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Holt Design Tools for Designing Symbols

I’m pleased to offer a great set of tools for AutoCAD Electrical symbol building – for free! These tools are designed with substation designers in mind, allowing them to create large-scale symbols (think SEL relay wiring diagram symbols) with ease and efficiency. Here’s a brief glimpse of what’s included. IAN – This tool allows users to automatically increment attribute names, so that TERM01 becomes TERM02 with just a single click! IAV – Similar to IAN, except that instead of incrementing attribute names, this tool increments attribute values. CHA_DIR – This tool lets users quickly and painlessly change the direction of attributes like X1TERM01. That means you can change X1TERM01 to X4TERM01 with just a click! REORDER_ATTDEF – In the Enhanced Attribute Editor inside of AutoCAD Electrical, attributes appear in the order in which they were placed on the symbol drawing. But with this tool, attributes are reordered so that they appear in a logical and functional order. AGAP – This tool creates a user-defined gap between attributes, making symbols look clean and professional. Full documentation is included with the download. Just click on the link to download the .zip file, and then extract it in a convenient location on your local drive. Open any AutoCAD Electrical drawing, and the file holtdesign.fas to the Startup Suite by using the command APPLOAD. Now the file will automatically load with every new drawing you open. We’re confident that you’re going to love these tools, and that they will make symbol building so much more fun and efficient! Note (11-28-18): The design tools have been updated to correct an issue with the AGAP tool requiring the user to be running the SDS toolkit in AutoCAD Electrical.

Custom LISP Tools for Wiring

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.