Electrical Design Software | Elecdes Design Suite by Scada Systems Ltd

How to Create a new Assembly

Fundamentals

An assembly is a group of component symbols and conductor lines for a user-defined part of a circuit that you will want to insert multiple times.

Procedure

  1. Draw a sub-circuit, or open the drawing containing a circuit that you want to save part of as an assembly.

    If you are drawing a new circuit in a blank drawing, we recommend that you place the circuit elements such that the base point used later to insert the assembly will be 0,0. This is a recommendation to keep things simple, not a requirement.

    You should choose the most common catalog specification that you would use for each component type where possible to minimise the need to reselect components when inserting the assembly.

    You should use initial names from the Name Sequencer for the components, e.g. K1 rather than K123, TB1 rather than TB54.

  2. Select Create from the Elecdes Assembly ribbon panel, or select Create Assembly from the Elecdes > Drawing Macros menu, or run CREATEASSEMBLY from the CAD command line.

  3. From the current drawing, select the drawing entities that you want to save to the assembly, then press Enter.

  4. Pick the insertion base point by which the assembly will be dragged when you are inserting it into a schematic.

  5. A file-save dialog will be displayed.

    The default path will be set to the appropriate MET_ASSEMBLY or IMP_ASSEMBLY folder in your EDS installation.

  6. Enter a new file name for your new assembly, then click Save.

    If you will provide both a horizontal and a vertical version of the assembly, prefix the file name with 'H' or 'V' as appropriate. When both an 'H' and 'V'-named version of the assembly file exists, the InsertAssembly function will offer the "Orientation" keyword to switch orientation while you drag it.

  7. If necessary, you can open the assembly file template directly and modify the contents further.

    For example, if you saved part of an existing circuit to be an assembly then the symbols will have had various tag names. You can re-set the component names in the assembly file to the initial values for their name sequences.

  8. If you have multiple representations of the same assembly, e.g. horizontal and vertical or other, then you must open the new assembly file and check the ASMBLYSYMB value in each symbol.

    The CreateAssembly function will have set a unique incremented number into ASMBLYSYMB but you may need to modify the values so that they match the values in the symbols across all of the assembly files that represent the same components.


You can also create a new assembly file by copying an existing assembly file to a new name and modifying the contents, ensuring that you set a unique value in the ASMBLYSYMB attribute.

Assembly files in the MET_ASSEMBLY or IMP_ASSEMBLY folder are drawing files containing sub-circuits, just like schematic drawings but without borders and mostly only a small part of an overall circuit. The circuit elements are not further nested into a block.

The only special property of the symbols in an assembly file is the ASMBLYSYMB attribute, which contains a unique number by which to identify a symbol when the assembly has been inserted and the component symbols have their proper tag names. There are no formulae in the attributes, unlike the templates used by other EDS modules.

See also

Insert an assembly