SolidWorks Electrical Quick Tip - Numbering Wires

By Hawk Ridge Systems Engineering Team 

During the design of an electrical project, we typically need to add marks to call out our wires. This can be done through a predefined numbering scheme. SolidWorks Electrical has built-in tools to quickly label all of the wires in the project. We’ll examine a few of these tools.

The schematic shown below still requires numbering to be added to the wires.

The act of adding the numbers just requires the push of a button. This is done through the Process tab of the command ribbon by using the either the “Number new wires” or the “Renumber Wires” commands. If only it were that easy… Well, it is. That’s all there is to it.

Well, it's that easy if everything is set up. Let’s start with the Project Settings.

We can determine the direction of the numbering, working its way left to right, then top to bottom - or top to bottom, then left to right - by using the toggle button. We can also access the Wire Style manager where we set the display and type of numbering.

In the Wire Style manager, we can choose to display the wire number for each wire either once per page or at every symbol connection. We can also choose to number each wire with a unique number or number all wires with the same equipotential with the same mark. We organize the wire styles into numbering groups with a numbering formula applied to the individual wire styles in the group.

By selecting the wire group and clicking on Properties, the numbering can be activated or deactivated. The scheme for multiple wires can also be adjusted to share a common number for each wire in a group.

After numbering the wires, the marks are placed next to each segment. These marks will be used to call out each wire in the generated reports of the project.

At this point, we would review the wire numbering to ensure the scheme is set up correctly. If needed, we may manually override the wire marks. By right-clicking on the wire, we can see the marks for the equipotential and the wires selected. Through this dialogue box, we can manually edit the marks for the selected wires.

Since all of this information is handled in a SQL database, like the rest of the information in SolidWorks Electrical, we can reuse and quickly export this information. This is one of the many tools in SolidWorks Electrical that speeds up our design process and reduces mistakes.