Electrical Drawing Software

[Paul T]

My experience with AutoCAD Electrical soured me on the idea of parametric electrical design altogether. There are just too many variables out there in the real world for a package to take it all into account. ACADe basically constrained me into it's neat little box, and everything that fell outside the box (and when you're a maintenance/engineer in a manufacturing plant, just about everything you see falls outside the box), while technically can be done, will not be easy nor quick to accomplish. I honestly can't think of a situation where Parametric design software would solve any problem on the electrical design side of things.

If you're an in-house end-user, you're going to spend just as much if not more time struggling to get the software to do what you want than it would have took for you to just draw it.

If you're a controls contractor, you probably already have a whole cad library set up and an innumerable amount of jobs you can copy-paste from. Plus you're going to run into a lot of curve-balls and will have to wrestle with the software to make it do what you want.

If you're an OEM machine builder, the majority of your cad work is going to be copying the last job, making a few modifications, and changing the title blocks.

So who does that leave? People who don't like to spend a few extra hours checking cross references?

For your price range, I'd definitely look at AutoCAD LT. Last I knew it was under $1,000 if not close to it.

Man, I SO agree with this. I've seen a couple of machine builders over the years who have used electrical packages and they uniformly failed to keep them up to date or actually link all the objects in the parametric database. I just this spring received a set of schematics for an oven that we purchased; they were done using an add-on to ACAD and they are terrible. Everything I touch is a half-done block related to the original package. Blocks... meh! They have not been needed for schematics for years now, ever since the ACAD copy/paste functions became both very easy and very powerful. Anyway, rant off.

For $1000, ACADLt will do a very good job and it's going to be compatible with almost everything else out there. I've been doing machine and process schematics for going on 20 years and I agree wholeheartedly with brstilson. Buy it, develop your own libraries and go from there. I guess that the E packages might be helpful for AE firms... maybe... but for machine and process systems, I have not found them of much use.

BTW, the last couple of versions of ACADLt have produced multipage PDF files as output, easily. That alone is worth the price of admission since you can now create distribution drawings that are both easy for everyone to read and locked from further edits.

 

[kolyur]

If you're an in-house end-user, you're going to spend just as much if not more time struggling to get the software to do what you want than it would have took for you to just draw it.

This was very much our experience with AutoCAD E. Since we paid the big bucks for it, I felt that I had to make the effort to use the advanced features, even if they didn't fit the situation (which seemed like most of the time). The result was a lot of wasted time.

Awhile back we eliminated AutoCAD altogether in favor of Solid Edge for 3D mechanical modeling. I started using the 2D component of SE for electrical schematics and haven't looked back. It's just your basic drawing package, but has good support for blocks, symbols, layers, and the like. It includes an electrical block library, which is not as extensive as AcadE but I've gotten familiar enough with the interface that I can draw my own pretty quick.

They offer the 2D drafting part of Solid Edge for free:
http://www.plm.automation.siemens.com/en_us/products/velocity/solidedge/free2d/
Yes, it actually is free but you have to re-up the license every six months I think, so you're basically at their mercy if they ever decide to discontinue the free license.

 

[brstilson]

This was very much our experience with AutoCAD E. Since we paid the big bucks for it, I felt that I had to make the effort to use the advanced features, even if they didn't fit the situation (which seemed like most of the time). The result was a lot of wasted time.

Awhile back we eliminated AutoCAD altogether in favor of Solid Edge for 3D mechanical modeling. I started using the 2D component of SE for electrical schematics and haven't looked back. It's just your basic drawing package, but has good support for blocks, symbols, layers, and the like. It includes an electrical block library, which is not as extensive as AcadE but I've gotten familiar enough with the interface that I can draw my own pretty quick.

They offer the 2D drafting part of Solid Edge for free:
http://www.plm.automation.siemens.com/en_us/products/velocity/solidedge/free2d/
Yes, it actually is free but you have to re-up the license every six months I think, so you're basically at their mercy if they ever decide to discontinue the free license.

The best thing about AutoCAD Electrical is that it includes a stripped-down version of AutoCAD you can use instead.

 

[maxketcham]

acad electrical symbols with attributes

if you have autocad available, I have a set of generic electrical block I can send you in a couple days when I find all of them, only use a subset anymore. I designed them about 25 years ago and have kept them updated to version 2007 right now. keep your snap at 0.5 or 0.1 and and you can do electrical drawing pretty easily,and the attributes, if you use them will let you export a bill of material when your done..... Have about every symbol needed to design relay logic, and some plc stuff also. May just post them here and let whoever wants them to download them, if I can find the time.

 

[Bullzi]

I am coming late to the party but I will add my $.02 worth. I use AutoCAD LT with Electrical Symbols Library I got from Cadtoolsonline.com I have most of the Libraries that they offer and really like them. The price is very reasonable and they have covered 90% of the items I have needed. They offer trial downloads too.
I don't work for them but I have been happy with the product and service.