Drafting substation projects is often tedious work because there are so many things that have to be done over and over again. Small, mundane tasks need to be repeated countless times in order for your intelligent substation project to work properly. Fortunately, Holt Design Co. has created some custom LISP tools to make some of these processes much quicker.

Two things that you just can’t get around are adding wire numbers and marking external terminal connections. Normally this would involve clicking on each wire that you want to number, adding your custom text, and repeating ad infinitum. Then you have to go back and check the I/E connections of each terminal. This process can be extremely tedious, not to mention mind-numbing.

In order to make this process more bearable for one of our clients, we have created two custom LISP tools to blast through these processes. We’re able to use these tools because this client has done something really smart with their template: They created a separate layer for all of their external wires.

An external wire begins at a terminal point on one location (say, LOC code = R1) and ends at a point on another location (say, LOC code = R2). The terminal connection points at either end of these wires need to be marked with an E, for external, so that they will annotate on the appropriate side in the wiring diagram. Putting these wires on a separate layer allows the designer to know, at a glance, that this wire needs a cable marker and a wire number, and that the terminals on either end are external. This kind of visual cue is, in our opinion, a great way to design a substation project.

The first of our custom LISP tools allow our client to simply click on a wire and swap it to the external wiring layer, as well as automatically mark the connected terminal points as external. Once the designer has inserted and labelled cable markers on these wires, the second tool allows him or her to pick on a wire and automatically sets the wire number based on the cable marker and conductor color. Take a look at the video above to see these custom LISP tools in action.

4 Comments

    • andrew

      Absolutely. You should know, however, that we don’t offer support for the tools, and they are considered “use at your own risk.” Although, I think they’re pretty easy to use, and nobody has complained about them doing anything terrible to their work!

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