Terminals

[dhwanpathak]

Hello,

I have been trying to update one of my previous colleague's AutoCAD Electrical Project Drawings. The terminal blocks used in all the drawings are inserted from the Schematic Icon Menu but just a simple round terminal without a tag or a wire number. Hence none of the terminal blocks are linked to a strip.

At the Panel Layout Page, he just inserted footprints of terminal blocks and wrote wore numbers next to them manually instead of using the Panel terminal strip Editor. 

I wanted to change this and use the Automated Method to link the strip with the terminal. However, I would really prefer not to change each terminal block to another one from the icon menu. 

Is there any way to fix it?

[jseefdrumr]

That would depend on exactly which one of the round terminals were used originally.

There are 5 shapes for terminals: square, circle, diamond, triangle, and hexagon.

Each of these shapes has 4 versions: no data (symbol only), non-changing wire number only, terminal number only, and wire number change + terminal number.

It sounds like the previous colleague used the 'no data' version of the symbol. Verify this by trying to use the Edit Component command on one of the terminals. If you don't get the edit dialog, then you know it's the 'no data' version. And if that's the case, you will indeed have to replace every single one in order to see them in the Terminal Strip Editor.

However, this doesn't have to be too hard. Try the Swap/Update Block tool (AESWAPBLOCK). This command will swap out all of these terminals for different ones, and it should take care of getting the wire numbers assigned to them. It will do this on an individual basis, drawing-wide, or project-wide. The one thing you'd have to address manually would be assigning the terminal strip name to each one. And even that can be streamlined: have the PROPERTIES palette open, then select all the terminals that go in a strip together. In PROPERTIES, find the TAGSTRIP variable and type in what's needed. Every selected block will then have that value, so you only have to type it once. (NOTE: if you mass-edit any symbols like this in ACADE, you should always follow it up with a database rebuild (AEREBUILDDB).)