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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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Making the Part Number fit the Relay Contacts used - AutoCAD Electrical
April 2, 2007, 02:08 PM Nate HoltThis user-request makes sense... he inserts the parent relay coil symbol and assigns the desired manufacturer code. But does not make a specific catalog number assignment until after the design is nearly complete. At this point he wants to go back to each relay coil symbol and make a catalog assignment selection based upon the EXACT number of that relay's contacts that he actually used in the design.
Makes sense. But AutoCAD Electrical is currently not set up to automatically figure this out "after-the-fact". It would need to gather up a list of all of the relay's child contacts (it knows this already), go through the PINLIST table in the catalog lookup database file to find all wild-card entries that match this number of NO/NC/Form-C contact combination (it has access to this PINLIST data), then go through the relay catalog lookup table (it has access to this too) and find all catalog numbers of the target MFG that match any of the wild-card PINLIST values that have the exact number/type of needed contacts.
So, the bottom line is this: AutoCAD Electrical has the various parts and pieces of data needed to do it, but this option is just not current programmed into the product.
Extending AutoCAD Electrical through its API
Okay, let's try to rough out some AutoLISP code to try to make this happen! Some snippets of the overall program are shown below (this utility was quickly assembled from parts and pieces of other utilities, so some stuff may not be used).
Here's where we prompt the user to pick on the parent coil. The utility gathers up the TAG1 attribute value, the symbol's "handle", and the INST and LOC attribute values in case we're in IEC-tag mode. A call to messy function "xref_get_data" (in the AutoLISP utilty but not shown here) does a query on the project's scratch database to find information on all of our picked parent's child contacts. Then the utility adds them up to get counts of NO, NC, and Form-C contacts used.
Next: Collecting a list of PINLIST wild-card matches
Next: Collecting a list of catalog part number matches
Finally: Displaying in the dialog pick list
Testing this Utility
Download the AutoLISP file here and the companion dialog DCL file here. Make sure you put the DCL file somewhere in the ACAD path.
1. APPLOAD the AutoLISP file
2. Type CAT4_COMBO [Enter] at command line
Here it is!
Here we've picked on a relay coil symbol that has four child contacts used through the project drawing set. There are three N.O. contacts and one N.C. contact used. Note that the listing shows the 3NO/1NC combos plus 4NO "convertible" entries as well!
Go for it !
This utility is really rough. Don't hesistate to experiment with it and make it better...!
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