Brewing with Electricity: The SOLIDWORKS Brewery Part 7: The Clean Up

It’s been a long day, but it looks like our brew day has been a complete success! There’s just one more step we need to complete before we can drink some celebratory beer… and that’s clean everything up.

Clean up is a vital piece of the process. All of our gaskets, fittings, hoses, and kettles were taken apart and washed down, because it ensures our equipment remains functional and efficient for the next time we decide to conduct a brew day.

This same mentality applies to our SOLIDWORKS Electrical projects. When we’re just about done with the design process, we need to add the finishing touches by generating our wire numbers, bill of materials, and our to-from wire list – just to name a few.

In the past, we would typically generate this information separately from the actual schematic – usually in some type of spreadsheet. Even though this method might fit into our comfort zone, it is extremely prone to errors. If things are changing within our design, we now have multiple places we need to account for those changes.

Why not generate all that peripheral information and reports right in the schematic design software? You’re already adding all this information up front in your schematic – so why not pull that information out on the backend so you don’t have to sit in front of Excel for a week straight making sure you captured all the parts. We can even capture all the part information for the auxiliary components we forgot to order last time!

We can take it a step further and generate our to-from wire list and make it even more intelligent by routing our wires in the 3D space, which will also give us a length for each individual wire in our project. This can be extremely useful logistically, because now we can figure out how much wire we will need before we start manufacturing and assembling our project. This is also useful in communicating our design to the shop floor or to a contractor who is building wire assemblies for us.

All in all, SOLIDWORKS Electrical helps us to make our design process more intelligent, more efficient, and even more effective. I strongly recommend checking it out for yourself.

For a hands-on demonstration of the software, contact your local reseller, or visit www.solidworks.com

If you’ve enjoyed this mini-series, keep an eye out for additional brewing videos that include the rest of the SOLIDWORKS portfolio – Simulation, Composer, Visualize – just to name a few!

If you are still looking for more great information on SOLIDWORKS Electrical, including topics such as “Understanding Project Macros,” check out our videos on these more detailed topics at my.solidworks.com – simply search for Electric Brewery.

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