagination hat-- you like that? That's my imagination hat there. I should probably make one or something. Get one of those voodoo hats. Ooh, that would be fitting, right? Make voodoo stuff going on. If we think about this different, just think, well, instead of a wire, that's a pipe. All right? So we name it as a pipe instead of as a wire, OK?

      If we insert different types of components that are not electrical, well, what does that mean? It means, well, pins aren't really pins anymore. They might be ports instead. Right? Inputs, outputs, exhaust. So it's just, you got to put that imagination hat on, and just remember, terms are different because it was designed for one thing. But we can use it for others.

      All right. So from here, I am just going to insert a very simple cylinder. So I'm going down here to Symbols. You can see the icon menu works pretty much the same way. Grab a cushion cylinder, going to come down on here. There's my two pipes coming out from the check valves and all this kind of stuff. And there is my cylinder inserted. It trims the wires, just like any other AutoCAD Electrical component. It starts numbering the device, just like any other AutoCAD Electrical component. Get where I'm going with this?

      Brings up the Insert Data Component dialog box. Blah blah blah, and everything, right? So all the same things, fill in the descriptions, do catalog lookups, put in part numbers, all that kind of stuff. That's really it. That's how it works. And we just inserted a pneumatic cylinder into our drawing. Yay.

      Next, this first part's pretty simple because all I'm really doing is showing you that all these things work correctly. Now we're in a hydraulic drawing. How do I know? Well, it says hydraulic over here. So sometimes I need that kind of help. But you can also tell from the symbolism things in here, so now I can go to the Hydraulic menu. It brings up-- come on. There we go. My computer's really been fighting me the last couple of days. It's been having startup issues and things. But it's right before AU. I don't want to put any updates or nothing. It's like, ah!

      So I'm fighting through it. I'm grabbing a motor and a pump, fix displacement, and U directional pump. Here's another feature of it that brings over from AutoCAD Electrical. You can see the symbol is coming in, horizontally-oriented. I'm going to put it on a vertical line. And just like every other AutoCAD Electrical symbol, it rotates itself to the correct orientation, breaks and trims the lines, and inserts it onto the symbol. All right?

      And I can fill out all the other information just like I did before I can even use some of the tools from AutoCAD Electrical. And maybe I need to scoot this thing down a little bit. It actually should be connected pretty close to that little bypass line. And I'm not a hydraulic engineer, if this schematic doesn't make sense. It's just an example.

      All right, one more-- P&ID symbols. So I'm going to open up drawing number 12 here and go to my P&ID symbols. And we're going to put in a valve. Wow, [INAUDIBLE] and I just restarted right before we started. Here's my gate valve, just a normal piece here. Oh, I didn't open drawing number 12. Come on.

      AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

      RANDY BRUNETTE: Yeah, I've been-- Deb, you ever noticed that hitting Escape button harder doesn't help? [LAUGHS]

      AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

      RANDY BRUNETTE: Yeah, that's what I was doing. Some of you might have heard. I was like, come on! It doesn't help, though. I don't know why, but it doesn't help. All right. By the way, here's something that's a little known fact. Do you know what CAD-- everybody knows CAD stands for Computer Aided Design. Did you also notice that when you hit Control-Alt-Delete, the acronym is the same? Just coincidence? I don't know. [LAUGHS]

      All right, there's my gate valve. I'm inserting that bad boy onto here as well, right? So again, place it into the drawing. So three different drawings, three different symbol libraries that are available with AutoCAD Electrical. And if I take a look at any one of these symbols, right? So I'm going to edit the components. And we go to Show Edit Miscellaneous, there's that WDTYPE. Right? It's invisible normally. PI for P&ID symbols, right? Hydraulic has HY. Pneumatic has PN. All right. And I think that's where the whole acronym thing started coming up with.

      All right. So how about that so far? Yay. All right? How many people create other types of drawings in Electrical? A couple, right? And the cool part about this is what's going to happen next, right? So, so far, that's still going to be a great tool. We have great symbol libraries. You can create your own custom symbols. We can insert trim lines, break wires, all that auto magical stuff that AutoCAD Electrical does. Auto magical, right? That's my-- boy, come on, guys. You've got to get with me here and help me out.

      AUDIENCE: What version of AutoCAD did this come out in?

      RANDY BRUNETTE: OK, the question was, what version did these three library start with? And I do not know. It was before 2010.

      AUDIENCE: 2009.

      RANDY BRUNETTE: Which would be 2009. [LAUGHS]

      AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

      RANDY BRUNETTE: OK, and it was there already then?

      AUDIENCE: Last time I taught.

      RANDY BRUNETTE: So it was there. It's been there a long time.

      AUDIENCE: But I think the library's much larger now.

      RANDY BRUNETTE: Hopefully. They had a lot of time to hire interns. [LAUGHS] Those were the guys that got to do the glorious work. So our Part Number Catalog Database-- Tiffany's class this morning, many of you were in there. She mentioned that Part Catalog Database. It has over a million different part numbers in it. I like doing that every time-- a million different part numbers. I'll guarantee they're not yours. And I'm guaranteeing you one person didn't enter them. OK? They'd hire interns over the summer, and that was their job. Lucky them, putting part numbers in. Just paid well for jobs like that.

      All right. Let's go back to the hydraulic drawing, drawing number 11. So I'm going to click back to this guy. And we're going to start doing some more stuff with this drawing, more Electrical stuff. That's what I'm going to call it-- Electrical stuff. But it's really not, right? We're in a hydraulic drawing, so we got to think differently. But AutoCAD Electrical was designed for Electrical. So you have to think differently as well.

      For example, now I need to start labeling all these pipes. OK? So in Electrical world, what are the pipes? They are wires. So if I want to put label them, I'm going to put wire numbers on them. OK? So I can come up to my wire number command, and in here, I can start doing any wire tagging like I would normally do with AutoCAD Electrical.

      For example, in this drawing, I wanted these to be sequential. I can tell them what number I want it to start at. Maybe I want it to start at 100 instead. And I'm going to overwrite the change here to hydraulic and put HY in front of all the numbers. And I don't want those fixed, and we'll do a drawing line. Oh, look at that. Magically, everything now has a number on it, starting with 100, 101. There's 100. What other numbers are on there? Right? And every network, pipe network in this case, has that unique wire number on it. OK? Questions? I am doing such a good job, and nobody has questions yet. All right.

      OK. So I put wire numbers in here. What other things might you want to do with a drawing like this? Maybe create a bill of material, right? You put all those pipe fittings and things on here. You can create those pieces as well.

      AUDIENCE: Pipe sizes as well?

      RANDY BRUNETTE: Pipe sizes, great. There's a great question. I'll come back to that. That was a little bit ahead of time. I'm going to start with my reports. And the most common report is bill of material reports. All right. So I'm going to do this for the active drawing. Here's the key to making this work. What WDTYPE or what type of symbols are these all? They're hydraulic, right? So I come into here and pick-- I want hydraulic symbols. Pick OK. And just pick [INAUDIBLE] Save Here. And I forgot to put a part number on that pump. You should come back and do all that.

      All right, and there's my bill of material. Here's the tags, the manufacturers, the catalog number. I put these numbers in. I just made them up when I was inserting this. But if there was description information, we could go and grab those values as well. Let me see if there's anything in there for descriptions. This is one of the really cool things about AutoCAD Electrical, right? I can change the report format just that easily. And I do not have any description values in. So these were just numbers that I made up placed in there.

      But if they were in the database, now I'd see descriptions, manufacturer ratings. You could put all those pieces in as well. Can also take this, place it, and put it on a drawing. All right? Another AutoCAD Electrical tool, but it's really just reporting options. So I can pick that over there for defining the width, inch table, and just pick OK here. And there is my table, placed down to the drawing.

      Well, that's pretty cool. All right? If you're doing that stuff manually now, right, how easy that is. Right? Most of the time when people are saying the complaint about using AutoCAD Electrical might be well, it's something we need to learn, we need to do. I've been using it in AutoCAD. I can make the drawings quicker. A, I really don't think so.

      And then the real piece comes-- ask those same people how long it takes them to create their bill of material report. Right? And they'll say, oh, I can do it. I can get it done really quick. I can do it in about two or three hours. And how accurate is it? Well, we're pretty good at this. I've actually had people say this. We generally only find one or two mistakes. One or two? That means 100% of the time, your reports are wrong. Because there's a mistake there somewhere, right?

      With AutoCAD Electrical, the reports are always as accurate as what you have in the drawing. If the report's wrong, your drawing is wrong. Fix the drawing, and the reports are correct. So it's just one of those self-fulfilling things that happens. And you saw how quick that is. Not a couple of hours-- seconds.

      AUDIENCE: Why'd you put the report on the drawing? Does that automatically update [INAUDIBLE] element there, or do I have to replace the [INAUDIBLE] drawing?

      RANDY BRUNETTE: OK. The question was do reports, once they're placed on the drawing as a table, automatically update, right? And the answer is they do not. Any report we create from Electrical is a snapshot of the information that's in the drawing at the time you're under report. Right? So in a way, you can think of it as soon as we run the report, the report's obsolete in a way, right? That's being pretty harsh when you think about it. But that's really the detailed truth of it.

      But it does get easier than that. If I run the same report, I don't have to find that table. I don't have to do anything. It'll just be updated again. It'll find it. It'll update it. But you have to tell it to go read the information in the drawing. That's because of how AutoCAD Electrical works. Unlike almost every other-- and I say almost because I'm sure there's somebody out there that does it differently as well. But everyone that I know has a database somewhere that stores all the information separately from the drawings, and then that updates the drawing somehow, however they work.

      EPLAN does that. Oh, I can't even think of the other ones that are in there. The one from SolidWorks does it that way. They all have this external database. AutoCAD Electrical stores the information in the drawing on the blocks and symbols themselves on those attributes. So that's why when you were updating those, it has to check those symbols, those parts, check that attribute information. They verify that it's correct, and update it, and update the report. That was a long answer for a simple, no, it doesn't. But that's really the whole story behind that.

      All right, bill of material. Now the next thing that was asked was about the pipe sizes and the wiring things. So I'm going to show one of my favorite reports in AutoCAD Electrical from two. OK? So it's going to be a list of the wire connections that go from one component to another. Now I said the wire connections. What are we talking about here? Pipe connections. So again, we're going to do Active Drawing All. Again, I have to say hydraulic. If I get schematic, it's going to go look for schematic things, which aren't in this drawing. I pick OK, and pick my location codes, and OK here.

      Oh. This is so cool, I think. Could you imagine trying to create a report like this manually? It is telling you, I have a 1 inch NPT pipe. It's labeled as 106, starts at check valve number two on the import, and the other end goes to valve number three on the outport. Is that pretty cool? Wire size is right. We can even see there's one down here, 3/4 NPT. You can't put slashes in it. It has to have those when you're creating layers. Because this is all done with layer names, and layer names, you can't have special characters in. So that's why I use the 1 inch decimal places for it instead. How about that, huh?

      I think it's pretty cool. I'll admit, I haven't had to create hydraulics drawings myself. But I just put on my imagination hat and think, hey, that could be useful to somebody. The only thing it doesn't do is length. It's a 2D tool, so can't really get length too much out of it from that. All right, next. Thanks for that lead-in, by the way, asking about pipe sizes.

      And let's see. OK. So we showed you a basic drawing. Now how about if we want to link that information from one drawing to an electrical schematic? Like I am going to move to my-- cancel out of here. I'm going to go back to drawing number 10, which is my pneumatic drawing. And we are going to link this valve, solenoid valve. Actually, I think we're going to stick it in the hydraulic drawing. I'm jumping ahead on my thing here. Sorry about that. I'm going to stick it in my hydraulic drawing and take a look at this pump.

      From the pump, I forgot to add part number information earlier. So I'm going to put some in here now. This is PMP2018, just so we have something there. Because I want to show you some of this magic that can happen with this. Next, I'm going to open a schematic drawing. Ooh, three-line schematic. And there's my hydraulic motor, right? It's going to link back to that pump thing I put in there.

      And I'm going to right-click on this, and pick Edit Component. And you'll see it doesn't have any bill of material information in it, no pieces and stuff like that yet. But we do have it in the hydraulic drawing. So I just wanted to show those things. And we're going to move back to our hydraulic drawing. Now I know I jumped around there a little bit. But I wanted to show you what we're going to link to between the two, from a schematic to the piece in here.

      I'm going to right-click on this bad boy, edit that component, and use this tool in here. I pick Schematic. We're going to show all components for all families. And I'm going to slide down til I find that motor, which is MOT212, that hydraulic motor. All right? So I just found the matching tag, the matching description by using the values in here. And I'm going to pick Copy Tag.

      Now I'm not selecting any of this information yet. I just want to link those two together. And this is where you make that choice of whether the tag names match or whether they're going to keep their original pieces. For this one, I'm going to say that pump 1, which is what it here is in this drawing, is going to match my motor from the schematic. So I'm going to use the TAG1 option. You'll see that that changed up here.

      Now on this step, nothing else takes place, right? We've just finished linking them, telling them that they're linked together. Now Electrical knows about them because the tag names match. For those that know about Electrical, that's really the key. We have to have some kind of link. The tag names have to match. Now that they both are linked as 212, I'm going to edit this one more time. I'm going to make an editing change. It could be just about anything. I'm going to put an A behind the part number. I could change the description. It doesn't really matter what I change. But at this point, now Electrical wants to update the other drawings.

      This is the auto magical part of AutoCAD Electrical. It's going to update the motor. All right? So it opens that drawing, drawing 2. It opens that up, makes the change there. It's going to open the panel layout representative of that motor. In this case, it's just an overall view of the systems, making the change on hydraulic 12. You can see it's doing a little updating there. And then it takes us back to our original. So it kept all of those drawings in sync because now they all match the same components, the same tags. Yes.

      AUDIENCE: When you're linking a schematic to [INAUDIBLE], do all those drawings have to be in the same project folder?

      RANDY BRUNETTE: OK. The question was, if we are linking all of the drawings together, do they have to be in the same project folder? Absolutely. They have to be part of the same project for linking to take place on any of these drawings. Now they have to be in the same project, not necessarily the same folder. You could have subfolders and other mapping things in, although with AutoCAD Electrical, using it with Vault and other tools, we recommend all project drawings are in one folder.

      AUDIENCE: You mentioned with the electric [INAUDIBLE] [? tied to ?] [INAUDIBLE].

      RANDY BRUNETTE: Correct.

      AUDIENCE: Other [INAUDIBLE] for instance, it has a database, right?

      RANDY BRUNETTE: Yes.

      AUDIENCE: What is the pro of having this versus a database [INAUDIBLE] storage?

      RANDY BRUNETTE: Wow, that's a deep question. A little bit outside what we're talking about, but I'll try to give you my high-res thing. So the question was, what is the advantage of AutoCAD Electrical putting information on the symbols versus keeping that in an external database, OK? I'll give a couple that I know of, and there's probably more. And honestly, if you talk to the people that have the other softwares, they'll probably tell you that we're full of crap, OK? It's really up what you want to do.

      But here's why I like it. Number one, because it keeps the drawing an AutoCAD generic drawing. The blocks and attributes we're putting on here are standard AutoCAD blocks. Anybody that has a tool that opens a DWG file can open an AutoCAD Electrical drawing, and all of the information is there. If you have a database-driven system, then your system, whatever you open, has to be able to read that information and off the database and work with that. That's the big one I see.

      Less than that is you have to make sure that your database stays valid, I guess that's the word I'll use. If anything happens to that database, you've corrupted your whole project, right? Because it's all in one area. If something happens to AutoCAD Electrical, if one drawing goes bad, it's one drawing. If your project two drawings, then it's still pretty catastrophic. But it's still only 50%, right? Where if you have 100 or 1,000 drawings, you lose one drawing, it's like OK, well, yeah, it's still a problem.

      It doesn't happen often. I'm not saying that that's a major consideration. But that would be the other one for me. Don't have to deal with databases, I just deal with drawings and generic data, OK? So that's my high level piece on that part. Buy AutoCAD Electrical. Oh, did I say that? Did that come out out loud? I don't know.

      All right. OK, so we linked all those back together. I just want to show you this quick Surfer thing. If you haven't seen Surfer, this bad boy is often-- notice these are both parents. They both say a P in front of them. I can pick Go to, Go to my Schematic Component. And I'll edit that, and you can see-- look at that. It now has bill of material information matching to what the symbol was, right? So it works back and forth between the two. Everything is pretty cool there as we're working along with that.

      All right. Let's show one other example. So that was TAG1 equals TAG1. Where does the time go? It is 3:44-- I'm 3/4 of the way through here. And I'll tell you, I practiced this thing three times, and I ended up at 35 minutes. I'm going, man, how am I going to fill up an hour? And now I'm not-- oh, this is sad. OK. I'm going to open up-- what drawing am I going to work in? Drawing number 10. We're moving here. I am going to link this valve.

      I'm going to try to hurry this up a little bit because I want to show you some of my cool stuff in here. I'm going to link this valve to a schematic component that I know is already there. So I'm going to pick schematic component here. So it's this kind of the same thing, except I'm going to link this to solenoid 723 that I know is in my project, this guy right there. Now I'm going to pick Copy Tag. And in this case, I want valve 7 from my pneumatic drawing to remain as the tag. And I want the solenoid of SOL723 to remain on the schematic, right? Because standard symbols, whatever you want to do with it.

      So in this case, I'm going to pick WDTAGALT. Alternate tag, that's what it's short for. Pick that, it matches it. Notice this one stays here. But if we take a quick look down here at Show Edit, there's my 723. I can pick OK. And the two of them are linked together. You can see it's going to go over and update the schematic component. So it's going to change my piece up in here. And there's my valve down there, right? So it's showing both of them. You can change these colors. You can make them different to kind of highlight which one's which, that kind of thing, by your standards.

      But the cool part is now they're linked, right? Change one, the other one updates. They both have the same tag values in. So it gets around the rule that AutoCAD Electrical has that says the tag names must match. Because we have TAGALT, a little bit of hocus pocus in there to make that happen. Yes.

      AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

      RANDY BRUNETTE: Can use WDTAGALT with tags you get from external lists? I'm not sure. I'd have to see what you mean by that. What we're doing with TAGALT is linking two components in a project. If those components are in a project, and you've extracted them out, and you just have a list that you're picking from, I see no reason why you couldn't fill it out using those codes.

      Here's a key rule of AutoCAD Electrical itself. Doesn't care how information gets in those attributes, like WDTAGALT. Doesn't care if you link it, like I did here. I think that's very easy, right? Because it does the linking. But if you just go in and type in WDTAGALT and put in SOL723, Electrical will know that those two are now linked, and it's going to go through and work. Just got to make sure they go to the other one and do it manually as well, right?

      If you do the work that AutoCAD Electrical does, it will work just fine, right? But that's the key. You have to do that work. That's why I use the tools like this. Now there's always exceptions to those rules, that maybe you want to use some other tools. But that's the general philosophy of let Electrical do the work.

      All right. We are in the last 15 minutes. Holy cow. So whatever else I was going to show you, I'm going to skip past that for now. But I think that was really it. And I want to show you these two cool things if for no other reason than I think they're kind of cool, OK? And you know what? I'm the teacher. So I get to decide what's cool and what's not, right? OK.

      So here's this drawing. And all of these drawings, you might have noticed in the lower corner, I have this note block. So remember I talked about how this customer asked me would have notes somewhere else? All right, well, AutoCAD Electrical, let's face it. The rule is, if the only tool you have in your toolbox is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

      People come and ask me to try to do something. What do I pull out? I don't know. How can I make AutoCAD Electrical do that? Can I do it kind of easily? If not, then I push them somewhere else. But hey, I'm an AutoCAD Electrical guy. So oh yeah, we can do it in Electrical. So that's what I did. I created this symbol as any other AutoCAD Electrical symbol-- three lines of text, here's a component tag.

      But notice it's a note. I don't need bill of material information. I don't need pin numbers and that kind of stuff on it. But it's a different type of symbol. What kind of symbol is it? WDTYPE equals note. Ooh, pretty cool with that, right? So again, I'm just taking this and trying to think, how could I think outside the box with this? So that's what I did. They haven't told me yet if they really like this or not. They haven't tested it yet for me. But I'm going to test it for you, and you can tell me what you think of it.

      Now I'm over on this drawing, wherever this might be, and I want to have duplicates of those notes. I'm going to show you two ways that I'm taking that. The real key here is I use WDTYPE to create a different type of component. It's not a push button relay anything. It's a note. So on my menu, I created AutoCAD University. Well, yeah, no. [LAUGHS]

      I created this guy. You can see here's my note parent, and here's my note child. I pick on that, insert it into my drawing. This is a child. Now earlier, I said it's not a parent-child relationship. And we're not, right? I just created a different type of component altogether, right? The other ones we needed to link back into schematics. This, we're really not linking.

      So in this case-- and I'm going to show you two ways. Now, I'm doing it for a project look. It looks for other notes in the project. All right? Note type devices. Here's note number one . Right? Copied all of the information over to here. And there's our notes. Ooh, because it's copying those descriptions. OK? I had three other notes in here.

      AUDIENCE: Will that update if you update the parent?

      RANDY BRUNETTE: Yes. So the question was, will it update if he updates the parent? Yes, because it's a parent-child relationship now. It's not reports or something off over in Never Neverland. This one, it will update immediately. I'm going to show that as well. I wanted to come back to the menu to show this. You have this recently used little menu piece in here. Not a big deal, really.

      There is project number two. And in reality, the faster way to do this would be now that they're linked, I just pick OK, repeat. And it comes back with the symbol right on my cursor. I can place that one in, pick project. And there is note number 3. Ooh. OK? I was even fooling around with some multi-line attribute-- or not multi-line, but two-part tag, stuff like that.

      Now the question was, couldn't we update these other ones? Yeah. Let's go back and surf back to that parent note that I put on the other drawing, right, in there. I'm going to edit that, here's this long description. I'm just going to say WDTYPE is A-W-E-S-O-M-E. Awesome. Pick that. Hey, parent-child relationship-- they gotta update the other drawings. Pick OK. It's going back. Watch it flash. You'll see it here before it goes back to the other drawing. See it? Uh-huh. Pretty cool.

      All right. And you can see they're all updated. I'm going to jump back to that drawing again. That was my blank drawing here. Going to re-open that. Zoom up on here a little bit. And right? So you can see it updated. So it can have those notes scattered around the drawing. Maybe you can put them all together in one spot. There are some disadvantages to this. We are using these with this method. We are using these attributes on the symbol. You can have 64 characters. The reason that these lines are skirting around is that's as long as we can make them. And there's only three lines, right?

      So yeah, it was a neat idea. And that's what they said. They didn't need more than three lines of that many characters. So hey, it could work. If you need long volumes, you're writing a novel for a note, this won't work this way. You'd have to come up with something else. Come and see me. Maybe I can make my hammer work for you, too. All right. But there's also something else I can do with this.

      AUDIENCE: What happened to the exclamation points?

      RANDY BRUNETTE: Hey, that's a good point. It must have taken them out, special characters maybe. Can't have special characters in the attributes. I didn't notice that before. Great, great observation. Well, maybe it wasn't so great because I put so many in. But thank you anyways. [LAUGHS] Now I feel bad. I didn't notice that before. Aw, man. It ruins all my--

      AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

      RANDY BRUNETTE: It does.

      AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

      RANDY BRUNETTE: Yeah, maybe one worked because that's what I put in before. But I'm all excited now, and I put in more. And then I don't know. I want to show you one more option you have with these. Now I did a parent-child relationship there. OK, so maybe I don't want that. Because I have to put in each block individually and tie it back to the parent. That was pretty cool. But it has some drawbacks. I have to do it each one. What if I had 30 notes? Ugh, now I've got to put in 30 blocks.

      I can also create a report, right? And I'm going to do this for the project. What kind of report is this going to be? Notes, right? For note devices. That's why I created a whole special category for this. Pick this. I can search through the whole project or whole thing. I'm going to show you this little tool. I'm just going to pick from those drawings. Pick OK. There's my note. I want a little more information than that. I need description 1, 2, and 3. I don't need location. We didn't use that one. But we'll keep the reference number in there.

      There's my notes. Put that bad boy on the drawing. I'm going to define the width in this case, just because they're a little too wide. They look kind of funky. I'm going to hit Update. If you ever use this tool, make sure you hit that Update command. It is so frustrating when you type in the values and you forget update, and you wonder why it doesn't work. Pick where I want this guy to be, insert him into there. And pick OK. Doo doo doo. And there is that report.

      Now the advantage of doing it this way is that if I had 50 lines, 50 notes, to one report, and I'm done, right? They're all there on the drawing. Disadvantage is if the notes change, I have to rerun the report, just like we talked about earlier.

      AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

      RANDY BRUNETTE: Yes, but [INAUDIBLE] how quick that is.

      AUDIENCE: In your parent-child update there, you have your drawings open. You have the drawings of your project open. So if you update it here, and you [INAUDIBLE] those drawings in your children--

      RANDY BRUNETTE: Doesn't matter.

      AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] have it open?

      RANDY BRUNETTE: Yes.

      AUDIENCE: Automatically?

      RANDY BRUNETTE: Automatically. I kept them open just so I could go back and forth to them quicker from the tab. But nope, if they're not open, it will open them. In fact, here's the official thing. It will find the other drawing. It'll close the current drawing and save it. It'll open the other drawing, update it, save it, open the drawing you were in, and you're back to where you're at. That's the full thing.

      AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

      RANDY BRUNETTE: What was that?

      AUDIENCE: Using both will do the same thing?

      RANDY BRUNETTE: Using both will do the same thing, yes. Yep. If you check out a drawing from vault, you edit one. It'll check out whatever drawing it needs to update, prompt you if you want to check it back in, then you can tell it to do something at the time. OK, I got one more cool thing to show you. Where does the time go? I just don't understand. We won't have time to make our really cool custom thing. But I just want to show you this guy.

      I made a couple of smart home devices. This one's called My Dot. All right? So I got that. WDTYPE is smart home. I also put some security cameras, smart home. What does this do for me? Well, on a reports, right? And I have them scattered. You can see I have those little green guys running around all over. I can now go to my Reports tab again. Grab component for the active drawing. What do I need to do? Change this to smart home, right? Different kind of device. And hope you're seeing, you can make up anything, right? Any kind of device you want to put in there and place it around.

      Here's what's kind of cool about this. Remember I was talking about the prison. That also gave me the idea for this spot. Well, this one, I need some different information. I don't need those descriptions. But I do need the location code. Because when I pick this, look at that. Huh? Now it's telling me, hey, I've got a camera one looking at the front door. Where is that in my drawing? It's at F5, right? So I can scan my drawing and find it there. Here's this guy, garage side piece, basement. Here's my dot.

      I'm a big Alexa guy. I love that thing, by the way. Walking through the house in the dark when it's night, and just go, Alexa, turn on the lights. And there you go, I don't stub my toes anymore. It's pretty cool. Or you're walking out of the kitchen with a full plate, hands full of food-- Alexa, turn on Channel 2. Yeah.

      AUDIENCE: Game's on.

      RANDY BRUNETTE: Game's on, whatever is on, we're rocking. Set the lights. Set the volume. Set the temperature of the house. I feel a little chilly. Alexa, set temperature to 70 degrees. OK. So there we go. And of course, I can put this on as a report table and other things as well, right?

      And it's just because of that WDTYPE attribute. And if you create a new one, Electrical searches through the project to find any devices. And if it spots one that's not there, like smart home or note, it just automatically adds it into list. You don't have to do any shenanigans in the background, saying, hey, I created a new type or anything. It just knows. If it sees WDTYPE, it just knows. OK?

      And if we had time-- that was my panic thing when I was thinking, oh, I was going to run out of time because my practices ended at 35 minutes. I was going to just make up one. Draw whatever you wanted, put any note you wanted in there, and you could see that all happen. But we only have three minutes left. So I am going to jump back to my PowerPoint here and run through a quick summary. Please hang around for the end of the summary because it's kind of cool.

      Distributed components, right? We talked about that stuff. One-line components, how to access those, make sure you pin them. And by the way, all of this stuff is available online, right? You can download the exercises that I did. Everything I did is available. The notes, files, everything is there. We talked about those different types of attributes. We link them together. Created new types-- note and smart home pieces, right? And it can be anything, right? I just made those up to try to show you how this works.

      Make sure you download the latest version because every time I practice it, it's like, oh, I missed something right over there. And I probably [? update them. ?] So give me a day or two. I don't think anything will change now, but when you get back home to your things, download the latest files again. So if you had downloaded them, just grab the new ones. Any last minute questions?

      All right. Please fill out the evaluations. Remember, the correct answer is 5, just so you know. The surveys are very simple this year. I was amazed. I filled out one for a class that just says, hey, would you recommend the class? Well, of course you would. How would you rate the instructor? 5, just so you know. And then please also put in any comments that you think about the class, if it was too fast, too slow, anything. That's how I can make the classes better. So I can make to year 21, maybe. So there is the correct answer. Awesome. 5 is actually the right answer. Thank you all very much for coming. Appreciate it.

      [APPLAUSE]