software

can anyone suggest about best elctrical & instrumentional design & drawing softwares.

I swear by AutoCAD Electrical. I been following it from vendor to vendor for over 7 years now. I would never have been able to do the level of work that I do without it. It handles wiring diagrams, panel layouts, and pneumatic diagrams. It can generate a BOM for the whole package or just parts of it. It is an "intelligent" package (All the blocks have attributes that tie everything together.) You can get a non-crippled 30 day full working demo that will allow you to get a feel for it.

Aautocad

Hi
Me to using Autocad in my projects decoumentation .I use it for every thing exactly as testsubject said to you but because Autocad is not designed specifically for electrical drawing i think that you can find another products from auto desk can do what you need.
Also i have contacted ECTI ,they have what you need but for us in Egypt it's expensive.
Aalso search this site because this subject discussed here before and many of the forum members clear what is the best.
BR

Use to be called VIA but Autodesk bought it, decent package.

http://www.automationstudio.com/ has a very strong package with simulator for.....

Want simple and low priced? Checkout Constructor 2003 http://www.cmhsoftware.com/productw.htm

Last but not least is Smart Draw
http://www.smartdraw.com/

And before that it was called CIMLogic.

Hesham,

What I was describing is a new package provided by AutoCAD for doing Electrical Diagrams. It is called AutoCAD Electrical or AE for short.

I've been using See Technical for a couple of years now and it works pretty well. It's a very inexpensive electrical drawing software around $200 CND. The company is called IGE-XAO. You can get a free demo at www.ige-xao.com. It has a pretty good symbols table to make the drawing go quicker. This company also offers a full blown version that generates parts lists, wire numbers, etc... You can also inport and export to AutoCad. Drawings can also be saved in different formats like .BMP. It's good for the price.

The Automation Studio is very impressive. I am sure this is probably pretty costly.

At $499, The Constructor looks promising.

I am using the CIMLogic, VIA, Autocad Electrical product. Actually still using the CIMLogic. Never upgraded.

I am very happy with it. One of the big time savers is importing/exporting I/O descriptions. Take them right into PLC software. No more re-typing.

Rick,

If you haven't updated since CIMLogic days, you are way behind. Nate has made a bunch of improvements. For me one of the big ones is the ability to give terminals descriptions. Now I generate a component report that lists all the terminals with a short description of what the function is attached there. There is now the ability to have up to 256 lines of text in the project description. The code is much tighter now. Lots and lots of stuff. I am planning on upgrading to AE at the end of April. I am presently running on R16.1 w/ ACAD2002.

Bob

thanks,

i have not tried except autocad 2002. its ok. but not dedicated. i will try with ur suggestion. anything else can u suggest.

regards

Test Constructor is a decent package for the price, I still have a very old version that I use.

The CimLogic/VIA/AE product is hard to beat, they had several versions with the top end version being a full package that did not need AutoCAD. I am not sure if they still have the Lite version or not but it was reasonably prices, the full addon version was around $1800 US when I checked a year of so ago. The full stand alone version was over $3000 US.

The Automation Studio package was in that upper range if I remember correctly but with it you can do a multitude of things including simulations that I havent seen in others.

I dont do much drawing so I have created a bunch of pre-formed sheets...ie a sheet with a 16 point input then add the line numbers and component(s) that work the input. I know people with ACAD that do this and create blocks and their own symbol library (basically using lines, dots and text) so anyone can view it.

I used to do it the "Old Fashioned" way of creating dumb ACAD drawings, but since switching to AE, I cannot imagine trying to take a step backward. If I ever leave my present job the new employer will have to pony up and buy it...lol

By the way, AE drawings are still native ACAD, so anyone with ACAD can view them. They just will not have access to the cross-referencing capabilities.

testsubject said:

I used to do it the "Old Fashioned" way of creating dumb ACAD drawings, but since switching to AE, I cannot imagine trying to take a step backward. If I ever leave my present job the new employer will have to pony up and buy it...lol

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I agree.

I have stated here before that if you do any kind of volume or complex systems, you aren't interested in making money unless you have some sort of controls-specific software.

The software I have has paid for itself many times over.