spare cable cores

[ccad2509]

am i being amazingly dense

looking at the cable summary report i don't see a field for cores used or spare cores available does it exist or has the caffeine levels in me fallen to dangerously low levels !!!!!!!

[dougmcalexander]

That is a cable summary report.  A list of cables.  Try running a From/To list and you can add CBL (tag), CBLWC (cable wire color or core), CBLMFG, CBLCAT, etc.  You get details in the From/To list.  I will attach a screen capture of a wire list from one of my training classes.

[ccad2509]

hello doug

thats not what im after

what i want is to produce a cable summery with a colum either of cores used or cores free

its a client requirement as quite a lot of  20 pair multicores are used from simply checking the sumery we can quickly detrmine if we have enough free cores or need to run another multicore as part of the future proofing of the installation

[dougmcalexander]

The cable cores are available in a Cable From/To report.  The purpose of the summary is simply to list the cables in the system.  Also note that you must insert a cable marker in order to display the core.  No spares will be shown if there is no cable marker on the drawing. However, the cable marker must be located on a wire layer and at least one end must be terminated in order for it to appear on the Cable From/To report.  See both attached screen captures.  

[ccad2509]

lets be blunt this feature does not exist in acade

i wont mention it comes stanadard with other products at a 3rd of the price of station

i will inform my client that this cannot be achieved (i got to cover my "£$%^)

[dougmcalexander]

No CAD program has everything that evryone wants. I wish I could make one with all of the great features from all of them.  But I find AutoCAD Electrical has the most of what most of us need most of the time, compared to the other programs I have used.  Is there room for improvement?  Sure!  The same is true for all CAD programs.

I get frustrated at times myself, but Autodesk, like most companies, has limited resources, thus they have to focus on the requests that rank highest in popularity.  It took 9 years for one of my requests to get into the software.  It took more and more users running into the same need, as more and more switched to ERP systems that required a separate item number for subassembly parts.  If enough people join you on this forum and request what you want, exactly the way you desire it, perhaps it could become a feature in a future release.  No guarantees of course.  I don't work for Autodesk.  I just try to help people become more familiar with what it can do at the moment.  I have been on this forum since 2003 and yours is the first request that I hae seen for showing spares in a cable report.  But I showed you a method that could display cable cores not in use.  You could changed the color assignment to spare if you wish, so it shows as spare in the report.

[jalger]

Hi Ccad2509,

If your looking to maps Spares, then create a dummy component.

Place it where the spares are then you can run the report and pull out the spares and the used ones at the same time.

If you want to sort them and only show one or the other, then use the installation code and set it to "spare".

You could do a line of Terminals and set them to spare and just pull the terminal listing out.

bottom line you have to have the wire drawn in for the spares, then you use the locations of the components on both sides to generate the wire or cable to/from reports. If you don't have components (dummy or real) then you can't produce this report.

I Hope this Helps,

James

[ccad2509]

doug

i was pretty pissed off yesterday with otherr issues so i was a bit blunt appologies for that

i dont accept the limited resouces comment about autodesk they have larger marketing budgets than most cad companies have for product design and implementation

my client will not accept you solution and you could probably guess why becasue he also has design documention supplied by other companies with this feature and this is what he wants

this is where i get frustrated more often than not im not asking for the moon here its a standard feature on other products just by a little bit of of programming this could be achieved 

this is the main problem i have with acade if you take a  look at all the other electrical cad products and look at the standard commands and features

now im not talking abot thoose special features that make that particular cad product stand out against the rest as being good at certain things

the all have strenghts and weakness

you find acade  missing quite a few of these things as standard features i wont start a massive argument about it but your need to do lots oftweeking and modifying acade just to get it to work just troll through the posts on this forum

i have two main complaints at the momnet

1) the electical audit is not fit for purpose and we have discussed the reasons why in other posts

2) and again a standard featue on other cad programs standard european form layouts not the autocad mechnical tweaked form (which is awful on so many levels ) your not winning friends when everybody else has a nice forms which are standard across multiplle cad packages and then you have to prentent what is effectively an excell spreedsheet imbeded into a cad drawing and my client wants thoose forms as well i worked out how to do this but its burning design time like crazy  

[dougmcalexander]

So I can't help but wonder why you purchased AutoCAD Electrical.  I use a couple of the European progams you refer to.  Have used others in the past, and am familiar with others I don't currently use.  As you say, they all have pros and cons.  But, as an independent ECAD consultant, I recommend the solution that most meets my customer's needs.  Sometimes it is not AutoAD Electrical.  Until AutoCAD Electrical could natively handle one-line diagrams I did not recommend it to customers who relied heavily on that ability. In your case I would not have recommended AutoCAD Electrical.  But if you're looking at the bigger picture, there is much that AutoCAD Electrical does, that the others cannot, or cannot do as easily.  What attracted me first to AutoCAD Electrical was that wire numbers are a separate entity from wire type assignments, thus I could auto wire number a project anytime I wish, without affecting the wire color/size assignments.  It requires band-aids or manual editing in the other programs to pull this off.  Also, some of the European programs require me to create each and every cross-reference combination I need for each and every relay or motor starter, whether 2 pole, 3 pole, or as many auxiliaries as I might ever need. I have made many, many.  Electrical handles this automatically, and I can change the cross-reference style anytime.  I also like that AutoCAD Electrical is drawing-driven, thus a database crash doesn't destroy my drawings.  There are trade-offs for storing all data in the drawings, but I will take those to avoid having to redraw after a database crash.

As far as resources are concerned, they are truly limited.  AutoCAD Electrical is a niche product for Autodesk.  It doesn't seem to get the attention that their higher volume mechanically-oriented products get. I find this is also the case at many OEMs, where the electrical engineering department is a necessary evil.  I have been in that situation myself at two different companies, and just about every OEM I visit in my travels reports the same issue.  Mechanical people think their stuff is superior.  Okay, theirs is more visible to the untrained eye, but theirs just sits there as a chunk of metal without our controls and wires.  

I'm sure that Autodesk has to prioritize heavily what goes into each release of AutoCAD Electrical, as they weigh their resources against the wish list.  The most popular requests seem to get the attention.  I have my own pet list of things that need to be fixed or added, but alas, I must wait.  Like item numbering.  I'm glad it is automatic, but it doesn't truly assign item numbers alphabetically by manufacturer, though that is how it appears to work.  It assigns in drawing order first and then alphabetcally.  That leads to splitting up manufacturers in the BOM, because they appear on different panel drawings.  But for now, my customers and I must manually rework the BOM order until the day Autodesk hopefully fixes this issue, so I can have the BOM sorted by item number, while still keeping the manufacturers grouped together.  But if I use another program, I run into other things I cannot do smoothly, and which require manual tweaking, and some of those take even more time than tweaking a report takes.

There is no perfect program that does it all.  But if reporting unused cable cores is paramount to your business, you may have chosen the wrong program. It is wise to examine from every angle before you buy. This is why I recommend that my customers attend a training class for the program they are about to invest in.  Kick the tires, check under the hood, so you know if it is right for you.  Just my free advice.