Conrad Preen

Spotlight power planning is not integrated with ConnectCAD. We are working on it. I also grew up in the 220-240 volt world so I find the antics of our US counterparts hair raising! But this is our reality.

@tk_ For a knowledgeable user who is aware of the assumptions he is making, I would agree with you. Though I wonder how the practices followed in the US involving wiring appliances across phases would fit in with this? Neutrals are often undersized on the assumption of proper phase balance etc. Would we need to be alert to a possible overloaded neutral? Designers inevitably rely on the results obtained from these models even though the small print in the EULA tells them not to. So as Vectorworks it's not so easy for us to release an electrical model that is incomplete and might fail to predict a real-world problem. However I am very interested in discussing this maybe we can find a solution. Conrad

Thanks guys! I'll add a request to fill the bubble as a separate class. That should be pretty easy to do. @livespace josha the first ever customer was Athens Olympic Broadcasting in 2002. ConnectCAD has been around a while.

What I love about this forum is how you all keep independently discovering the topics I'm working on 😄. As Simon says this is not too hard to do at the basic level. However, power planning very quickly turns from design to modelling. And those are two very different things. In your question aggregating loads came up almost immediately. Propagation of loads back to power sources involves ConnectCAD devices "knowing" what they do internally. And right now devices are just a named collection of sockets. That simplicity is by design - it makes creating devices super-easy. But imagine if every time you wanted to create a device you had to define the relationships between the sockets? Your day would never end! My challenge is to find a way to do this without making everyday design work harder. And not just for power but for every signal.

@Ben3B Could it be click-drag with the ReRoute tool that you are looking for? Conrad

@btgroves If you could PM me this file I will take a look. Moving the entire rack workflow to 3D involved significant complexity. We did extensive testing but this issue did not arise. The key to getting this fixed quickly is to find a reproducible case. Your help in this regard is greatly appreciated. Conrad

Hi @Cristiano Alves ConnectCAD and Spotlight have indeed developed separately. Until several years ago ConnectCAD was an independent product. Now as part of Vectorworks we have begun a process of closer integration with Spotlight. ConnectCAD is more aimed towards permanent audio-visual installations. It handles theoretical schematic design, physical layout of equipment and cable routes, and has extensive reporting and visualisation features to allow you to present your design to project stakeholders. Short answer - for sure ConnectCAD can help you. And it's not that hard to learn. The online help is helpful! I know that there are not as many tutorial videos as for example with Spotlight. This is a question of resources and hours in the day. Conrad

Hi @livespace josha Just been playing around with that. The overall attributes of the circuit are controlled by the signal type class e.g. CC-Circuit-Signal-HDV. So a text style applied to this affects the text in the bubble. You have to move the bubble to get the circuit to correctly recalculate the size. I notice that the text style background is also applied but only under the text and that can look a bit strange. So to cut a long story short I agree this needs some work. But before we go there could you tell me your expectations? I like to know what sort of thing you would want to do. Conrad

@TLeatherman @Nikolay Zhelyazkov I would caution against overloading this command with numbering preferences. The existing Renumber command is the way to go. It's better to have a set of simple tools than a complicated multi-tool. C

@bjoerka the reason we have designed this as a "vanilla" worksheet and not a database is simply because it isn't possible any other way. A database needs a criterion that selects a given set of drawing objects which means that empty rack positions would not be displayed. Can't have it all I'm afraid. But it's better than nothing. C

@MT-Lighting The modern way of adding extra linked text is the same for devices and sockets, in fact for all object that draw the contents of their profile group. Just enter the profile group, add a text object. In the object info palette find the section ConnectCAD Linked Text Data and check the Is Linked Text box. Select the parameter or attached record file that you want to display. Exit the socket and the linked text shows the value. You can use the Data Manager to automatically attach a record to all new sockets. There's a video on that in the Did You Know section of this forum. You can edit the symbols Skt_L, Skt_R etc. to incorporate your extra text. Hope this helps. Conrad

@bjoerka well from the device OIP I see that the Make and Model are disabled. What this means is that an Equipment Item already exists with the name <DEVICE>. Then the equipment takes control of the physical characteristics and make and model. You need to give your devices names so that ConnectCAD can understand that they refer to different physical equipment. If two devices have the same name ConnectCAD thinks that they must refer to the same physical box. This is handy on schematics because the same piece of equipment may be involved in two places in the signal flow. Since we often draw schematics and then want to layout equipment we temporarily store the physical characteristics and the make and model in the device. And when you run the Create Equipment command then equipment is created using this information. Since these are native characteristics of the physical box rather than the schematic device (which is really just a named bag of sockets), once an equipment item exists it takes over control of these parameters and they become read-only on the device. Just give each device a name and it will all work fine. This one could be called DANTE-USB 1 for example. Hope this all makes sense. Conrad

Reshaping nothing isn't really possible I think. When you have nothing selected the tool will select an object if you click on it. And then modes applicable to that object will appear. This is nice because it saves you the trip thru the Select tool and back. C

@mwalker_mw In ConnectCAD the drawing IS the database. If a circuit on the drawing joins two sockets it IS the connection. What you see on the drawing is what will be reported in the list. As Nikolay says you can have multiple instances of devices that have different sockets, but not multiple instances of the same socket within a device. We don't prevent you doing this but it could lead to the situation where an installer has multiple wires that are supposed to go into thee same socket. So, the Check Drawing command flags this as an error. From what you say, I understand that you are looking for a view of your schematic that shows what's connected to a given patch bay or field plate (aka connector panel). Is that correct? They are 2 ways to do that at the moment: 1. Device Connections Report - this creates a worksheet listing the circuits connected to each socket on the drawing. You can adjust the criteria to display only your panels if you wish. [ menu ConnectCAD>Documentation>Device Connections Report] 2. Create Panel View - this creates a view of your panels which can include the "where they are connected" info. The command creates a Panel Layout object containing all the panel connectors and can easily display the connected device and socket. There is nothing to stop you from adding lines joining the connected device and socket text to the connector graphic. Hope that helps. Conrad

@MT-Lighting The Cable object is part of Spotlight. So maybe your question would be better posted in their part of the forum? @mwalker_mw It is the same standard Reshape tool in the the Schematics palette. The available modes change according to the objects selected. Some objects have special reshape modes. Best regards Conrad

Yes it has. Here's what it looks like in Vectorworks 2024 in our great new 3D rack workflow. Best Conrad

@wscooper Dear Will I have already tested this and made the video. It will be released very shortly. Conrad

Hi Simon @spettitt Adapters have always fallen into that grey area "is it a device? is it a cable? no, it's an adapter!". Circuits on schematics vs. the physical cables that implement them are another area that I have left a little murky - deliberately... For a lot of uses circuit = cable is a pretty reasonable assumption. But of course there are exceptions. These DO-SUB "adapter cables" are effectively 4 circuits packaged in the same wire. So, in a very simplistic way you could give each circuit the same Cable parameter and have them share a common path on the schematic up to the point where they break out to different devices. This will look fairly nice. But it doesn't help you count the number of DO-SUB's you need to order. So I think you do have to consider them as devices. After all you can connect a circuit to the multi-pin end and another circuit to extend the single end. So your "fake circuits" may not always be fake. And it needs to be on the bill of materials. Even though it looks like a cable, it walks like a device and quacks like device!!! The alternatives involve extreme complication of the Adapter object. Or a new Adapter Cable object... that could connect to device sockets or circuits at both its ends, and be re-shape-able. Guess that could be a project...? Conrad

@RMDiekmann And that is what ConnectCAD is all about !!!

Hi Simon @spettitt Thanks for the detailed use case. I shall think about that! Conrad

Maybe a Data Tag might sort it out for now?

'Connector itself' I guess would mean the chassis connector on the equipment. So, we'd be relying on common sense to make sure that cables aren't terminated with the wrong sex connectors? But we can't rely on common sense to know which side of a term is the soldering/crimping side... I will take care of term panels so that the correct connector type is displayed. But I don't think it's a good idea to change the connector-on-cable paradigm which has stood us in good stead for the past 20 years. With all respect and thanks for drawing our attention to the issue. Conrad

@Andy Bentley Thank you for bringing this up. It would rather nice to be able to do that. I'll add it to our list of things to look at. Conrad

@Jrw Right now you cannot. You can turn off all connector text by making the class CC-Circuit-Connector invisible. Thanks for the explanation about term panels 😉 . As I said, I knowingly took a short cut that has worked fairly well for 20 years + but it is on my list. C

Actually this is a case of term panels on schematics not "knowing" which side (left or right) is the inside of the panel. For many years we've just left this to common sense and that has worked surprisingly well. But you are right, and it's on my long list of things to make perfect 🙂 Conrad