Electrical design

I don’t thinks it’s a trivial task to make an electrical design software that keeps track of all your components, their hierarchies, electrical connections, symbols used, etc. I’ve been using Aucotec’s Engineering Base but the version I have only runs on Windows 7, so rather than upgrade to a W10 compatible version I’d like to switch to a more widely used platform. So far the best alternatives on the market are SolidWorks Electrical and AutoCAD Electrical. The cool thing about these is that they seamlessly integrate with their 3D functionality. Something of the sort for Rhino would be extremely good to have as a lot of mechanical designs also need the added electrical documentation.

I have both Solidworks, and Autocad electrical, so even if the plugin for Rhino that was for electrical work / machine controls was several thousand dollars Id still be way ahead. The plug in “Rhino Piping” isn’t to far from what I would think an electrical plugin would look like. Maybe when I retire I will work on developing a plug in called “Rhino Electrical © ™” as my next way of making extra money.

Hi, this seems like a quite promising area for Rhino. I had one customer asking about if there is any plug-in. Anything new on this?

Also @RBL how come RhinoPiping was close to that? If so, we have a partner developing a Piping plugin for Rhino 6 & 7, it will be ready for distribution soon, if the way of piping would be somehow similar, I think we can manage to develop based on it.

plus, is this GD&T method you mentioned satisfactory?

I’m working on a mixed reality system for Assembly Assistance of electrical designs. The positions of the components are shown on the mounting area with laser projectors. Additional info can be projected with a beamer or on a monitor.

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Parts are parts, It doesn’t matter if its pipe , pumps and valves, or wires, motors and relays. And pipe in a 3d model in nothing more then a really thick wire or cable, I only down loaded the lite version and with time I could have made it work more or less for me, but time is not always something I have much of.

As far as the GD&T its ok

Jess

Can you go a little bit more in depth with this,

Hi @RBL ,

I’ve developed a Rhino plug-in which makes projections for LAP-Laser projectors. It works with complex 3D geometry, takes care of hidden lines and optimizes the distribution of the projection in a multiple-projector-setup.

The assembly sequences can be controlled by the layer order and hierarchy. The projections are very precise and can directly be used to position, drill and mount for example electrical components in a cabinet. These laser systems are used in many different industries CAD-based industrial laser projection systems | LAP

So far I was just using the 3D and Meta data from various E-CAD tools. Most of them would benefit using Rhino’s 3D engine :wink:

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I am total newbie to Rhino and GH but interested in trying to find a solution for a visual power cable distribution calculator - which should be quite basic - to allow you to set-up say

  1. Main Panel Board at say 400V (a simple block with attributes)
  2. 3 x feeder cables at say 50m, 75m, 100m to 3 Sub Panel Boards (lines connected to the block with attributes of length etc)
  3. a further Sub-Sub Panel Board from say 1 of them (another simple block with attributes)

Once this is drawn out in 2D, you should be able to use GH to calculate the required cable size base on current / distance / volt drop

Then you should be able to drag the Boards around to see the impact of locating them in different locations on site and the impact of the cable size

Then some sort of optimisation to find the optimal location to achieve overall lowest cost of cable / most effecient design

Anyone know how the heck I would get started with that without a VERY steep learning curve ! any pointers to existing tutorials or anything much appreciated