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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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Adjusting the 'Jag' in split-lines of PLC I/O modules - AutoCAD Electrical
February 18, 2009, 03:32 PM Nate HoltSplitting a PLC I/O module or a parametric connector automatically triggers AutoCAD electrical to draw a jagged break line at the split point. If seem too "jaggedy", you can do something about it.
Here we've split a PLC I/O module and the jagged line pierces the PLC tag. We could grip this attribute and move it down and solve the problem. But maybe we'd just as soon have the jagged line a bit more mellow.
AutoCAD Electrical has a Lisp global variable that can be set up to override the hard-coded values used for jagged break calculations.
The global variable name is GBL_wd_break_parameters and it is set up as a list of two numbers:
1. The first gives the ratio of the jagged break gap distance to the total module width distance - it needs to be less than 1.0 and greater than 0.0.
2. The second number is the "jag" angle value in degrees.
When this global is not defined (the default state of AutoCAD Electrical), it defaults to a list value of '( 0.8 60.0) meaning that the jag gap consumes 20% of the total width and the jag angles up at 60 degrees. The break in the illustration above represents this AutoCAD Electrical default.
A more gentle Jag
Try this. At the AutoCAD Electrical command line prompt, type this:
Command: (setq GBL_wd_break_parameters '(0.9 40.0)) [Enter]
Now insert and break a PLC I/O module with this global override in place.
That works. No problem with the jagged line hitting the tag attribute. To turn this off and go back to the hard-coded defaults, just set the global back to a value of nil:
Command: (setq GBL_wd_break_parameters nil) [Enter]
How to make this setting permanent
So, how to automatically set this global variable whenever we start up AutoCAD Electrical? There are multiple ways to do this. You could add it to the ".mnu" file or push it into AutoCAD Electrical's wd_load.lsp initialization file or encode it into the "cui" file so that whenever you pick on the INS PLC command it first executes this Lisp expression to set the global.
Here's another way... set it up in the AutoCAD Electrical "wd.env" environment file.
Setting a global from the wd.env settings file
The wd.env file is an ASCII text file hidden away in some obscure path. One way to find it is to do this.
1. Start AutoCAD Electrical
2. At the Command: prompt type this: (c:ace_find_file "wd.env" 3) [Enter]. It should return the full path to the file.
3. Exit AutoCAD Electrical
4. MAKE BACKUP of wd.env !!!
5. Open with text editor. Add the highlighted line shown below to the end of the file. Save. Restart. Test.
...
*SETQ:GBL_wd_xref_mtext_pinsize,"0.67",ratio pin/reference text size
*SETQ:GBL_wd_wnum_noduplicate_chk,'("GND" "24VDC" "COM")
*SETQ:GBL_wd_colga_leaderlay,"SYMS"
*SETQ:GBL_wd_colga_textlay,"MISC"
SETQ:GBL_wd_break_parameters,'(0.9 40.0), distance ratio/angle for jagged "break" lines
Comments
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April 21, 2009 12:35 PM Octavio Gonzalez
This is quite helpful. In addition, I do have a different issue when breaking off a PLC I/O module. When I insert a 32pts I/O module say, my 2nd block being inserted starts with a blank terminal showing all the module's information (INST, LOC, TAG, etc) and not only the TAG_1 attribute that is automatically inserted by ACADE. The issue is that now I do have 2 different attributes on top of each other. TAG & TAG_1. Is there a way to either stop ACADE from automatically adding the TAG_1 attribute or add additional attributes automatically without adding a Blank terminal with all the module information? Thanks in advance
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