Hagerman & Company, Inc. Technology Bulletin

AutoCAD Electrical 2009: New and enhanced tools to improve productivity

By Tad Whitchurch,
MCAD Solutions Engineer
Hagerman & Company
Schaumburg, IL

AutoCAD® Electrical software is built specifically to create and modify electrical controls designs. The latest release offers significant productivity gains with new and enhanced tools for creating and modifying symbols, circuits, terminals and jumpers. Moving to AutoCAD Electrical has become easier than ever before with an intuitive user interface and improved migration utilities. The new AutoCAD Electrical 2009 supports international standards and provides comprehensive libraries of manufacturer content and symbols, enabling users to easily create standards-based designs that comply with industry requirements.

The Symbol builder simplifies the creation of intelligent AutoCAD Electrical symbols and enables you to add them to your standards-based library. The symbol builder has a new interface to simplify the creation and editing of intelligent AutoCAD Electrical symbols in the AutoCAD block editor environment. AutoCAD Properties palette enables you to quickly add and edit the necessary attributes, automatically audit your new block for discrepancies, and then save the updated block as an intelligent AutoCAD Electrical symbol.

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The Symbol Builder enhances your design by simplifying the creation of intelligent blocks.

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Create custom schematic symbols by using a schematic attribute template.

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You can also create custom Panel Footprint symbols, using the same method as creating Schematic Symbols.

The new Circuit Builder helps you reduce your design and drafting time by automating the creation of controls circuits. You can dynamically generate motor control circuits by providing specific functional requirements and you can customize the Circuit Builder feature to build just about any circuit you need. This powerful new Circuit Builder feature allows you to concentrate on designing and forget about drafting.

The Fit and Finish project was created to identify the most prominent user issues encountered in everyday design tasks and to resolve any defective workflows. More than 80 issues identified by you have been resolved. A few are below.

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Assign item numbers on a per-part basis

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Surfing by item number is now available. Simply right-click an item balloon and choose the Surf tool.

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Customize the graphics used to represent each contact type in the table cross-reference style

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Connecting three-phase wiring to a motor symbol is now as simple as connecting a single-phase component

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The Flip Component command now enables you to apply the feature to a symbol with dashed link lines

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You can now perform dynamic pan and zoom while using the Trim Wire command

Support for Table objects now gives you more flexibility in documenting your terminal strip information and eliminates the guesswork when organizing this data across multiple drawings. You can now split the terminal strip table into multiple sections, which you can then place on one or multiple drawings. You can also preview how the terminal strip tables will look on your drawings at any time when defining the table settings. When you edit the terminal strip, table sections are automatically updated based on changes made to the terminals and jumpers.



Additional terminal jumper support allows you to add jumpers and assign catalog numbers, which automatically register within a Bill of Materials report. Jumpers are also displayed graphically in the terminal strip editor, making it easy to see which terminals are jumpered together. Insert a jumper chart table to display your jumpered terminals graphically.

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Support for Internal Jumpers

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Multilevel terminals can be created with some or all levels jumpered together.

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By defining catalog assignments for internal jumpers, the levels are jumpered automatically.

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You can also define internal jumpers directly in the block properties of the terminal, although these internal jumpers will not receive a catalog assignment separate from the terminal.

Migration Made Easy
You can migrate your previous version of AutoCAD Electrical to the latest release while preserving existing data and settings. The Migration Utility is a simplified and intuitive interface, which guides you through the migration process. This utility will virtually eliminate the manual transfer of data and requires no previous knowledge or experience with AutoCAD Electrical’s file formats and folder locations.



AutoCAD Electrical is a must-have tool for anyone doing Electrical Controls Design. If you are using AutoCAD, please take an hour or two and check out this excellent package designed to make your life so much easier. This can be accomplished in a face-to-face presentation or we can even show you the tool via the web while you sit in the comfort of your own chair. I can assure you that you will see the benefits almost immediately. For those of you who have already made the step forward to AutoCAD Electrical, these new features in 2009 are sure to increase your productivity.