AutoCAD Electrical 2021 – Drawing a PLC Rack, Slot & Sub-Slot Within the Schematic Drawings

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by Miles Nicholson

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In some industries, it is quite popular to draw individual inputs or outputs as separate symbols being drawn on the schematic that they are controlling. In addition to drawing the individual I/O, some clients ideally like to repeat the information of the I/O in a schematic displaying the slot. In an intelligent CAE system, this is effectively duplicating the I/O. In addition the slot is repeated again in a “top down” view of the rack with slots (still within the schematics) duplicating the slot again.

So how can this be achieved without duplicating the I/O and the slots for reporting purposes?

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Utilising one of the standard symbols out of one of the IEC libraries as a starting point, a new analogue input was created:

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An individual I/O utilises the Edit PLC dialogue so that address, descriptions etc can be assigned and kept track off. The PLC tag being specific to the slot rather than the rack.

A PLC slot was created as a “DN” category component as the Edit PLC dialogue wouldn’t be required for simply the power connections:

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The symbol was edited so that cross reference information only displayed the sheet and grid reference of the individual I/O:

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This is done by Edit ComponentACElec_Drawing_MN_06.JPG Component Override >ACElec_Drawing_MN_07.png

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If you then want a list of the individual I/O being displayed within or next to the slot, a PLC Component Connection report can be run:

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With ACElec_Drawing_MN_06.JPG Special breaks on Installation/Location PLC Tag selected:

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..and the reportACElec_Drawing_MN_11.png

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The slot that’s displayed in the schematic representation of the rack (not footprint) is drawn as a child “DN” category component. This is linked to the parent “DN” category slot above:

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The rack being drawn as a parent DN category component but with the tag being specifically unique to the rack:

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Finally with the slot being positioned, our schematics now result in:

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The sample project can be downloaded from:

Sample PLC Project

For further training on AutoCAD Electrical, please visit our training website: https://training.cadline.co.uk/autocad-electrical/

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