Modeling Terminal Blocks of Predefined Sizes - So close! What am I missing???

[drathak]

I feel like I’m standing outside the door but the handle is hidden.  Below is a summary of my plight with terminals at our comapny.  (I design substation controls for a power utility company.)

AutoCAD Electrical is designed to work with terminals that are discrete items as well as barrier strips and end caps to build a terminal strip of the desired length.  My company purchases ready-made “strips” in the form of multipoint terminal blocks.  Using the software as designed, it is possible to model these multipoint terminal boards and use the Terminal Strip Editor to generate a graphical panel footprint with proper wire annotation.  However, since AutoCAD Electrical tries to operate with discrete terminals, the count on the BOM will be off.  Instead of one 12 point terminal block, the BOM will show twelve of them, for example.

Following suggestions made by another power utility and an ACADE software devloper, it is possible to define the terminals as “multilevel” and constrain the number of terminals that way.  This works for everything except the graphical panel footprint generation.  ACADE wants to insert a single symbol (which is correct) but it doesn’t allow for split wire/destination labels.  (There may be an attribute variation for WIRENO that will allow this, but I haven’t discovered it.)

As of today I have a panel footprint that does almost everything I want.  I merged our old footprint with the AutoCAD Electrical wd_default_multiterminal.dwg block and took some hints from a Siemens terminal symbol.  I now get my terminal values filled out, and I get proper wiring information when I annotate.  But I want the two possible wires on each side to have their destination shown on a separate line/stacked.  You can see my attempt to do that in the attached image.  And by “attempt” and the fact that I’m posting this, you know the results.   It took me forever to find the WIRENO01 & WIRENO01A trick on other footprints, so maybe there is an attribute string that will work in terminals.  Any ideas?

Oh, I'm on ACADE2012 if that makes a difference.  We are scheduled to upgrade to 2013 (still a rev behind) in a couple of weeks.

[p.gardnerRGQ5E]

Putting \u+000A on line +35 of the WDP file will 'wrap' the text and put each wire on a separate line.

[testsubject]

Joe,

ACE is not designed to work with Substation prints. Some have Been able to wrestle it down but there is an addon that was designed with Substation in mind.
SDS - Substation Design Software | Software (ieng.tech)

This might help and make your job easier....