From the course: AutoCAD: Electrical Toolset

Using ladders in a drawing - AutoCAD Electrical Tutorial

From the course: AutoCAD: Electrical Toolset

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Using ladders in a drawing

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- We're starting a new chapter now where we're going to take a look at single wiring and components in our AutoCAD electrical tool set. Now make sure that you've opened up the appropriate WD demo project for this particular chapter. So you know the drill by now. You go to the demo folder that you've downloaded for this particular chapter. And then you go over here to open project and you find that WDP file there, like so. Make sure it's a wddemo, WDP file in your demo folder, and then click on open. I'll click on cancel because I've already got the project open. And you'll notice that my current drawing is DEMO10.dwg. You can see it there and it's in the SCHEMATIC subfolder. That's the drawing we're going to use for this particular chapter. Now, the first thing that you would normally do with some single wiring is create some ladders in your drawing. Now, these ladders are great because you can set up the numbering of the rungs on the ladder and then the wiring all tags itself according to those rungs on the ladder as well. It's a very useful tool. So you go to the Schematic tab up here on the ribbon into the Insert Wires/Wire Numbers panel and click on this little flyout just here. And you can see there's an Insert Ladder. So I click on insert ladder and I can then decide on what ladder settings I want to use. So it's fairly simple, actually. You decide on a width. So we're going to go with six there. It's just six units. It doesn't have to be inches, millimeters, or anything like that. It's just six units based on this particular drawing. And then the spacing there, I'm going to go with say, let's go with two. And then you can specify length. And then a number of rungs If you wish, or you can specify your first reference. I'm going to go for 200 and I'm going to go there with an index. Now the index is the iterations between each one. So I'm going to go with five in this case. So it'll be 200, 205, 210, 215. Now, the reason I'm doing that is purely because it gives me a little bit of tolerance between the rungs. I might need to add some more wires and wire numbering. It's going to be one phase, not three phase. We'll look at three phase later. And draw rungs? Yes, please. And we're not going to skip any either. So when I click on OK now I specify the start position of the first run. I'm going to go top left, click. And what'll happen now is, as I come down, can you see there's my ladder appearing. So I'm going to make sure I've got that bottom rung there and click and there's my ladder. So if I zoom in on this ladder now, you'll see that it starts at the top 200, 205, et cetera. So I'm just going to zoom out slightly and I've got my first ladder in place. And that goes all the way down to, you'll notice there, 245. Because I've spaced it five between each rung. That means I can add other wires in here if I need to and tag them such as 241, 242, and so on. It's always good to build in a bit of tolerance into your AutoCAD electrical drawings. Now, I'm going to add another ladder now. I'm going to go back up, flyout, insert ladder. You'll notice, this time, it automatically remembers the referencing. Can you see there? 250 is the next one. But I want that index to be five again. And remember the width was six, like so, and the spacing, remember, was in this case two. So six and two that's distance. Referencing is numbering. I'll leave everything else as it is, click on okay, and I'll pop this one. And notice, can you see I'm kind of clicking here. I can line in because the snap and grid kind of works. Notice that snap is on, on the status bar down there bottom right. And it kind of allows me, you'll notice, to snap to each spacing on the ladder. Kind of useful when you think about it. So my crosshair there, if I click there and drag down and I'll come down to get that last one in and click there, you'll notice now that not only do they line in across, courtesy of the grid setting down here which only comes on when you place the ladder, but I've got 245 at the bottom here, like so, and then if I zoom in there, I've got 250 going to 255 and so on. So I've got two ladders in place to allow me to add some wiring and components to my AutoCAD, electrical drawing. Just double click on the wheel and that will zoom extents before we move on to the next video.

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