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Conrad Preen

Vectorworks, Inc Employee
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Posts posted by Conrad Preen

  1. Hi @CharlesD

     

    Good to have you back !!! 😄

    That looks like you need to make extensive use of Adapter object which we introduced in Vectorworks 2023. Adapters attach to a single socket on a device and convert it to one or more sockets that can have different signal / connector types. This gets rid of the need for "phantom" devices or cables. At the moment we don't support cascaded adapters because you can make you own adapter that actually does the same as the combination of multiple adapters - the graphics and labeling are up to you.

     

    Hope that helps.

     

    Conrad

  2. @DylanHovey are you talking about an adapter perhaps? If it's a circuit just specify the sockets that it will connect to as DVI-D and HDMI and connect them - ConnectCAD doesn't care at all. The signal type will be calculated as ??? meaning unknown and you can type in anything you like instead.

    ConnectCAD assumes that you know what you are doing and doesn't fight back.

     

    Conrad

  3. 20 hours ago, spettitt said:

    One purpose may be to convert one kind of socket to another, but another may be to convert a socket containing multiple circuits to separate identifiable sockets. In this example, one adapter's job is to deal with the format conversion, and another to split the circuits.

    Yes, all that is already possible in our current adapter object - it can have multiple sockets comprising a mixture of types, signals etc.

     

    20 hours ago, spettitt said:

    A good example is an L-Acoustics DO-SUB, which breaks a single CA-COM multi-pole loudpseaker connector in to individual NL4 connectors to drive several sub loudspeakers. This adaptor will sit on the floor behind stacks of loudspeakers, and is not captive to a host socket.

    In this case you have a cable from the source device to the input of the adapter so it effectively becomes a device in its own right in terms of our model. Which in fact it is. It needs its own name otherwise in the cable list it could become quite hard to understand which adapter we are talking about. Not to mention the list-to-drawing comparison which being a piece of software has no common sense at all.

     

    If we were to support this in the adapter we could have the "host" socket appear when the adapter is not attached to a device. But this undermines the simplicity of it in a couple of ways. Until now we needed no specification of the host socket since the host device provides that info - if I go for this idea we will need more data entry. I also fear that people will use it in the wrong way and then start asking for circuits to be marked as fake. Yuk!

     

    I'm open to ideas about this. But I don't want to lose our way in special cases.

     

    Conrad

  4. Hey guys! this question came up during our discussions around the design of the adapter object - would adapters be chained together? We deliberately opted for not, on the basis that the additional complexity is significant.

     

    You could think of two adapters in series as a new type of adapter - and create that as a specific type. After all, the only thing an adapter does is convert one kind of socket to another - what happens in between is immaterial.

     

    What @spettitt says about fouling breakout tails is a good point though - it might be nice to be able to put the adapter somewhere and pull a control point to the device socket to make the connection. I'm not a big fan of fake cables because they will be hard to filter out of the data model.

     

    Good discussion - let me know what you think of my suggestion.

     

    Conrad

  5. @George Char Hi George!

    Welcome to the forum! Just to expand on this a bit what the Documentation menu commands like All Layers Circuit report and all its friends below it actually do is as follows:

     

    - if it doesn't already exist, the command imports the worksheet into your document from Vectorworks Libraries / Defaults / Reports_Schedules / ConnectCAD / ConnectCAD Reports.vwx

    - it updates all the plug-in objects used in the database criteria

    - it opens and recalculates the worksheet.

     

    If you already have the worksheet All Layers Circuit Report in your drawing you can customise it as Pat Stanford suggests  and that is the one that the command will use. If this is a standard feature you need then you can set this up in a custom template so that the worksheet is just the way you want it.

     

    Best regards

     

    Conrad

  6. @ktucker that's certainly something we can think about. However I have one plea - can we use ConnectCAD terminology here. "block" is not a term we use to refer to anything in Vectorworks or ConnectCAD. So to avoid misunderstandings let's talk about devices, sockets, equipment items etc.

     

    TIA

     

    Conrad

    • Like 1
  7. Jeff is talking about ConnectCAD Circuit objects I think. These can draw as a pair of "to" and "from" arrows.

     

    @Jeff.Sullivan the thing is a circuit can appear in multiple viewports on multiple sheet layers. So the only way to add information specific to the viewport/sheet would be to add this as a viewport annotation. We don't do that right now. But I will think about it because it has been asked for before.

     

    C

    • Like 2
  8. @alexmootv Thanks for pushing the envelope !!! The visual editor is there to make live easier for the majority. The edit as text is there to support power users like yourself because in fact the numbering system is a little progremming language embedded in ConnectCAD. A bit like grep if you are familiar with that.

     

    C

    • Like 1
  9. @ktucker Hi Kevin, thanks for reporting this and sharing the file with us. It's an interesting (and realistic) case where a very large number of alternative routes exist from a given drop point but without all of these being necessarily relevant. We will fix the overload issue in the next service pack and I'll give some thought to how we can further optimize these calculations.

     

    Conrad

    • Like 1
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