Unconventional use of Wire Gaps - AutoCAD Electrical

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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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  Unconventional use of Wire Gaps - AutoCAD Electrical
  February 26, 2008, 09:38 AM Nate Holt

   

  Eight inches of newly fallen snow outside your window and your favorite snow shovel is broken... have to switch to improvise mode.

  

  Back inside, continue to improvise. Let's say that you want to quickly tie three wires from the right-hand output module into three inputs on the left-hand module, both on the same drawing.

  

  AutoCAD Electrical can do this with individual source/destination arrow pairs. But, since the source and destination are on the same drawing, maybe we can figure out a way to do it more simply.

  Using / Abusing the Wire Gap feature

  AutoCAD Electrical supports "gaps" in crossing wires. The way this works is that each broken line has an Xdata (Extended entity data) pointer that points at the handle of the other piece. AutoCAD Electrical treats it as a continuous, unbroken line even though it is in two pieces.

  

  What if we set up the gap and then manually moved each piece to different parts of the drawing? Would AutoCAD Electrical still "think" that the wire was continuous? Answer: YES.

  So, what if I set up three gapped wires, starting at the right-hand module with the other side of each gapped wire continuing back over on the left-hand side of the drawing and tying in to the input module. Would AutoCAD Electrical think that the each wire was continuous? Answer: YES.

  Making it happen with the Check/Repair Gap Pointers command

  This concept should work... and you don't even have to mess around with moving pieces of a gapped wire around. Just use the Check/Repair Gap Pointers command (on the "Spool of Wire" toolbar flyout).

  

  Pick each pair of start and end wire segments. That's it. The link is established. Wire numbers 710, 712, and 713 connect from the right-hand module and tie in to the three wires on the left-hand module. These connections will now show up in various reports such as Wire From/To.

  Pretty cool.

   

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