Announcement
March 25, 2015

The AutoCAD Electrical 2016 release addresses the feedback made by the day-to-day users. With the 2016 release you will notice a tightly coupled interface with Autodesk Inventor Professional 2016, allowing for real-time collaboration for electrical and mechanical engineers.
Among other improvements a new Location View allows for all components, wires, and harnesses to be linked and design changes kept in sync. The user can now see all of the metadata, wire lengths, connectivity, and network information at a glance.AutoCAD Electrical 1

Coupling the 3D layout and the 2D schematic builds greater confidence that the engineering team is on the same page. Not only does it help reduce costly errors, but it also allows the team to be confident that they are working from the same design.AutoCAD Electrical 2

The Location View in AutoCAD Electrical 2016 is used to provide a hierarchical view of all the components, connectivity, and metadata. Search directly in the view to the representation in your designs. The Location View allows for an easy glance to see all of your data sorted by installation and location. Engineers can now quickly review work of fellow team members and be confident the project is in great shape.AutoCAD Electrical 3

Take note to these other improvements made:

  • Intelligent default wire sequencing that follows the same settings as retagging or wire numbering logic.
  • Child components linked directly to the parent with the dashed link line are filtered out of the cross-referencing on the parent component.
  • Buttons for rating defaults added to the View / Edit Rating Values dialog box when editing a panel component. Previously available only on schematic components.
  • The Insert\Edit Component dialog box opens when you insert a parametric connector so you can further annotate the connector.
  • The Copy Circuit command defaults to selecting multiple insertion points for creating multiple copies on the same drawing.
  • A new Circuit Builder API is available to link components within a circuit with a dashed link line.
  • Terminal Strip Editor lets you save the internal and external device assignments.
  • Wire number attribute (W01USER-W10USER) support. (frequent user request)
  • Connector dialog settings remembered across sessions. (frequent user request)
  • Dialog options to make it easier to annotate one-line symbols from schematics.

Have questions about AutoCAD Electrical 2016?  Contact us or ask an expert.