Why are there no catalog lookups for toggle switches (listed as SPDT switches under Miscellaneous Switches)?
Hard to say why.
But It's quite easy to add some.
If AcadE says that It can't find the TG-table, press OK, then press the Family button:
Now, just press the "add"-button in the top left corner. (Couldn't take screen shot as I'm on AcadE 2015 now. If you're running AcadE 2015, just press the "pencil"-button to go into "edit mode")
Yep, did that & it created a family table named "TG112" which now cannot be deleted from the catalog database because whomever designed the "new & improved" catalog lookup functions allowed families to be added but NOT removed. Another day in Electrical paradise!
Hi Marshallw,
You can remove the new component specific table in MS Access.
At a quick glance I also noticed that the pin lists and terminal properties access has been removed from the "other tools" Section in 2015.
It is Recommend that you have MS Access installed to maintain the Databases anyway.
I hope this helps,
Regards,
James
jalger,
Thanks, but I don't have Access.
I don't understand why Autodesk thinks that everyone needs/has a full-blown database manipulation program to do their everyday job.
My complaint was that they put in the button to add the family table, so why didn't they put in a button to remove a table. Does not make sense.
So here it is a year later & 2016 Electrical is out with all-new "Interoperability" & whiz-bang catalog references but still no toggle switch references.
Amazing. The entire Electrical/Inventor interoperability tutorial has not only not been updated (had to go back to the 2013 tutorial files to even find the tutorial), but there are NO references to the toggle switches in the demo itself.
How can interoperability be shown to a tutorial user when the new, integrated catalogs contain no references to the entire component class ?
No lookups because there is no toggle switch family and/or lookup table(s).
News flash Autodesk: toggle switches are probably the most common electrical component on the planet next to the IC. Not having catalog lookups for this class of component simply makes AutoCAD Electrical look like a second-rate program that was never thought through. I mean, why put a component in the Icon Menu that has a class designation for which there is no lookup table?
This whole thing makes no sense...
Hi Marshall,
I agree its a bit silly.
They have SW listed as the Toggle Switch Table, but the component is saved to the TG family.
... and SW really should be listed as Encoders because thats all it really has.
Oddly they do have alot of Limit Switches (some of them are actually Toggle switches).
It not a second rate program but there are alot of little things that were over looked.
Having done schematics with Regular AutoCAD, I can say that the few gripes I have FAR outweight the time it took to manualy update wire numbers and tags. (about 4 days for 50 drawings)
If you saved your table from last year (when you created your TG family) you could migrate it into the new release.
I hope this helps,
James
James,
Understood. Didn't say it was a second-rate program, and it's definitely a huge step above Vanilla AutoCAD for doing electrical work.
I said it makes Autodesk look like it's putting out a second-rate program because of little, but important missing information.
By contrast, look at the Solidworks Electrical 3D demo on Youtube. I realize that it, too may be largely hype, but at least it's impressive hype.
Autodesk is hyping their new "Interorerability" functionality, but it can't even be demo'd using the existing tutorial dataset because of this.
Hitting a snag like this during a product demonstration to a potential customer will very likely result is a "Thanks, but no thanks" response.
Just trying to get Autodesk to get away from the hype or at least put in the functionality that backs up the hype.
They haven't upgraded the tutorial files. They haven't upgraded the help files. They don't have a demo set that shows how the new features work.
Sad...