topic Re: Electrical Designs in Modeling

Electrical Designs

Anonymous — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 15:03:50 GMT

Hi, im new to ArchiCAD and i want to know if is possible to make electrical designs with this, without using add ons or plugins.

Im student of Electrical Enginering and im using Mac Os, but i need to make electrical designs as in AutoCAD.

Is this possible on ArchiCAD or maybe, if u can recommend another Mac software for me.

Im leaving some examples for u, maybe with them ull understand me (examples maded in AutoCAD, opened with ArchiCAD)

I really appreciate ur help.

Re: Electrical Designs

Karl Frost — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 22:33:49 GMT

Yes you can do this in ArchiCAD, but as it appears to be mostly 2d / diagrammatic documents it is a rather expensive software to be using. While I don't wish to promote Autodesk products I think AutoCAD LT or similar CAD software would be sufficient.

Re: Electrical Designs

Anonymous — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 00:16:31 GMT

Karl wrote:
Yes you can do this in ArchiCAD, but as it appears to be mostly 2d / diagrammatic documents it is a rather expensive software to be using. While I don't wish to promote Autodesk products I think AutoCAD LT or similar CAD software would be sufficient.

Thx for the answer.

Im on Mac Os and i want to use a native software and i just know ArchiCAD.

Can u make a little explanation of how to do this things on ArchiCAD?

Thank you.

Re: Electrical Designs

Erich — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 00:45:53 GMT

You might want to check out the Eletrigon object, found here http://www.archicad.ca/, for the electrical plan.

However, for the diagraming that you want to do you will either need to make some 2D objects for the various devices and switches or just make do with lines, arcs, fills, etc since ArchiCAD is not set up for this type of work out of the box.

If you draw your symbols in the floor plan you can then save them as simple 2D objects (see your Reference Manual found under the Help menu). While objects made that way are not intelligent and only have the pen/fill/material/etc. of the initial drawing you used to make the object. However, if you know some basic GDL (the object language used by ArchiCAD) then you can either code the objects from scratch or at least adjust the simple ones you make from the floor plan to give them some simple intelligence.

Re: Electrical Designs

Karl Frost — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 00:56:18 GMT

For symbols also look at the ArchiCAD objects library - there are a number of electrical symbols which may suit under the "2D Elements > Electric Symbols" subfolder.