Recommended Best Practices for Electromechanical workflow in AutoCAD Electrical 2016 and Inventor 2016

AutoCAD Electrical 2016 and Autodesk Inventor 2016 boasts a new Electromechanical workflow to align designs definitions between Mechanical and Electrical Engineers. Following are some recommendations that will help you to use this workflow smoothly:

1. Electromechanical workflow only supports that you connect one Electrical project to the Inventor assemblies through one .emx file.
   
   
   
   
2. It is recommended that you store the EMX project files on a shared folder on the network. Both AutoCAD Electrical and Inventor should point to the same folder.
3. Once you have linked the projects it is helpful to divide the project using Installation and Location values. These Installation and Location values should be the same between AutoCAD Electrical and Inventor. You can assign Installation and Location values at the drawing or component level in AutoCAD Electrical and at the Assembly level in Inventor.
4. It is recommended to have atleast one schematic or Panel representation of a component in AutoCAD Electrical 2016 project to show them in Location view. As only components with either Schematic or Panel representations in AutoCAD Electrical 2016 are shown in EMX tree. Schematic Child and One-line components are ignored in EMX tree.
5. To view the latest AutoCAD Electrical data in the Location View, click the Refresh button. This updates your Location View to show any edits made to the project, either by you or another team member. Refresh updates the Component tree along with the data in the Details and Connections tabs. Based on the size of your project, the refresh can take a while to to complete.
   
   
   
   
6. To view the latest Inventor data in the Location View, click the Sync button or set up Automatic sync by clicking on the Sync settings on Location view tab.
   
   
7. For better performance, split a large project in to smaller projects.
8. In a multiple-user working scenario, before syncing ensure that all your drawings are saved and updated with latest changes from all users.
9. The only Inventor components that are included in the Location View are those with Electrical Properties (Installation, Location, Tag, Description 1, Description 2, Description 3, Catalog no, Manufacturer and Assembly code). To add Electrical Properties to Inventor components:
1. Right-click on an Inventor part and select Electrical Properties. This launches the Electrical Properties dialog.
   
    
   

   Electrical Property Dialog menu in Inventor 2016
   
   
   
   

   Electrical Property menu on Inventor 2016 Canvas
   
   
    
   

   Electrical Property Dialog in Inventor 2016
   
   
   
2. Assign Installation/Location values at the Assembly level so that all components added to Assembly inherit these values and are treated as Electrical Components.
   
    
   

   Set Installation/Location values at Assembly Level in Inventor 2016
   
   
   
   

   Installation and Location dialog in Inventor 2016
   
   
   
   
   
10. To keep the designs consistent between AutoCAD Electrical and Inventor, link all the components from AutoCAD Electrical to Components in Inventor and resolve their differences.
    
    
    
    

Stay tuned for more details on How to Reuse Electromechanical Project data.

 

By
Vikas Vaishnav

 

 

 

Related articles

Resolve Differences between Linked Components

Linking Components between AutoCAD Electrical and Autodesk Inventor

New Electromechanical Link between AutoCAD Electrical and Autodesk Inventor