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Coinciding with the acquisition of VIA Development, Nate joined Autodesk in March of 2003 after a decade stint as an entrepreneur following a two-decade stint as a controls engineer and software applications developer at Owens-Corning. Nate is now the lead product architect for AutoCAD Electrical. He loves this stuff.
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Electrical Idol - Submissions
May 31, 2006 03:55 PMby Nate HoltOkay, first submission is posted. Performer wishes to remain anonymous. Listen to it here.
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Electrical Idol
May 26, 2006 12:30 AMby Nate HoltI've been around since the 50's so It's rare for me to experience three totally brand-new things in one week. But this was one of those weeks. The first two will probably become known eventually but the third, well, it's just too good to keep mum about...
Announcing... the Controlling the Machine blog's "Electrical Idol" contest! This should be fun...
Last night, sitting in my hotel room (on the road this week), I scratched out lyrics for a theme song for AutoCAD Electrical. But I have no talent plus no one else handy who seems willing to do the required crooning part (see below). So, I'd like to run a fun contest where Blog readers record it, send it in, I post it here, and then we'll figure out a way to determine who will become the "Electrical Idol".
I'm thinking of even awarding prizes: 0.5W Resistors!
Grand prize: 33,000 ohms
1st Runner-up: 2,000 ohms
2nd Runner-up: 1,000 ohms
You don't have to have talent or instruments for the recording. It is probably best done acappella. Lyrics below
UPDATE: added a 4th verse.
(suggest it be done to the tune of "Don't Worry, Be Happy").
(snapping fingers to establish beat throughout)
(whistle chorus to begin)
The engineer, he come to say
Switch re-lay with time de-lay
Don't worry.... A-Cad-E
The re-lay con-tact count too low
Too many N.C., no more N.O.
Don't worry.... A-Cad-E
Don't worry A-Cad-E now.
[CHORUS]
(crooning)
Don't worry
(crooning)
A-Cad-E
(crooning)
Don't worry A-Cad-E
(crooning harmonizing)
Don't worry
(crooning harmonizing)
A-Cad-E
Don't worry A-Cad-E
Shop foreman come to call you nuts
Com-po-nent tag name dup-li-cates
Don't worry.... A-Cad-E
A finger in your face he wags
About those missing wire tags.
Don't worry.... A-Cad-E
Don't worry A-Cad-E now.
[CHORUS]
The customer, he spec'd Square-D
Now on the phone says Allen-Brad-ley
Don't worry... . A-Cad-E
The project name, you thought was locked
Now gotta edit thousand title-blocks
Don't worry.... A-Cad-E
Don't worry A-Cad-E now.
[CHORUS]
Design changes at your door
After it hit the shop room floor.
Don't worry.... A-Cad-E
The en-gi-neer with face of woe
Twelve more P L C I/O
Don't worry.... A-Cad-E
Don't worry A-Cad-E now.
[CHORUS]
(fade)
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A Tornado and a Green Flash
May 18, 2006 05:19 PMby Nate HoltThis year marks the 50th anniversary of the television debut of "The Wizard of Oz". Saturday evening, November 3, 1956 on CBS-TV program called Ford Star Jubilee. It was next shown on TV in 1959 and then became pretty much an annual TV event.
I think I saw the debut. I developed a very early fascination for tornados. The early-on scene of Dorothy and the farm house being swept up in the storm, the woman peddling the bicycle through the black, swirling air and morphing into a witch riding a broom... all made a huge impression on this first-grader. Since then, I always wanted to witness a real tornado (from a reasonable distance, of course). Whenever a really big storm is brewing outside, I run out and look toward the southwest, waiting for "it". My wife thinks I'm nuts, I guess. Anyway, still no luck after all these years.
Other than a tornado there is one other atmospheric spectacle that I really, really want to see someday: the Green Flash. This is very rare. It appears as an emerald-green flash of light just as the setting sun dips below the horizon. I don't have many opportunities here in Ohio to watch for it... too many trees and clouds. But some time ago I had a stretch where I spent many weeks in Amarillo, Texas. There it was easy to see all the way to the horizon and (it shared with nearby Kansas) had a "sky was not clouded all day". I was a young electrical controls engineer, often found hunched over my 4-node Modicon 384 PLC programming unit long after all the other workers had knocked off and the construction site had grown dead quiet. I could see the setting sun from where I sat, looking out through the unfinished building's silhouette of structural steel, pipes, and process equipment. As that Texas sunset slanted down along the horizon, I would pause and almost hold my breath. Slowly, slowly, sinking, sinking, disappears, pause, pause... no green flash.
I'm still waiting.
Has anyone seen both?
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Attribute Edit > 255 characters ( ? )
May 18, 2006 02:50 PMby Nate HoltYesterday I had a quick need to edit an AutoCAD block attribute to carry a value that exceeded 255 characters. But I just couldn't find an existing tool that would accept this long string. Seemed that the user interface was the problem? Donno. Is there a way to do this with an existing tool??
Anyway, this is a situation where AutoLisp comes in handy. Threw together a crude tool here and problem seemed to be solved.
UPDATE: the word is that the character limit was increased in AutoCAD 2000 from 255 to 2049 single byte characters. But the UI is still limited to 255 characters in both the GUI and CLI.
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Rolling your own brand of Signal cross-reference annotation
May 12, 2006 02:51 AMby Nate HoltThis idea/suggestion appeared at my door earlier today: an AutoCAD Electrical user wanted to know if wire connection "fan-in/out" cross-reference annotation could include the tag-ID of the device at the "far end". In other words, a wire leaves a connector or PLC I/O module, passes to a "source" fan-in/out symbol, and then jumps to some other schematic drawing in the project. At this far end it does the reverse. It jumps from the incoming "destination" signal symbol and passes along and finally lands on some other connector or device. Can each end's signal cross-reference annotation display the tag-ID of the device at the wire's far end, even when the far end is on some other drawing?
Hmm... nice idea but AcadE's out-of-the-box cross-reference set-up doesn't cover this situation. But, here's where AcadE's "API" customization/programming interface and a bit of poking around in the project's scratch database file can fill in the gap. The key is held in the WDATA table of the project's scratch database file (in Microsoft Access format). Each wire network's raw data is listed here along with Source/Destination codes that reside on that piece of the wire network.
A fairly simple Lisp utility here can be APPLOADED and run on the active drawing to update these fan-in/out symbols with cross-reference annotation of the far end connected devices. Use this as a template to construct a more elaborate version of this custom cross-referencing (example: right now it's just writing to an existing XREF attribute on each symbol). Creating (and debugging!) this stuff can be a lot of fun!
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Dual Monitor Setup - Why did I wait so long?
May 10, 2006 04:05 AMby Nate HoltAbout a year ago, my Autodesker friend John mentioned that he was using his notebook and an external monitor together in some kind of dual monitor setup. I made a "that's nice" mental note and that was it.
Well, I finally tried it. Wow! It's so cool. I have my notebook open and propped up next to my big Sony flat-screen monitor and software development life is good. I can move stuff back and forth across the chasm between the two monitors. Lot's of extra room! I can have AutoCAD Electrical open on the big monitor and detach and float the Project Manager modeless dialog along the edge of the notebook's screen along with Outlook and my code editors and such. The whole AutoCAD screen is available for graphics. Why did I wait so long?
Setup was easy (using Win XP). Go to the Windows "Display Properties" dialog and select "Settings". Look for a "multiple monitor" option under "Display:" along with an unfuzzed "Extend my Windows desktop onto this monitor" toggle. Flip the toggle "ON" and hit "Apply". This is all it took for my two monitors to start working as one double-wide monitor.
The only adjustment I had to make was trying to keep track / find the cursor. It was easy to lose it with so much more room. I tried a couple options. The first was to turn on mouse properties --> Pointer Options --> "Display pointer trails" toggle. It worked and I could easily find the cursor but it was just too distracting. The next option was the "sonar ping" option under the same dialog above. It shows an expanding circle at the cursor's location when you press and release the CTRL key. This was a bit less intrusive and only showed up when I needed it (or whenever the CTRL key was pressed). But my final solution was to keep the bottom "Taskbar" flipped to "Auto-hide". Now, if I can't find the cursor, I just wave the mouse around until the taskbar pops up. This locates the cursor somewhere along the bottom of the screen.
Again, so cool. Why did I wait so long?