What’s New: AutoCAD® Electrical 2011

When you launch AutoCAD Electrical 2011, the first thing you will notice is that the drawing window has been revised to display a dark-colored background. When you toggle-on the Grid Display (F7), you will notice that the traditional dot grid has been replaced with horizontal and vertical gridlines to more closely represent engineering graphing paper. Additionally you will see that the UCS extends its positive X and Y axes indefinitely from the origin with red and green grid lines respectively.

A new pull-down menu has been added to the ribbon cycle button and you can now minimize the ribbon to Panel Buttons in addition to Tabs and Panel Titles. The ribbon tab and panel arrangements stay the same so there is no disruption in workflow in that department.

One major enhancement in this release of ACAD/E is the Catalog look-up interface. You can now control the fields to display, and the field order in the catalog lookup dialog box. You can filter records by selecting existing values or search for a catalog record by supplying values including wild cards for any one of the catalog fields. Sorting is easier than ever, you can now double-click on a column header of any of the displayed fields. The Catalog Check is now replaced by BOM details check-box and is now part of the main dialog box.
Fig. 1 and Fig. 2 show the difference between 2010 and 2011 catalog look-up interface.

Fig. 1. ACAD/E 2010 Catalog look-up interface

Fig. 2. ACAD/E 2011 Catalog look-up interface

Another enhancement is the ability to Import Wire Types from an existing drawing or template to another drawing. You can import wire types on a per-drawing basis by using the Import Option button on the Create/Edit Wire Type dialog box (Fig. 3) or you can import wire types on a project-wide basis using the Import from specified drawing checkbox under the Wire Types section of the Project-Wide Utilities dialog box (Fig. 4).

Fig. 3. Import Option button

Fig. 4. Import from specified drawing checkbox

The next enhancement that I would like to discuss is the ability to insert an associative Location Box. You can access the command from the Schematic tab>Insert Components Panel>Location pull-down menu>Location Box (Fig. 5). When inserting a Location Box, you can assign location code as well as installation code values for the components that are enclosed in the Location Box and have an option to make the values visible on the components as well as display the values in the Location box. If the components have existing location and/or installation values, you can update the parent symbols values to match the location box values. ACAD/E commands are now aware of location boxes. If you insert or move schematic parent components into an existing location box, location and installation values update to match the location box. When you move schematic parent components out of a location box, you can choose whether to update component values to match the drawing defaults.

Fig. 5. Location Box command

Fig. 6. Location Box Dialog Box

Fig. 7. Example

The last enhancement that I would like to discuss on this article is the ability to temporarily suppress wire collision check. By default, ACAD/E has wire collision check that routes around a component or component in between when routing a wire from one location to another. You can now suppress this behavior and break the wire across any components encountered as you insert the wire by turning the collision check off. During the Insert Wire command, after clicking the first couple of points, you are given the option in the command prompt to turn the wire collision check ON and OFF by pressing the TAB key. The setting is retained only for the current session of ACAD/E. Collision check becomes active by default when you restart ACAD/E 2011.

Fig. 8. Wire Insertion clicks/points

Fig. 9. Collision Check On

Fig. 10. Collision Check Off

The preceding texts in this article describe some but not all of the new features of AutoCAD Electrical 2011. For details and a complete list of the new features, please refer to New Features Workshop or the What’s New section of the Help file.

This page last edited on Monday, February 14, 2011