From the course: AutoCAD Electrical: Implementing PLCs

Work with PLC modules in AutoCAD Electrical - AutoCAD Electrical Tutorial

From the course: AutoCAD Electrical: Implementing PLCs

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Work with PLC modules in AutoCAD Electrical

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- [Instructor] We're now going to look at how AutoCAD Electrical works with a PLC module, a programmable logic controller module. Now you'll notice, if you look at the project manager on the left hand side of the screen, we are in the wddemo project. So that means that I've opened up the wdp file for that project, and then I've opened up a drawing, a DWG file, that relates to that project. Now it's really important that you download the demo folder from the library if you want to follow along with this particular video. So let me just take you through that first. So over here in the project manager, I click on open project, and you should have downloaded the demo folder, there it is there. Now in the demo folder, there will be drawings, and a number of wddemo files, one of which is wddemo.dwp. So if you select that when you open the project and then click on open, that will open up that particular project. Now I've already got a drawing open in this particular case which is demo06, and I go and open that here in the project manager just by double-clicking on it, so I could go and open up demo05, just by double clicking on it, and it opens up that particular file, so there's demo05 in the file's tab under the top of the screen there. I'll just close demo05 now because I want demo06 to show you how these PLCs work in AutoCAD Electrical. But that's how you work with AutoCAD Electrical. You don't just go and open the drawing file, you open the project first, then the drawing file, so make sure that you open the wdp file first, using the project manager. In this particular case, you'll need the demo folder and the wddemo.wdp file. So what I'm going to do now is just quickly show you how these PLC modules work. Now these have already been placed, they've got all of the wiring ladders and rungs in place and everything else. We'll look at that as we work through the course. But the benefit is is that they are parametric, so if I hover over this like that and I right-click, you'll see that you've then got the menu that pops up in AutoCAD Electrical and this menu is really really useful because you can edit from it, and you can do all different things from it, so what I can do now is I can go to edit component, which is our PLC module. Now as soon as I do that you see it takes a few minutes to think about it, and you see now here's all our input output addresses here, and if I just pull this away like so over here like that, can you see there's all the input output switches, those little circles there, like so, with the little diagonal line. And as I come across there's my input output point descriptions for each one, and as I go down and through, can you see all of that information can be updated in this particular dialogue box. Once I've made the changes, I click on okay, thank you very much, and those changes are made, and will show up in the PLC on the AutoCAD Electrical drawing. Now as we work through this course I'm going to show you how to build up a ladder with the rungs which are red in this case, so actually it looks like a ladder. Two vertical wires with wires going across that join into the PLC modules. And I'm going to show you how to develop one of those in this course and work with the different types of PLCs that are available in AutoCAD Electrical, but you can see how those PLCs work and it's all easy to do, that's the important bit, because Autodesk have made it that way, you don't want to have to draw all of that manually, and wonder where all those connections go and what they do, so everything is stored in the AutoCAD Electrical project, but more importantly it's all annotated nice and neatly on your AutoCAD Electrical drawings as well. So let's start working through this course now, generating our own PLCs in our own AutoCAD Electrical drawings, and more importantly we're going to look at the types of PLCs and different methods of generating PLCs in AutoCAD Electrical as well.

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