Out-of-the-blue phone call, another company wanting to recruit me. I initially resisted.

But it has been pretty tough since the lay-off almost two years ago. And issues probably common to most entrepreneurs… providing high-quality services but in some cases waiting months to get  paid (and even finding that many months of high-quality services are not going to be paid at all!) give a certain appeal to a steady paycheck and company-paid health insurance. But the key thing was this… the new job sounds complex and challenging… something that seems to appeal to my DNA. I just can’t help it.

In the next week or so I will be moving on. It is with sadness I bid farewell to AutoCAD Electrical.

Note: with “moving on”, it is awkward for me to maintain AutoCAD Electrical-related postings. These had to be deleted. Very sorry…

Here is what the mailbox across the road looks like after the latest blast of snow. Not a pretty sight.

And here is my mailbox, still standing [so far!]. The difference may be the energy-absorbing mechanism I added to the design.

The idea is that the mass of snow-plow generated ice and snow, travelling 45-55 mph and striking the mail box assembly, causes the large gray hinged part of the mailbox to swing with the blow. This does two things: 1) As the hinged mailbox part rotates, the cross-sectional area exposed to the flying wall of snow/ice is reduced (side versus back).  Some of the trailing part of the wall of snow/ice will “miss” hitting the mailbox because the box will have partially rotated out of the way – exposing the back of the box instead of its maximum broad side. 2) The movement/acceleration of  the box as it rotates on the hinges absorbs energy along with the increasing resistance provided by the stretching spring. 

The net result is that the shock of a ”broadside hit” is reduced and, “rolling with the punch”, the energy is dissipated over a longer period of time. The spring auto-resets the mailbox to its normal position… ready for the next snow-plow.

So far, so good…!

UPDATE: a commenter below asked whether the a violent rotation might fling out the contents of the mailbox. I made some snide comment, but this commenter has proven to be absolutely correct!  I need to adjust the door latch to be a bit stiffer…

We had another 6-inches of snow several days ago, and the mailboxes along my road were subsequently attacked by the snow-plows. Afterwards I found various pieces of my mail frozen to the road surface, extending to about 50 feet downstream from my still-standing mailbox. One key item, what was supposed to be a tax return, is pictured below, chiseled from the road’s surface ( ! )

Circuit Builder’s “Wire Size Lookup” dialog is a tool that can link into an “electrical standard” and guide you as you select motor size, motor power wire sizing, and appropriate ratings of the main disconnecting means – whether some type of breaker, fusible switch, or just fuses.

It can be launch from within Circuit Builder’s “Circuit Configuration” dialog as shown here:

The dialog opens and includes a number of different de-rating factors and settings. The results of the calculations default to AWG wire sizes. But one of the settings on the dialog can toggle calculations and display of metric wire sizes.

Let’s say you have a project that needs to use metric wire sizes rather than AWG. But you’d rather not have to remember to toggle to the “MM2″ metric option every time the “Wire Size Lookup” dialog displays. You’d like it to default to metric wire sizes.

Setting up an alternate standard that defaults to metric wire sizes

Here’s how to create an alternate standard that parallels the default National Electrical Code settings for wire calculations but defaults to using metric wire sizes instead of AWG sizes. This avoids having to hit the AWG/MM2 toggle each time the dialog displays.

1. Launch the built-in Access database editing tool as shown below.

2. The Electrical Standards Database Editor dialog opens. Expand the “Default” and “NEC” tree nodes to show all table names. Find the table named “OPT_NEC”. Right click and Copy / Paste this table. Name the new copy “OPT_NEC-MM2” as shown below.

3.  Once you hit OK, the tree structure will update and add in the new “NEC-MM2” entry as shown below. Expand it to display the copied table OPT_NEC-MM2 and click on it to open. Edit the two ”name” records highlighted in red. 

Here’s the key change. Edit the record marked with a CODE field value of “W_STD”. Change its DEFAULT field value from “AWG” to “MM2″. Hit “Save” and exit out of the database editor.

Testing

Open up any project. Right click on the project name in the AutoCAD Electrical Project Manager and select it.

Now run Circuit Builder and start to “Configure” a motor circuit. On the “Motor Setup” right at the front end, hit the “Select Motor” as shown below and make some motor selection. This sets in motion the queries into the select standard in the Electrical Standards Database file.

Select any motor size in dialog above and hit OK. Now cross your fingers and pop open the “Wire Size Lookup” dialog as shown below.

The dialog should display. Metric wire sizes instead of AWG sizes should now calculate and display. 

If there are other defaults you’d like to change, take a look in your new copied OPT_NEC-MM2 table and adjust.

Other Circuit Builder tutorials:

Tutorial – Introduction to the Circuit Builder Tool (Part 1)
Circuit Builder – Creating an Alternate Electrical Standards Setting
Circuit Builder – Leveraging AutoCAD’s “Group” Concept
Circuit Builder Configure Mode – Adding a “Pick from Icon Menu” Selection
Circuit Builder – Embedding Custom Calls in the Spreadsheet

Win7 ”Home Premium” has not been too friendly with AutoCAD 2010/2011 on my inexpensive laptop. It would go through periods of locking up every hour or so when AutoCAD was running, even when doing just the simplest tasks. Sometimes just sitting there… I would come back to the machine and it would be locked up.

A Google hit suggested that the Win7 “Aero” theme might be the culprit…

…it’s now been two “lock-up-free” days since I flipped my machine over to a generic theme!  Fingers-crossed…

Pretty much the totality of my AutoLISP customization has been mute. Last week I decided that it was time to make a little noise.

For example, if my function failed for some reason (operator input error or premature program exit), I wanted the tool to not just issue a little message to the command window… I wanted it to be accompanied with a clundge sound.

(acet-sys-beep …)

A search turned up a couple methods to embed some simple sounds into an AutoLISP function. The one way that seemed to work for me was using a call to “acet-sys-beep”  and this only after I installed the “Express tool” option that comes on the AutoCAD install CD.

But once in place, there were three different sounds I could generate from this call. If you want to experiment, type each of these at the “Command:” prompt (if you don’t hear a thing, you may need to check for existence of the AutoCAD ”EXPRESSTOOLS” on your machine):

• (acet-sys-beep 16) [Enter]
• (acet-sys-beep 48) [Enter]
• (acet-sys-beep 64) [Enter]

Sample Utility that invokes a couple different sounds

Here’s an example function showing how two different sounds can be tied into success and failure of a function. This tool just swaps tag-ID values between two picked AutoCAD Electrical components. If the components are different types, then an error dialog is accompanied by a bad sound. If success, then a more happy sound.

This is not rocket-science. But it makes my mundane utility just a bit more interesting.

The two places where the sound is invoked is highlighted below. Just to be safe, in both places there is a call to confirm that function (acet-sys-beep…) exists… before trying to call it.

NOTE: 100+ other AutoCAD Electrical utilities indexed here.

Working on a potential customer’s sample drawing, I converted a complex collection of dumb graphics into an AutoCAD Electrical “smart” symbol. Works fine but the wire connection attributes ended up being very tiny because the graphics was scaled in metric units and the default wire connection attribute definition text size was coming in assuming imperial units. 

Normally would have just moved on… the converted symbol works great. But the wire connection points are hidden behind connection dots that are part of the symbol. I’d rather these wire connection attributes be big enough to at least extend a bit beyond the dot so that it is obvious that they’re there.

So, how to quickly adjust the text size of these 60+ wire connection attribute definitions? Could write a little AutoLISP utility… but how about using something already built into AutoCAD?

QSELECT and PROPERTIES command

The PROPERTIES command seemed like the right tool to make the actual text height change. But how to carefully select the 60-plus attribute definitions, almost all of which are hidden behind other graphics?

With a little tinkering, the “Quick Select” mode with filtering did the trick. Here’s the sequence:

This should bring up the “Quick Select” sub-dialog. If it does not, just type QSELECT [Enter] at the AutoCAD ‘Command:’ prompt. Select Attribute Definition as shown below.

And we want to filter on the attribute definition Tag names. The wire connection attributes expected by AutoCAD Electrical follow the naming convention X?TERM?? where the first “?” is a 1, 2, 4, or 8 and the last two form an incrementing number value (starting at “01″). So we’ll just enter in X?TERM?? where the “?” wild-card represents any single character.

That’s it. We hit OK and the “Quick Select” finds 62 attribute definitions that have a “Tag” value that wild-card matches string ‘X?TERM??’.

Now, the fun part. Adjust the text size in the PROPERTIES dialog and all 62 tiny attribute definitions resize and now reveal themselves!

Frustration setting in as I worked on AutoCAD libraries for an electrical sub-station design application… copy circuit to a new drawing name, open, then use an attribute edit command to change a substring value in a dozen or so attributes. A little Find/Replace tool would be so welcome right now!

After 20 minutes of this tediousness, decided it was time to either find an existing tool or create a quick one. Found previous posting for a drawing-wide MTEXT find/replace utility. Good place to start.

Solution

Here is the result. Seems to work.

The flow is 1) enter “Find” substring, 2) enter “Replace” substring, 3) start picking on text. The text can be attributes, text entities, attribute definitions, and even multi-line text (multi-line attributes not covered in this version).

Here is an overview of how the original version was modified.

Step 1 - Renamed the source “.lsp” file to “text_fr.lsp”

Step 2 - Got rid of the drawing-wide “ssget” and changed to a loop of individual text picks (below).

Step 3 – added two blocks of code to deal with Attributes/Attribute definitions and with straight Text entities (below).

That should do it. It seems to work for me… speeded-up my effort to copy and modify my folder of sub-circuits. 

Here’s a simple example of it in operation. Starting out with a sample drawing that contains the substring “DN100″ in three different places: an attribute that is part of a block insert instance, a single line of text, and a 3-line multi-line text entity just below it.

Let’s say we want to selectively change instances of “DN100″ to now be “CM99″.

With the utility APPLOADED (download revised version  here - see update note below) we launch by typing TEXT_FR [Enter] at the “Command:” prompt.

To use… just APPLOAD the text_fr.lsp file. Then

1. Type TEXT_FR [Enter] at the AutoCAD command prompt

2. Enter the “Find” substring, Enter the “Replace” substring

3. Start picking on individual Text, MText, Attribute or Attribute Definition entities

There it is. Seemed to work really well for me!

UPDATE: user note below correctly points out that if this tool used to find/replace attribute values for AutoCAD Electrical “TAG1″ attribute values, there is a good chance (especially if “IEC” tag mode is active) of confusion. This is because there is an Xdata tag name “VIA_WD_BASETAG” that is pushed out to parent components. This Xdata value carries the base copy of the overall component’s tag-ID. If the tag-ID is changed by our utility above, then this Xdata value needs to be processed as well. Here is a screenshot of the addition to our utility to deal with keeping this Xdata in synch. This code addition should lie dormant unless the tool is used on a “TAG*” attribute with AutoCAD Electrical in memory.

Update 2 – using the tool on ATTDEFs (as opposed to ATTRIBs) not working. Found that the utility was set to look at subrecord 1 instead of subrecord 2. Download revised version of tool here. I apologize for all the confusion this caused. – Nate.

And it was even harder at the wedding reception, preparing for the final father-daughter dance. Here’s what I said to my daughter as I asked her for this last dance.

Nate.

11-June-2010

Rachel, you were my Special Angel, a nickname I attached to you when you were just a little girl.

You were the one who would spend hours with me in the evenings, quietly reading your arm-load of books, camped under my work table as I labored-away on my computer. More than once you would fall asleep under that table, amongst the scattered books. I would have to gather you up to carry you to bed.

You were special.

You were the one who would make me promise… PROMISE… to wake you up before I would leave the house on the many Monday mornings at 5am to catch the first flight out.  In the early morning darkness I would tap on your door and quietly call out your name. Five minutes later you would come padding down… doll and blanket in tow… and silently watch me finish my breakfast. Then, as I picked up my bag and headed out the back door, you would move to the front door. And as I backed the car out of the driveway, I would spy my Special Angel, illuminated by the porch light, standing there inside the glass front door. I would blink my headlights… you would raise your hand… and I would slowly drive away for yet another week of out-of-town work.

You were special.

How many thousands of times did we have bed-time prayers together? The routine was this: I would be working in my office on the computer. I would hear you brush your teeth. Next, the bathroom light switches off. A few moments later there is the gentle rustling of blankets and such as you get into bed and arrange your pillows and dolls. And finally, there’s the sound of the bedroom light switching off.  All is now quiet. Then I hear a little voice calling out for me… “Dad… I’m ready”. That was my signal. I would pause from my work and climb the stairs to your room. In the darkness, I would kneel down beside your bed and we’d have our prayer time together.

But as you grew up and moved into your later teen years, you sorta outgrew bed-time prayers thing with your dad. High-school, busy-ness, activities… growing from a little girl into a young woman.

But there was to be one more time… and of the thousands of times we had bed-time prayer together as you were growing up, this very last one is the one that is burned into my memory:

You were moving away. You were all packed up. You were leaving home the next morning to start college – hundreds of miles away. I think we both sensed that a chapter in our lives was ending.

That last night… before you were to leave home… as I worked at my computer, I heard you brushing your teeth. The bathroom light snaps off. The rustling sounds of you getting into bed. The bedroom light turning off. Quiet. I sit there at my computer. Thoughts of gratitude and thankfulness to God for bringing us to the end of this life’s chapter, but mixed in with a bit of sadness. I think back to the years of our bed-time prayers together, and how that routine thing now seemed so much more precious in the years since it had ended.

But there was to be this one last time. From the quietness, I hear your voice call out, just as it did some years before as a younger, littler girl… “Dad. I’m ready.” I climbed the stairs to your room, I’m glad it’s dark because tears are filling my eyes. That final bed-time prayer with my special angel, me weeping in the darkness… I will never forget.

Finally, I believe God’s hand has touched your life.

You were probably six or seven. We guys were all at the softball field for a game in our men’s church league. It was a hot, muggy summer evening. The men were loosening up… stretching, playing catch, taking practice swings.

As you stand there watching, I suddenly feel compelled to take three steps forward to stand between you and a player taking cuts with a baseball bat some distance away. Step… step… and on the third one, as I step in front of you, the bat slips from his grip and shoots through the air, barrel first. It strikes me in the thigh on that third step. We all jump back, everybody looks.

I think we probably went on to lose that game. And what everybody thought that evening was that our record was not getting any better and, oh yeah, Nate will probably wake up tomorrow with a nice-sized bruise on his thigh. But nobody saw what really happened that evening, and I didn’t say anything. I filed this away in my heart. Because I believed that on that hot, muggy summer evening, that I witnessed the Hand of God in and on your life… the barrel-end of that flying bat was thigh-high on me, but would have been forehead high on you.

God is good. And you are special. God’s hand is on you and Eric.

So, here we are this evening. I gave you away a couple hours ago. But will you dance with your dad this one last time?

============

Update: pics thanks to Remi Bowers, Sandy Felzer

Update: watching this advertisement brings back a small measure of the feelings I had that day…  Nate.

Steve Kemp responded to a user request on the AutoCAD Electrical discussion group by developing this cool little utility. He passed it on to me for posting here.

Here is an example of how it might be used. Let’s say that you have a column of terminal block inserts that are wired to a PLC module block insert. But, for this one drawing, you’d like to relocate one of the attributes to the left-hand side of each terminal block instance.

Here’s how to do it with Steve’s tool. First, use normal AutoCAD grips to position the attribute of one instance to the desired position.

Next, APPLOAD Steve’s little AutoLISP utility here. Type AATTR [Enter] at the command line.

Now pick on the one relocated attribute. Choose “vertical” alignment (default).

Hit [Enter]… and there you go! Everything neatly aligned with the master.

Current limitations: as written, the utility does not process attributes that are set to “FIT” or “ALIGN” justification.

About Steve Kemp… in addition to applications development (contact him at skiflea@mchsi.com), Steve likes to surf. Though trapped in the heartland of the US, if he loads his boat down with 1600 or so pounds of dead weight so that it sits low in the water and then drives 9-11 MPH, it will throw up a wake large enough to surf!

You know an entity/object’s “handle” number, but where in the world is it in your jumbled drawing?

Complex library creation and testing has been on my plate for a couple weeks. The new code spits out the AutoCAD handle of various entities as processing proceeds. Sometimes there’s a need to go back in and find a problem entity on the drawing. Have the handle reference but that’s it. What is it, where is it?

Manual Method – Crude with  no-frills

Here’s the crude, no-frills way. Open the entity and display its guts in the command window.

Let’s say that you’ve run your program in a “debugging” mode and find that there is some issue with object handle “74F” in the active drawing. What and where is this entity?

Type this AutoLISP expression at the “Command:” prompt

Command: (entget (handent “74F”)) [Enter]

It returns this block of data about this entity.

((-1 . <Entity name: 7ef152f8>) (0 . “LINE”) (330 . <Entity name: 7ef11c10>) (5 . “74F”) (100 . “AcDbEntity”) (67 . 0) (410 . “Model”) (8 . “0″) (100 .
“AcDbLine”) (10 6.09375 13.5 0.0) (11 6.12676 13.5 0.0) (210 0.0 0.0 1.0))

The “0″ entry flags the entity type: “LINE” and the “10″ and “11″ parts give the XYZ start and end points of the LINE segment.

Crude, but it does work.

Better Method: auto-ZOOM to the entity

Here’s a little AutoLISP utility thrown together to help in troubleshooting. It zooms in on the target object given the typed-in handle.

The syntax is pretty simple. After the utility is APPLOADed, type ZH at the AutoCAD command prompt and then enter the handle number at the next prompt…

Command: zh [Enter]
Handle  =74F [Enter]

The utility opens up the entity. If it is a simple graphical entity like an arc, text, block insert, line, then it opens it to find “where” it is.

Entity type: LINE XY=(6.11026 13.5 0.0)

… and then it issues a ZOOM “Centered” command to display the object in the middle of the screen. It then tries to highlight it. Now you can zoom in or out with “I” or “O” keystrokes or use your mouse “wheel” to take a better look in context.

Here’s the handle “74F” example… it was an incomplete wire connection on the high side of a control transformer.

Here’s the utility itself. Cut and paste into an ASCII text file, let’s call it “zh.lsp”.

; ** 13-Oct-09 NEHolt - http://n8consultants.com
(defun c:zh ( / hdl xy enttype ed en xy2)
  ; ZOOM to entity "handle". Does not check model vs layout space.
  (while (/= (setq hdl (getstring (strcat
              "\nHandle " (if en "(or I=Zoom IN, O=Zoom out)" "") " ="))) "")
    (cond
      ((= (strcase hdl) "I")(command "_.ZOOM" "1.5x"))
      ((= (strcase hdl) "O")(command "_.ZOOM" "0.75x"))
      (T
        (if (setq en (handent hdl)) ; convert handle string to its "entity name"
          (progn ; appears to be a valid handle number
            (if (setq ed (entget en)) ; open up the entity
              (progn ; success, okay to continue
                (setq xy nil)
                (setq enttype (cdr (assoc 0 ed))) ; extract the entity type
                (princ "\nEntity type: ")(princ enttype)
                (if (= enttype "INSERT")
                  (progn ; this is a block INSERT instance
                    (princ " blk nam=")
                    (princ (cdr (assoc 2 ed))) ; display block name
                ) )
                ; Figure where entity is located
                (if (cdr (assoc 10 ed))
                  (progn
                    (setq xy (cdr (assoc 10 ed))) ; 10 subrec often gives a location value
                    (if (= enttype "LINE")
                      (progn ; LINE entity. Reset to zoom to line's midpoint
                        (setq xy2 (cdr (assoc 11 ed))) ; XY of other end
                        ; Calc midpoint coordinate
                        (setq xy (list (+ (car xy) (* 0.5 (- (car xy2) (car xy))))
                                       (+ (cadr xy) (* 0.5 (- (cadr xy2) (cadr xy))))
                                       (+ (caddr xy) (* 0.5 (- (caddr xy2) (caddr xy))))))
                ) ) ) )
                (if xy
                  (progn ; Non-blank XY extracted from picked entity. Go ahead and
                           ; display the value and ZOOM in to that point on the drawing.
                    (princ " XY=")(princ xy)
                    (command "_.ZOOM" "_C" xy 1.0) ; use ZOOM CENTER command
                    (redraw en 3) ; trigger entity to "highlight"
                ) )
        ) ) ) )
      )
    )
  )
  (command "_.REGEN") ; brute force - unhighlight everything
  (princ) ; quiet return
)

That should be it. APPLOAD this file and that should expose the utility to use on your active drawing.

UPDATE: typo introduced when the above program was cut/paste into this posting. Very sorry. Should be okay now. – Nate.