From the course: Learning SOLIDWORKS Electrical

Line diagrams

From the course: Learning SOLIDWORKS Electrical

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Line diagrams

- [Instructor] Line diagrams are electrical drawings that show a simplified overview of our project. Note that in your specific project template, you may already have some of these electrical drawings or line diagrams in your document list. But if you don't, such as in this case, I can of course add them as well. So again, I'll just right-click on my document book here and go to New, and if I want a line diagram, I'm going to go to Wire in Line Diagram here. This adds a new specific sheet, and in this case it's the line diagram. If I want to rename this, again I can just right-click on my sheet 03, jump into Properties, and maybe give it a description here of maybe Line Diagram. And so here now I just have a sheet. And within my line diagram schematic, the most useful tab to me will be this new Line Diagram tab that just popped up. So I have a number of commands here that we'll go through. Maybe the most important one will be my very first Insert Symbol. So if I just click Insert Symbol here, it's going to jump me into my Symbol selector. So this is a very powerful search tool. And this is going to show all of those thousands of symbols that are existing in my database. So I have a number of options as far as searching goes. I can jump through the classifications if I want to look at circuit breakers, or connectors, or relays or whatever it may be. I can also switch over to Filters and get a lot more specific. I have Remove Filters, so I can just completely wipe it out and remove the filters. That should show me all of my existing symbols. So in this case, my diagram symbols only have 101 in this brand new installation here. But I can search each of these by specific symbol type, or a name, or a description, library, a whole bunch of different search options. It's a very powerful, very fast search command. So in this case, maybe I'll jump back to Classification. And I'm just going to look for some circuit breaker, let's say. I can throw in whatever circuit breaker symbol I'd like. Maybe I like this first circuit breaker. And I'll just say Okay, Select. And I can just click to place really wherever I'd like to throw in this circuit breaker symbol. As soon as I click, it's going to ask me for a whole bunch of symbol properties. This is where I throw in all of my information for each of my components, the Mark Name, the Number, maybe the Manufacturer, whole bunch of information, Current Rating, and so on. This case I'm just going to leave all that blank. We'll get to this later on as well. And I'm just going to say Okay. So this has created a brand-new circuit breaker called Q1 in this case. I can insert again and again or I can just hit the Escape key or hit this red X to finish off that command. In the exact same way, I'll just jump back, insert another symbol, jump into Insert Symbol. By default, it's going to try to place the exact same symbol, or the previous symbol we just used, so the Circuit Breaker in that case. But if I want something else, I just go to Other Symbol. This jumps me back into my search. And maybe now I want a Disconnect or something like this. So I'll jump into Disconnect, grab my Disconnector here, and again, Select. And maybe I'll place somewhere about here. Again, throw in whatever information I'd like. In this case I'll just leave it blank. I'm going to create a new disconnect fuse called F1. And I'll say Okay. And now I have my two line diagram symbols. If I want to cable these, or wire these up, I also have an option just Draw Cable. And fairly easy to use. I do have some options to customize the color and whatever else it may be, but again, we'll get to that later on. But to draw a cable, I can really just click. So, for example if I want to go from my fuse F1 to my Circuit Breaker Q1, I can just jump over to the box, and I'll see this green square pop up, and that's just showing that I'm making that electrical connection. So I can just click there to start. Now you see I'm drawing my wire, my cable. And I'll go over to my Q1 again. As soon as I hit that box, I should see this green square popping up, and click again. And this is kind of showing I have these red circles on the end of my cables. Again, that's just showing that that electrical connection has been made. And this will be more and more important as we go on to see eventually we can do electrical tests and everything like that between our components. So it's just an overview of a very simple line diagram.

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