Multi color wires

[erlend.kleiveland-hanssen]

I have had the problem with customers on relying on wires with multi color for identification in their system. It would be good if Autocad could implement the possibility for multicolored wires. Today you can use multiline for this visually, but it would be nice to get the functionality of the wires. I hope you make it possible and it should not be much work to put this in an update.

Many of the customers have gone away from labelling the wires due to cost and a hassle with marking high temperature systems or systems exposed to bad conditions.

[rhesusminus]

Hei Erlend.

I've seen people putting a dashed polyline with the secondary color, on top of the other wire. This looks quite ok, but it's a nightmare to maintain.

Other than that, do you print in color?  Do the service guys have everything available in color?

From my experience, people just indicate the color with the text BUWH for example, to indicate a two-colored wire.

Of course, I totally support the idea of having multicolored lines. I use a lot of colors in my schematics, too.

[erlend.kleiveland-hanssen]

On some project i printed in colors (Projects where they use single colored wires), but usually I also just indicate it in the label. But the problem is that the label is not an intelligent way to use the schematics because I think you loose the functionality and it also requires a lot of manual work. An example here is if you use the fan in/out option for a bus you would have to manually type in the label in both ends. I try to make the schematics idiotproof, so that when you hire in consultants which are not familiar with the projects they can also help in routing wires.

I do not know why AE have not implemented it yet because it should not be hard to add the mline as an attribute for the wire type. But I hope I can get some advice on the forum how to work around this or that they get it fixed as an update.

[rhesusminus]

Don't hold your breath while waiting for Autodesk to implement this. There's barely any new functions added to new releases, and they're not fixing the larger bugs either. 

Maybe you should consider changing to a different software, just like some other people breaking out of Heli-one did 😜

[rhesusminus]

They're looking for three new engineers now actually 😁

[erlend.kleiveland-hanssen]

I saw that you were using Eplan, how is the integration with mechanical models? Is there a solutions for multicolors? Have you compared it versus capital elektra integrated with Onshape?

I liked what I saw in the youtube videos where you compare AE versus Eplan. I have felt the same way on many of the points you make.

[rhesusminus]

Nope, Eplan does not have multicolored lines either. I wish it had.

It's just a different thing. You can't compare it with AcadE or Capital Elektra. But you do all the electromechanical things in Eplan, and you share a step-export from Eplan that you link into whatever software you use for the mechaincal stuff. If you need to drag extrenal cables inside the mechanical model, Eplan have a harness program to do so.