Terminal Strip as Common Rail
I like to be graphical.
I do what Tyler suggests with the JUMPER layers. In addition, I draw the jumpers differently from regular wires.
My ladders are vertical (YMMV)
All "wires" enter the terminal on the left or right.
All Jumpers (both internal [dashed] and external [solid]) are connected top and bottom. (Magenta lines)
I also draw the external jumper so that it "looks" like a comb with the connection being a 45 degree wire.
I never use the jumper part of the TSE.
Here is an example:
Welcome to the club!
When each and everyone who stumbles upon your software implementation of a real-life VERY NORMAL situation and can't figure out for DOZENS of hours how to make it work in order to get consistent results.... That's a statement of a very poorly designed implementation IMHO.
Let me walk you through the way I find the best cost/benefit (visually great, relatively fast implementation and great TSE compatibility)
Imagine one 24V signal coming from a power supply needs to be "split" between numerous other components that need that power.
The elegant way of doing that in real life is to feed a terminal block with that "original source" 24V, add a bunch of extra terminal blocks to its side forming a terminal strip and jump them together with a proper terminal strip jumper.
My base-case scenario here is a "single-tier" terminal block strip like this:
In this case, the first terminal block is able to connect only one other component (TOP side is receiving the 24V source, therefore you are left with one spare connection at BOTTOM side), and every 1 other block gives you two new possible connections (because there is a jumper between them which is NOT using any of the available connections).
Back to my example:
Here you have three "splits". They could be achieved with 2 terminal blocks jumped together:
-terminal 1 TOP: 24v source
-terminal 1 BOT: 24v destination 1
-terminal 2 TOP: 24v destination 2
-terminal 2 BOT: 24v destination 3
Like this:
If you run TSE after drawing this (and not updating wires to be jumpers) you'll get:
-four terminals instead of 2 (because it counts each lil round terminal in your drawing as a full terminal block)
-a standard "two wires per screw" wiring set up (in most companies that's heresy!)
-a literal reading of your drawing's connections, as if your jumpers were actual wires jumping each terminal block
The way to read this table is assuming the following:
-LEFT side of TSE table is BOTTOM side of each terminal block.
-RIGHT side of the table is the TOP side
-each line is a wire
-each "L1" is a terminal (sometimes it throws two wires to the same side of a terminal, as if they were soldered or screwed together there)
Now let's see what it's trying to represent there (follow the numbers):
1- Terminal block 1, at its TOP side, receives a wire FROM "24V Source"
2- Terminal block 1, at its BOTTOM side, sends a wire TO another terminal of the same terminal strip "TB-24V". You can assume that's going to the very next terminal block (a literal "jumper").
3- Terminal block 2, at its TOP side, receives a wire FROM another terminal of the same terminal strip "TB-24V". You can assume that's coming from the previous block (jumper).
4- Terminal block 2, at its BOTTOM side, sends a wire TO our first destination 24V
5- Terminal block 2, still at its BOTTOM side (again, screwed or soldered together), sends a wire TO another terminal of the same terminal strip "TB-24V"
6- Terminal block 3, at its TOP side, receives a wire FROM another terminal of the same terminal strip "TB-24V". You can assume that's coming from the previous block (jumper).
7- Terminal block 3, at its BOTTOM side, sends a wire TO our second destination 24V
8- Terminal block 3, still at its BOTTOM side (again, screwed or soldered together), sends a wire TO another terminal of the same terminal strip "TB-24V"
9- Terminal block 4, at its TOP side, receives a wire FROM another terminal of the same terminal strip "TB-24V". You can assume that's coming from the previous block (jumper)
and finally 10- Terminal block 4, at its BOTTOM side, sends a wire TO our second destination 24V
You can see that TSE by default will jump terminals together as if we were on a school science project:
..as if we needed to tap into "useful" screws or push-in/spring terminals in order to jump these all together.
Of course, this is ridiculous for any professional use, you now need to spend a hundred hours learning how to update your approach:
First, create a new wire layer, color it to something else that stands out and name it "JUMPER". Attribute the wires that represent the internal jumpers of your terminal strip. Like this:
Just by doing this, you'll notice TSE will instantly remove those redundant representations:
Of course, it's not smart enough to represent the actual jumpers, it's a step you need to manually perform (although it's not 100% necessary nor much useful, you could skip this):
still, it is using/calculating four terminals where you'd actually need only two (this error grows geometrically as your project can potentially have hundreds of terminal blocks.
The way to trick ACADE here is to upgrade your terminals to have levels that are equal the number of connections
This means all "single tier" terminal blocks would be a "2 levels" block. "Double tier" terminal blocks would have 4 levels:
Change this on the first block and copy/paste its properties to the other ones. You'll see now that each line represents not only the wires but also the different levels on each block (L1, L2, so on)
Now that we have two level terminals, we can use the "assign" tool to glue each two terminals together. You'll notice the terminals that lose the assignments become empty, or "spare" terminals. You can use the remove spares to get rid of them, or just reorganize everything by clicking on the table columns or manually moving them up and down.
Assignments done. Now delete the spares:
Here I've set a few new conventions - because TSE doesn't do any kind of "type check" for you. Each wire and each connection can be all over the place.
The way it works best for me is to always keep to the LEFT of the table the incoming/source signals, and to the RIGHT of the table the outgoing/destination signals. Notice I chose not to do any physical wire representation of TOP and BOTTOM like I was doing before. This would be way too detailed for the schematics I normally need to generate.
This is enough detailing for ACADE to correctly calculate the number of terminals your electrician needs, as well as represent them flawlessly on both your schematic and footprint pages:
Of course, here ACADE defaulted to an actual "tier 2" representation, so for the final touch you should assign part numbers to your terminals and make sure they have a matching footprint database / dwg in order to display your correct footprint drawing:
If you ever need to actually report each terminal and each wire coming in/out, just toggle their positions in the table, like such:
and you'll get the wiring represented like so:
Excellent write up! This is exactly the process I use and try to teach others on how to accurately get the right count of terminals. It is quite a lot of work in the background. I've found that when it comes to terminals, they are one of the trickiest parts in any intelligent CAD systems, especially when you start introducing 'distributed' (showing a single terminal multiple times in your drawing) terminals.
In vanilla AutoCAD, it's much easier to just place terminal symbols wherever you want to show a connection to a terminal, and then let the panel builders figure out the actual count needed, but then how accurate are your connection reports, BOMs, physical layouts, etc.? There is a lot of thought that needs to go into how you show terminals and 'trick' the software into how you they are actually represented in the real world. Any old drawing I've come across or seen is a combination of electrical schematic drawings and circuit board drawings. Meaning, there are common bus rails and the engineers/designers just showed a connection to it wherever they needed. As we move and adapt our drawings to intelligent CAD, we can still do that by tricking the software, but you really have to think about how the panel is going to be wired in the real world and show that as close to 100% as possible, which can also make for really messy drawings as well, if you want your reports to be accurate.
In the example below, I have a very simple circuit drawn two ways. One is more representative in the real world than the other, however I have to manipulate the software different ways for each one in order to get the same results in the end. I'm more used to seeing drawings shown in the top circuit and prefer to draw them myself in the bottom circuit. The bottom circuit would be much easier to troubleshoot since I know exactly how the panel should have been wired. A panel builder looking at the top circuit would have no idea that the two push buttons would be wired back to the same terminal under one connection point and that I want to have the pilot light neutrals wired back to one terminal the same way. This of course gets a lot harder to manage when your schematics are more than a few pages and terminal types. This also makes it difficult for you to hand a project off to someone else if they are unfamiliar with your workflow or even how you set everything up in the first place - call it job security if you want, but I think this is a big downfall for anyone who hasn't used an intelligent CAD system before. The results are great, but you need to understand how to get those results, and they don't appear by magic.
