Validate Your Electrical Cable Routing Digitally with SolidWorks Electrical

Electrical System Design has progressed to the point that today every designer uses and practices Design Automation and 3D tools to eliminate manual tasks such as Reports, Documentation, and Physical mockups. Also, Electrical Design engineers are started exploring their work in 3D areas such as Control Panel Design,

Cable Tray Routing, Wire routing, and Wire harness; it helps them recognize and rectify design flaws in the early stages, cross – team collaboration, and most important it saves the company a lot of money. We can now generate separate cable routing assemblies in SolidWorks Electrical 2021, allowing us to route cables more effectively and quickly on our designs.

To Activating the separate routing assembly parameter for a cable:

Step 1:

Go the project tab, click Cables

Step 2:

Select one ore more cables from cable manager

Step 3:

Click the properties and enable the Separate 3D route assembly option

Step 4:

Goto SolidWorks Electrical 3D toolbar, click Route Cables

Step 5:

Open the Cable selector, click Selected Cables > Select Cables. The Separate route column displays the status of the Separate 3D route assembly

Step 6:

Start the Cable Routing

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SOLIDWOKRS TECH TIP - SOLIDWORKS PROPERTY TAB BUILDER

The Property Tab Builder is a stand-alone utility that you use to create a customized interface for entering properties into SOLIDWORKS files.

Traditionally, designer's use to modify the drawing template to insert custom property such as Description, Part No, Material, it’s a manual method. so, designers have to modify the custom property or metadata on each time, simultaneously BOM creation is also manual which increases a run time and errors in BOM table. It's also delayed the release of entire project.

Three ways to create a customized interface for property template.

• In the SOLIDWORKS software, on the Custom Properties tab in the Task Pane, click Create now.
• In the SOLIDWORKS software, on the SOLIDWORKS Resources tab of the Task Pane, click Property Tab Builder
• From the Windows Start menu, click All Programs > SOLIDWORKS version > SOLIDWORKS Tools > Property Tab Builder version.

To create the property tab, you will need to first create a new file inside of SOLIDWORKS. A new application window called the Property Tab Builder will pop up. In Property tab builder have three columns.
The left side column is a list of types of properties can be used. Mid column is what will be shown in SOLIDWORKS when the property tab is ready. The right column is the options/settings for each parameter.

Group Box: The Group box is essentially a container that allows you to group the other items.Textbox: This item accepts free-form text and stores it as an associated property.
List: List boxes present users with a list of predefined values that once selected will be stored.
Number: A number box accepts only number inputs to store as a property.
Checkbox: With a checkbox you can have the user select between two predefined values to place as a property.
Radio: Radio buttons allow you to define a selection of up to three predefined values that can be used to show or hide elements in the dialog.

By Assigning attributes to the properties. You will get final Property Box.

To Save the tab templates in the same location as the properties.txt file. You can create multiple templates for each document type. The file extension indicates the template type
➢ . PRTPRP for part
➢ . ASMPRP for assemblies
➢ . DRWPRP for drawings
➢ . WLDPRP for Weldments

This is done the same way you would for your custom templates. But instead you’ll select the “custom property files” in System Options > File locations.

You can see the applied properties in file property in below image.

Property Tab Builder lets you to create your specified properties in a single window and can be share it to all users so that properties can be applied by a single click, resulting in saving design time.

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Do More than Just Visualize with Assembly Visualization

Ever since its introduction in SOLIDWORKS 2010, Assembly Visualization has been a excellent tool to display components in an assembly based on different criteria using colors.

Assembly Visualization can be used as an interactive BOM in which you can see file name, quantity, mass, material, volume, density etc.,

  

²Add colors to visualize the model property values.

²You can add new columns to show other properties of the model.

Lets just add a new column to link SW-Material

 

²You can sort the assembly visualization based on the properties in different columns.

²Another great option available inside Assembly Visualization is we can directly apply materials to parts.

²Use the Rollback bar to show only necessary components in Assembly Visualization

²Other Tree options

 

²Starting from SOLIDWORKS 2018, you can directly access Performance Analysis option inside Assembly Visualization.

  

And sort based on Graphics Triangle, Open time, rebuild time.

  

²Another great option is that you can save this style. Instead of adding/editing the new column, you can load this style for future display of Assembly Visualization

²You can also save this as Excel, Text or PDF and publish this a Bill of Materials as Top-level, Parts only or Indented.

 

  With Assembly Visualization you can evaluate you assembly performance and sort by component properties and more.