Cable's individual wire references

[hayleyR7ZRC]

Hello,

I have a 32 core cable in my system with individual wires going to many different components. I'd like to show where each wire of the cable is going via cross-reference on one drawing. However, the cross-reference for each wire only seems to refer to any instance of the cable, not for each individual wire. 

Is there a way to get each wire in the cable to be able to keep its own cross-references? 

[rhesusminus]

The cross-references goes between the parent cable marker and the child cable markers.

If you could create a small picture showing what you want to do, maybe we can help find a solution?

[jseefdrumr]

Take a look at Fan In-Fan Out signals. They're a little tricky sometimes, but I think they will get you where you want to go.

These special symbols allow you to show individual wires, that are then gathered into a line representing a cable, which are then shown leaving the cable individually at some other connection point. Each wire gets its own unique source code, just like a standard source/destination signal. You place a Fan In Source on each individual wire at one end of the cable, and a Fan Out Destination at the wires on the other end.

The wires you draw to make this work have to be done in a certain way: any line that represents the cable must be on the layer _MULTI_WIRE. However, you have to place the Fan In/Fan Out symbols on a regular wire that is on a normal wire layer. The command will automatically redraw the wire after it places the symbol. To one side, the wire will be shown on its original layer. On the other side, the wire will be shown on layer _MULTI_WIRE. You decide which side that is at the very beginning of the command. The side that gets its wire moved to the _MULTI_WIRE layer is the side the cable should approach from.

I attached two screenshots of how this looks on a print. One shows sources, the other shows destinations for those sources. Note that we see individual conductors get gathered into a cable ('fanned in'), which then leaves the drawing via a standard source arrow. It then reappears on a later drawing via a standard destination arrow, where the individual conductors are then fanned out and sent to their various connection points.

The third screenshot shows one of those drawings as it looks in the dwg file. This allows you to see how the layers come into play. My _MULTI_WIRE layer is color 230, this represents the cable itself. All the 'normal' wires in this drawing are blue or cyan. (Our standards are to not set individual wires from multiconductor cables onto specific layers, because we include it in the annotation of the Fan In/Fan Out symbols.) Note how I used filleted (curved) corners on just the cable, to set it apart visually. Also note that once the individual wire from the cable passes through the source/destination symbol, it leaves the _MULTI_WIRE layer and moves to a standard wire layer. Finally, a third thing to note is the unique situation happening on my 0V DC bus.

So there's a rule in ACADE that you can only have one destination signal per wire. Well, I have five 0V DC connections from that cable. In the real world, they land on terminal blocks in the panel, and I want to show that in the drawings. But the single-destination-per-wire rule prevents me from doing that in the normal way. So, I cheated by inserting a short length of wire that is on layer _MULTI_WIRE. This highlights one of features of that layer, and why it's meant to be used for cables: No wire drawn on that layer gets a wire number. That whole layer is totally skipped by the software when it's running an automatic wire numbering command. This helps me get around the whole multiple-destinations-on-a-bus thing.

So take a look, and if you feel like implementing this, feel free to ask for some help. I or someone else will get you together.

[djosephE962J]

Prior to the Source/Destination arrows, do your cable markers sit on a WIRE or LINE type layer? If they're on a WIRE layer, do you have anything special going on besides the color?