Tim Pulaski Latest Blog Articles Page 1

Electrical schematic design tools fill a vital niche in the engineering environment. Falling somewhere between pure electrical and mechanical design, they allow engineers to communicate crucial system-level wiring specifications to technicians, vendors and other downstream project stakeholders. Recognizing the importance of this facet of production, SOLIDWORKS provides several solutions to allow multidisciplinary teams to work together to achieve their design goals and milestones efficiently. Choosing the right tool for your business comes down to a few specific factors we’ll explore in this blog.

In this article, I will address a very common question I get when working with clients involved in electrical design: What’s the big difference between SOLIDWORKS Routing and SOLIDWORKS Electrical 3D?

On paper and in video demonstrations, they both seem to do the same thing: allow you to route wires and cables more easily through your SOLIDWORKS assemblies. If you have ever experienced the unbridled joy of trying to create a wire using a 3D spline sweep in a SOLIDWORKS assembly, both may be enticing propositions. In addition to understanding their academic differences, perhaps the better question is: Which solution is the better fit for my business? I’ll try to answer both.

In electrical design, how we choose to represent connections between electrical devices in our schematics is often open to interpretation. If we’re not careful, our design intent can be easily miscommunicated to the reader, leading to potentially disastrous results. “The danger is in the details,” as they say. SOLIDWORKS Electrical provides some powerful methods of ensuring that nothing is lost in translation, but many designers frequently overlook them. Today’s blog will focus on how you can avoid costly and time-consuming errors in testing and assembly, by spending just a bit more time clarifying your schematic connections. Let’s begin.

Each year, SOLIDWORKS seeks to outdo itself with hundreds of sweeping enhancements to its diverse and ever-expanding portfolio of engineering, manufacturing and design solutions. SOLIDWORKS Electrical, in particular, received quite a few significant enhancements this year, making documenting your electromechanical systems more streamlined than ever before. With this article, I wanted to highlight some of what I consider to be the most impactful updates for those considering whether it'd make sense to upgrade sooner rather than later.

On the road to becoming an engineer, what they don’t tell you about is how much menial labor goes into documenting and supporting an electrical system you’ve helped design. Sourcing spec sheets, entering project data cell-by-cell into Excel, and if something changes, recalling with perfect clarity the numerous places that need to be updated. It can be very easy to spend just as much time documenting a project as drafting it! 

In a recent poll of 2,000 Americans, the inquiry found that 8 out of 10 respondents said they had one place in their home that seemed impossible to keep clean. While I’d love to claim otherwise, I’m sorry to report I fall well within the bell curve on this one. With the introduction of our two children to our family, our storage room has devolved into chaos accumulating into an eclectic assortment of tools, clothes, computer parts, and banished toys. So what’s keeping me from rolling up my sleeves and sorting it out? Quite simply, it’s overwhelming. Where to even begin? And with such precious little time in each passing day and so many distractions, it’s easy to get pulled away compounding the problem further.

A lot of the same can be said about electrical design; how often have you made it partway through a project, looked back and thought, “Oh no, this is a bit of a mess. Where is that part again?” Today we are talking about how to get your electrical components better organized within SOLIDWORKS Electrical.

Developing electrical systems can often feel like planning an event. There are many moving parts, lots of unknowns, and the requirements can quickly shift and evolve as the date draws closer. Suppose it’s something you put together annually or multiple times a year - it would only make sense to save the numbers of your favorite vendors, prepare your invitations and mailing addresses and overall tighten down your process to save time in the future. As with anything, having the right tools can help. SOLIDWORKS Electrical Schematic is a fantastic electrical design solution that can help you plan out your system, adapt to changes and automate repeatable procedures to produce high-quality, professional drawings time and time again.

Many types of software can draft a schematic, but very few can actually automate the process and produce things like bills of material, wire run lists, net lists and other necessary documentation for manufacturing. SOLIDWORKS Electrical Schematic is one of the few - with its ability to automatically capture properties as you design to later be accessed and collated to produce those usually time consuming associated documents.

Which language do you speak—Electrical or Mechanical? Both engineering disciplines have unique jargon that can easily be misinterpreted in translation. Why?