Electrical CAE packages

Hi

I’m currently evaluating a number of electrical wiring packages for Electrical CAE.

I’m initially looking at PC-Schematic (£2,295) , Zuken E3 (£2,290) and EPLAN Electric P8 (£4,700). I know there’s a lot more out there.

Typically our builds are system integration jobs with thousands of wires and each job is normally a unique build.

The most important criteria at the moment is producing decent wiring schedules from schematic diagrams.

May look at 3D panel design in the future to automatically calculate the length of the wires and to cut, strip and ident them using something like a Komax machine.

Price is an important consideration but choosing the right package has a higher priority.

Any advice would be well received.

Thanks

Craig

you may want to look at autocad electrical.

some say its a pain, others say its great.

regards,
james

Hi James

Thanks for the reply.

I choose not to include AutoCAD electrical in my initial assessments because it’s not designed from the bottom up to be an electrical CAE tool.

And reading the posts comparing EPLAN and AutoCAD Electrical, EPLAN seems to come out on top.

I’ve been trawling through the posts on here and other sites quite a bit, and EPLAN receives a lot of positive comments.

I’m just wondering if it’s worth the cost if initially (and possibly in the future) I’m only going to be producing wiring schedules, although these these are for 1 - 4 bay 19 inch rack systems up to 43U in height.


Recently in a new job and don't want to balls things up


Demonstrations for all three coming up in the next couple of weeks, quite looking forward to seeing what they can do.

EPlan Hands Down.

Try Elwin for free, from http://www.3xm.se/

Tried many but my personal favorite is Elcad by Aucotec, also check out Engineering Base.

There is also Solid Works Electrical. There are several packages from $6500 up. The base one is 2D only, but everything is upgradable to full 3d, etc.

I would love to have any of those packages, but for the work I do its just plain overkill and my company would never spring for it. I have used a package called SEE Electrical and it is an excellent value for the money. It can be quirky at times and the export to dxf wasn't great. If you export the drawings straight to PDF it worked pretty well.

I found yesterday "Any DWG to PDF Converter Pro".
It is Batch converter (from DWGs or) from DXFs to one or separate PDF.
More simple than Acrobat 11 Pro. Not need AutoCad or knowledge of any printers. I can set any page size of template and any margins I like.
We don't need paper prints, we have computers.

Ps. I have done (1984-2013) SQL-base CAE program myself and I can execute that Batch converter directly from there.

EPlan is the best I have seen. I'm stuck now with AutoCad Electrical, and it is horrible.

Moggie + 1 for E-base. It not only does wire lengths but also routing. You can download a trial version to see if it suits you.

Paul

widelto said:

Try Elwin for free, from http://www.3xm.se/

Click to expand...

I would like to look at it but it does not appear to be in English.

I'm taking a look at Zuken E3. Looks pretty nice. Does anyone have experience with it?

Thanks.

Hi Opeleg

I’ve almost finished evaluating E3, after reading all the positive reviews about EPLAN, I thought EPLAN would be the obvious choice, but it’s now looking very close between the two.

E3.Cable offers true hierarchy in the schematic design, which the other packages do not seem to offer (including EPLAN), this is an important consideration as it is a natural way to think about the system.

Being able to represent modules in the system as blocks and being able to tunnel down into the sub-modules below is a nice feature. Groups of cables and wires can be represented as a bus on the schematic and passed through to the sub modules below then broken out individually, or passed to the next level down. There doesn't seem to be a limit to how many levels you have either.

It would be good to have the time to review some more packages, but I don’t want to spend too long evaluating rather than getting on with the actual work itself, but hierarchy could be the deciding feature for me.

Cr4ig said:

E3.Cable offers true hierarchy in the schematic design, which the other packages do not seem to offer (including EPLAN), this is an important consideration as it is a natural way to think about the system.

Click to expand...

This is a primary premise of EPlan so you missed something.

The other thing for me with EPlan was vendor integration of parts library with all the major players.