Catching up on some blog postings!
The DraftLogic Electrical development team has been hard at work for four months & has prepared a most excellent new release for you! This release includes the usual bug fixes but more importantly includes a number of your requests brought to life. In addition, motor protection and feeder selection is now completely compliant with standard CEC and NEC requirements for motors.
Here is a list of the more important changes in this release versus our last major release in June 2010. Please call (Dean @ 780-906-2888) or email (dwhitford@draftlogic.com ) if you have any questions or would like to get a quick WebEx walk-through of the new features. We can schedule a session to occur at your convenience; I expect we’ll cover everything new in 30-60 minutes.
1. A link to ConEst IntelliBid has been added such that users can now transfer detailed Bill of Materials data into their ConEst IntelliBid software to vastly speed up the estimating process—we remove any need for counting, measuring, and scaling. Please let any electrical contractors you work with know of this in case they are using IntelliBid and want to shave immense person hours and risk off their estimating time.
2. The Automated Branch Circuit Wiring has been migrated to be compatible with AutoCAD 2006/7/8/9/10/11 (all 32 bit). We are including it as a beta release in this version. [2011/11/11 note: Automated Branch Circuit Wiring is now compatible with all platforms that DraftLogic Electrical supports, including 64 bit versions of AutoCAD.]
3. Preliminary testing has been completed with 32 bit AutoCAD 2011 & all DraftLogic Electrical functions tested OK. You can thus use this release with any and all of AutoCAD 2006/7/8/9/10/11 (all 32 bit), plus any of Autodesk’s vertical products that are based on these versions, like Autodesk Map or AutoCAD MEP. [2011/11/11 note: DraftLogic Electrical now supports 32bit AutoCADs from 2006 to 2012 & 64 bit AutoCADs from 2010 to 2012.]
4. Enhanced motor protection selection in both Automated Circuiting and in the Circuit Manager to come into compliance with standard CEC and NEC requirements for motors. Now motor protection selection is completely automatic. There are, of course, a complete set of user overrides available for you to select protection size and type that differ from that which would be selected by standard electrical code calculations (e.g. for special situations, whether covered in the electrical code or not).
5. Enhanced the Load Calculator (which runs in advance of any schedule depending on having current loads for its calculations) to include motors classified as ‘large’ so that feeders are automatically selected for large motors in compliance with standard CEC and NEC requirements for motors.
6. Enhanced both motor protection selection and motor feeder selection to be able to rely on any single one of: MCA, FLA, HP, or load. The user now needs supply only one of these elements and DraftLogic Electrical will factor the rest out. This is improved versus our prior motor support which was reliant on HP.
7. Added project parameter for user to specify the exact FLA cut-off to use to determine small versus large motor treatment for each motor. Small motors will be powered by the branch circuit panel that is powering receptacles in their area, large motors will circuit as per the project setting telling DraftLogic Electrical where to power large motors from. Small motors will also consider grouping with receptacles and other small motors for circuiting (with user control from next two enhancements listed) whereas large motors will always circuit alone.
8. Added project parameter to allow user to specify whether small motors can circuit in with receptacles circuits in their area or not.
9. Added project parameter to allow user to specify whether small motors should always circuit alone or not. Supersedes the prior project parameter if ‘No’ is selected. If the prior project parameter is ‘No’ but this one is ‘Yes’, small motors will not circuit together with receptacles but will circuit together with other small motors if feasible.
10. Enabled project parameter for forcing all connections to have a bonding conductor if user desires.
11. Enabled project parameter for forcing all bonding/grounding conductors to be copper if user desires.
12. Enabled project parameter to user force, if desired, all in/under-slab conduit to have a bonding conductor regardless of whether such conduit is metallic or non-metallic. This parameter is superseded by #6 if it is set to ‘Yes’.
13. Added project parameter for user to specify if full load of transformer should be carried up to its parent and all distribution above it in the power tree or just the actual load on the transformer.
14. Split new ‘kitchen’ load type out for load calculations.
15. Restructured panel schedule footer calculations to include motor loads in compliance with CEC and NEC.
16. Added completely automatic support for NEC demand factors to panel schedule footer calculations in addition to CEC diversities. NEC demand factor support includes the tiered demand factors applied as per NEC sections 220.42, 220.44, and 220.56.
17. Added support for five kinds of protection types to be assigned via the Attribute Editor and Circuit Manager and to be faithfully represented on the Single Line Diagram and in the Bill of Materials: molded case circuit breaker, fused disconnect, air drawout breaker, combination mag/starter fused, and combination mag/starter breaker.
18. The Drawing Mapping process has been enhanced to gracefully handle blocks with no start/end. These result from drawing corruption or by being placed in a drawing by another custom application that intends on using them to store information.
19. The CU tables have had a number of additions made & have had their titles reviewed and standardized. In addition, all luminaires have been gone through to ensure that a suitable CU has been selected for them. The detailed CU tables are included with this shipment for your reference when selecting a CU table for a new luminaire you are adding to the Luminaire Library. Note that for spaces of ‘near rectangular’ shape, DraftLogic Electrical’s zonal cavity calculation for determining luminaire quantities is near exact to the rounded number of luminaires that result from a complete and much more time intensive AGI analysis.
20. An issue has been corrected where the Wattage per ft2 report and function within AutoCAD were including luminaires that touched the space selected by the user in any way (i.e. including just having one of their visible attributes touch or go inside the boundary line).
21. The Wattage per ft2 report has been enhanced to process and report the rooms and floors in their numeric order.
22. The Wattage per ft2 report has been enhanced to drastically reduce the time it required to be generated.
23. The Annotation Organizer has been optimized to run much faster than before and with less network load on the database.
24. Numerous little gremlins, trolls, goblins and various other evil creatures (aka bugs) living in the source code have been ferreted out and sent back to the magical lands where they are supposed to live.