Conrad Preen

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

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

@MT-Lighting you're talking about labels for sockets - right? Conrad

It's working fine for me Rob - please PM me your file. @rcrossland Conrad

The fill is automatically set to white or black depending on the luminance value of the text color. This is to make sure it is easily readable. Best regards Conrad

We are working along those lines to automate the creation of schematic devices from lighting plots. This is a new workflow in ConnectCAD. It is totally possible to do this manually already but of course we want it faster 🙂 Best regards Conrad

@CharlesD Yes I thought you'd say that! Having trees of adapters is a bit of a challenge for a variety of reasons. I know you have a point about the sheer number of combinations so I will have a think about it. Conrad

@Beat Per Light You are ahead of the curve as Niko says. We are working on a much better solution as speak so do please be part of the conversation. Conrad

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

I don't think it is extra difficult. We'll fix it. C

Hello! @aruk You are the first person on the planet to ask for this !!! We will add it to the list of wish items. Best regards Conrad

Just create devices for these. Don't forget that devices don't have to be rectangular boxes - you can use any graphics you like. I would say make a device with 2 sockets of type IO, passive signal type and however you want to show that it's a barrel. Hope that helps. Conrad

@Stereoface You'd be amazed at what people ask for round here... !!! C

@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

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

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

@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

@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

Posted an enhancement request for this - it's easy enough. C

Select them with the magic wand or the custom selection command? C

Device tool eye dropper mode? C

@spettitt I like the replace idea! And the use case is spot-on. Ditto Data Viz - we'll check on that. Conrad

@Jeff.Sullivan my dream is to make printing a thing of the past! I mean if you were able to just call up your project on a tablet or a phone and just click the arrow to navigate to where it goes... you wouldn't need page numbers. Get my drift? Conrad

@Daniel Dickman I had a feeling that opinions would vary on whether the Equipment and Device should have the same Tag. @spettitt those ObjectData functions are worksheet functions that allow you grab data from associated objects. There are several ConnectCAD-specific ones. You can see examples of these in the standard reports. We hope you find creative uses for them !!! Conrad

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