Conrad Preen
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Posts posted by Conrad Preen
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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
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On 11/12/2023 at 2:44 AM, spettitt said:
The 'con_' of con_NC5MD-LX may be confusing to a user of the data
The reason for that prefix is because Vectorworks need a unique name for the symbol definition. So we have to make sure it won't conflict.
Conrad
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Hi @Peter Z
Externals are a special device that is the outside world. It's name is <EXT>. It's been like that for more than 20 years and people are fine with it. What Externals can also do now is to represent a Drop Point i.e. a physical place where cables emerge from containment. So if you really don't like <EXT> you could always define a drop point and give it whatever name you want.
Best
Conrad
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@ryanww I'm generally not so crazy about the idea of equipment automatically resizing if the container (rack or frame) is changed. Equipment items model real-world stuff and our push is towards having these defined by the manufacturers. If a piece of equipment doesn't fit, then resizing it automatically in the CAD world might cover up a problem that will reveal itself in the real world. That my thinking behind this.
Conrad
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@ryanww thank you for raising this. We will sort it out as soon as we are able to reproduce the problem. But I have to ask for your understanding here. We have to progress. And in some cases like this one, that involves rebuilding old workflows from the ground up. Inevitably there will be some problems that remain to be fixed. These teething troubles do not make the entire effort worthless. Let's work together to find out where the difficulties lie and resolve them.
Conrad
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Hi @bjoerka
Just a quick readback first. Using the Connect tool with multi mode activated, you click on the left-hand device with it's many outputs and move over to the right-hand device and the tool does the clever thing and says "oh there is only one destination socket so I can only create one circuit" and although this feature is a great help to many other users, in your case you really want it to be more stupid and just connect everything to the one destination. Correct?
Until we have a way to automatically detect peoples intentions I think at least Niko's workaround is a nice power-user trick. I'm trying to think if there's a way to have both the current behavior and what you need right now, and automatically detect what to do. Interesting puzzle! Thanks for mentioning this use-case.
Conrad
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@Jrw Tech Pubs did a pretty nice job of explaining numbering rules in the online help by the way.
Conrad
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Hello everyone! This is nice conversation here. Just so you know we are actively working on more and better Spotlight integration. But you may not be aware that you can already link a ConnectCAD Equipment Item to any Spotlight object including Lighting Devices and this way if you have Lighting Devices and a ConnectCAD schematic this will tell ConnectCAD where those are in the real world. What's missing is the automation - the basic building block is there.
Please try it out and give me your feedback.
Conrad
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Hi @tk_
I think it would be a bad idea to go renaming the sockets on an adapter depending on which device socket it is connected to because that breaks the modularity of the adapter as an object.
We use a concatenation of the device's socket name and the adapter socket name separated by a hyphen to designate an "adapted" socket. Shown in this way on the drawing, in the Circuit object info palette and in circuit reports. When you say "correctly labeled" what do you mean?
Conrad
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Please do post your questions as they come up. We are here to help. It's true that ConnectCAD takes a different approach sometimes, but there are reasons for this all founded in design practice. The reason devices are placed as groups not symbols is exactly because editing a symbol definition affects every instance of the symbol. On a complex project this could result in changes happening that aren't currently visible - source of unintended consequences that might prove expensive to correct in the real world. And as Simon points out it gives you a lot more flexibility in how you organise your design.
Best regards and welcome to ConnectCAD!Conrad
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@robert1 you can set a number of circuits per socket. All it does is display a xN text beside the socket - it doesn't manage it in any way.
If you have many signals going down a multi fibre cable the circuits represent the individual fibres and you can give them a common Cable ID to indicate that they are n the same cable. Just my 2c worth knowing what little I know right now about what you are trying to do.
Conrad
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This might be caused by changing the snap grid in mid-design? @kmbarnett617 the snap grid has a special role in ConnectCAD schematic objects. It determines the size of the symbols we use inside sockets and devices. This allows you to draw schematics (line diagrams) at any layer scale. For reasons of efficiency we apply the scaling once on first use of the symbols. So the trick is to do some tests and set up the snap grid once before you start designing and leave it at the same values.
Or even easier, just start from the standard template.
Conrad
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@Brian Nitz What you are seeing is the front door of the frame. The door is in the class CC-RackFrame-Graphics-FrontDoor. Set this class to invisible and the slots will be clear.
Conrad
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@Thomas Peters We will certainly keep these comments in mind and perhaps it will be possible to improve things. Meanwhile do check out the ReRoute Circuits tool. This gives you a way to line up the circuits AND their Cable "bubbles". Just select the circuits to tidy up, grab the tool and pick the circuit you want the others to follow.
Hope that helps,
Conrad
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Hi @Brian Nitz a choice had to be made either top or bottom. The reason that we use the top of the equipment as its location is because in the vast majority of cases cabling comes up from the bottom of a rack so the equipment location represents the maximum height that the cable must reach. I think that a setting for this would introduce confusion.
Regards
Conrad
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On 9/16/2023 at 10:07 PM, spettitt said:
I think this is two different worlds of panel design colliding a little - those who are trying to assign a schematic panel device to a different slot on a pre-made panel, and those of us who spend the majority of our time on custom fabricated work, where we genuinely do want to push the name of our new schematic panel device to the same panel connector that we've placed where we wanted it.
Exactly Simon !!!
I will think about this maybe we can do something. -
Thanks for the interesting suggestions. Simon if you have the time could you submit an enhancement request for this? It's not laziness on my part - here in Central Greece where I live we had extensive damage as a result of getting an entire winter's rain in just 4 days last week and there's rather a lot to do at the moment.
Be happy to get this one into a coming service pack.
Conrad
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Hi @rcrossland
Well there you go! Originally before ConnectCAD became part of Vectorworks it actually was the way I said. It may be that we dropped this functionality for some reason. So here my question for you. How would you intend using the fill color? Would it make sense for you for it to be automatically contrasting the way it used to be?
Conrad
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@Tom C 612 Would it be possible for you to PM me a link to the file and also tell me what operations were slow?
Conrad
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Hey everyone. For us this is a case of being between a rock and a hard place. I gave in to a request to be able to draw schematics at any scale, not just 1:1. This came from the world of event planning where there want a quick and dirty way to draw a schematic on top of the floor plan and read the cable lengths off the perimeter of the circuits.
That has a knock-on effect that we have to get the scaling of our objects from somewhere - and that somewhere is the snap grid.
As Simon says once you know, you know - but it's good to know the reason also.
Conrad
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Yes I agree that it's not that obvious but at least it is there !!!
I will note that this has caused some confusion and we'll see if there's a way to address that.
Conrad
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How to partly hide connectors on circuit
in ConnectCAD
Posted
@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