![eplan p8 vs autocad electrical eplan p8 vs autocad electrical](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/jpphUoyeQUQ/mqdefault.jpg)
- Eplan p8 vs autocad electrical manual#
- Eplan p8 vs autocad electrical software#
- Eplan p8 vs autocad electrical free#
This is an IEC style schematic where we see some relays, a door mounted pilot light, and a field mounted pilot light. Here’s a typical AutoCAD way of representing schematics: This is most apparent in the routing of your circuits within your electrical enclosures.
Eplan p8 vs autocad electrical software#
This automated cross-referencing in EPlan alone is well worth the cost of the software !Īnother benefit of modeling your controls is that it forces the designer to actually think about what he’s doing as opposed to a drafter who’s content with executing the red-lining given to him by the engineers. The same goes for interruption points that transmit your power rails between pages. Trying to maintain this information manually is tedious and error prone. For example, a relay coil will typically be represented on one page, and its contacts on different pages.
Eplan p8 vs autocad electrical manual#
One typical source of errors in electrical schematics is the manual handling of cross-references.
Eplan p8 vs autocad electrical free#
You know that these generated documents will be consistent and error free as long as you maintain your model error free. For example, you can extract a bill of material, a list of wires, terminal diagrams and so on.
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Once the model is completed, you can project “views” in the form of reports that give you all the needed documents for you production team. When applied to the electrical engineering field, modeling your controls is a definite advantage over “dumb” graphical entities. Shop workers are free to do their jobs instead of wasting time trying to understand discrepancies between drawings. This brings consistency and quality to the design. Any needed changes are done on the model itself, and views are regenerated, making sure that nothing is forgotten. With the advent of 3D modeling software such as Inventor or SolidWorks, you concentrate on modeling the actual part, and you generate views as needed. Countless errors came from forgotten updates, and many manufactured parts had to be scrapped because of this. In the old days of 2D drafting, modifications to one drawing often involved many manual updates on several other drawings to reflect all the views of the object. 3D modeling software for mechanical design. The analogy I always give at my trainings is that of using AutoCAD vs. In EPlan, as you create your electrical schematics, you’re not only laying out graphical elements on the page, you’re actually building a “model” of you machine’s controls. This is definitely a mistake when working with EPlan, which is more of a design tool than a drafting tool. We then assist to a merry-go-round between shop floor, drafters and engineers, and a simple one hour thing ends up eating up a man-day of labor. Not only does this shift responsibility to the wrong place, but it raises the labor cost when errors are discovered and panel builders/shop workers lack the knowledge to correct them. One good example of this is leaving out the terminals from the schematics because “our guys on the shop floor know where to put them as needed”. The lack of specialized tools in AutoCAD makes it so that drafters will leave out details that would guide the panel builders in their job, only to shift that responsibility on those same panel builders. AutoCAD is a very good drafting software, but when it comes to expressing electrical schematics, it falls flat for anything but the most trivial project. Having worked with AutoCAD for many years myself, I definitely understand why it is so. What struck me, once again, is that most people coming from AutoCAD tend to concentrate on the graphical aspects of their documents, while giving less consideration to the logical aspects of it. I was helping this customer on their very first Eplan project which would eventually become their “template” for future machines. I was recently involved in a fair sized project conversion (200+ pages) from AutoCAD to EPlan P8.