Symbol Libs

How useful are the supplied (mechanical) libraries that come with Electrical?

I have recently been given a new machine with electrical on it (get some training in January!) but our parent company has decided that the only mech lib we need is the one of their equipment. Leaving us short by a long way. Do the supplied blocks have any special properties or can we continue using the ones we have built up over the years?

I guess that is a "definite maybe" then. Oh well, at least it upped my post count by two.

I can second that opinion

update, Dave's post count by 3, Tiger's by 1.

The libs aren't bad, but if you are doing a lot of mechanical hydraulics and pnuematics schematics then its better to use AutoCAD PID for that. I have seen Electrical used pretty well with this, but it falls short of PID simply on libraries and speed of documentation in that package. The fact it also works with Plant 3D is a bonus if you ever need to get into 3D process piping models.

dbroada, I make all our symbols from scratch. I believe 2010 may have a way to convert a block to electrically intelligent but I haven't explored it yet but in 2008 I took blocks, exploded them, and then added the electrical attributes which makes the blocks electrically intelligent. It was fairly easy to do.

We just recently upgraded to 2010 and they changed the way things are done to make symbols so I'm trying to relearn the process.

I am ok with the electrical symbols that have been supplied, it is the mechanical ones that were not installed. Since then I have obtained a set of mechanical symbols and have decided that there is no intelligence within the symbol itself so will continue using our own which will cover virtually all our needs.

dbroada, I'm not sure what you mean by "mechanical ones" but there are footprints that may be what you are calling mechanical. They are not used in the schematics. Like an LED on the front panel does not have any wire connections but it is represented in the schematic. The LED schematic symbol and the LED (footprint) can be connected for BOM purposes.

I do have an internal assembly drawing for most of the drawings that is not electrical in any way, in fact, I make it a reference drawing to keep it separate.

Not sure if that helps but it's free.

again a problem of shared language! Yes, by mechanical I mean footprint. As in the original post, our parent company didn't install any footprints for items not made by them which rather limited its apparent usefulness. All sorted now though.

Good deal!