AutoCAD Electrical 2016 masters the electromechanical workflow with enhanced information flow between AutoCAD Electrical and Inventor Projects.
You can establish a link between an Electrical Project and Inventor assemblies, and enjoy a seamless information sync between these projects helping the Electrical and Mechanical teams to work on a shared design. This “one design” integrates the logical controls design with the physical model. You are immediately aware of design changes and modifications, reducing costly design errors and facilitating design communication flow right inside the products.
The concept is simple, there is a single file that is accessible by both the Electrical and Inventor users which acts as a bridge for the information to flow between these products. Once the bridge (which is the Electromechanical Link) is set up, Electrical users would be able to see the designs definitions from Inventor and vice versa. This shared information is displayed in the new Location View available in each product.
Creating the electromechanical link (EMX) is simple. All you need is:
- An Active AutoCAD Electrical Project.
- At least one Inventor assembly file.
- Shared folder accessible by both Electrical and Inventor teams. The EMX file in this shared folder acts as a bridge between two products to exchange information.
Steps to link your project as initiated from AutoCAD Electrical (you can also initiate the process from Autodesk Inventor):
Step 1: Click on the icon as shown below to open the Link setup dialog.
On the dialog, you decide whether to create a new link or connect your project to an existing link. Assuming you wish to create a new link, click Create.
Step 2: Enter the name of the link file and shared folder location.
After filling in the appropriate details, click “Create” and an EMX file is created in the shared folder.
Step 3: Once you click Create, your Electromechanical Link Setup dialog updates with more details as shown below. At any point during the course of the project you can click on the Electromechanical Link Setup icon in the ribbon to access this dialog.
Step 4: Now your mechanical team using Autodesk Inventor can open the assembly file you want to link. Click on the similar Electromechanical link setup Icon on the Electromechanical tab on ribbon and you will see the following dialog where you click the browse “Link” icon to select the EMX file created in Step 2.
The AutoCAD Electrical project and Inventor assembly are linked and the information flow (sync) is automatically triggered.
After linking the projects, the design changes flow between the products. New components, wires, and connection data appear in the Location view tree and their details can be seen in the Component and Connection detail views as shown in image below.
In the next blog posting I will cover the basic data transfer workflows and how users interact with the design changes.
- EMX: Linking Components
- EMX: View and resolve differences between linked devices.
Vikas Vaishnav
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