Compile Error after Windows Update on 11th April 2012.

On the 11th of April, Microsoft released a Window update that causes a Compile Error in Hidden Module when you open Electra.

To fix the error, please follow the instructions listed below:

1. Close Visio and Electra.
2. Look for the following folder:

Window XP:
C:\Documents and Settings\%USERNAME%\Application Data\Microsoft\Forms\
Window Vista/7:
C:\Users\%USERNAME%\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Forms\


To browse and open the folder, copy and paste the path above onto your Window Explorer. The "%USERNAME%" will be automatically renamed by Windows to your current username.


3. Delete all files ending with .exd

Backup these files if necessary by renaming them from "MSComDlg.exd" to "MSComDlg_bak.exd". Once these files are deleted, Windows will automatically recreate them when they are needed.


4. Run Visio and Electra, and the error should be fixed.

Thanks for your patience.

Optimal Visio Settings for Electra.

Over here at Radica Software, we have setup our systems to work great with Electra. In this blog post, we would like to share with you these settings, so that you may get an optimal performance out of Electra.

Macro and Security Settings.

To access Macro and security settings:

In Visio 2010, click on menu File | Options. Then at the Visio Options window, click on Trust Center tab and select Trust Center Settings. In Visio 2007, click on menu Tools | Trust Center.

Our Trust Center settings are as below:

In Visio 2003, click on menu Tools | Options. At the Options window, click on Security tab and select Macro Security.

Our Security settings are as below:

Visio Settings.

To access Visio settings:

In Visio 2010, click on menu File | Option | Advanced.

In Visio 2003 / 2007, click on menu Tools | Options.

Snap & Glue Settings.

In Visio 2010, click on the View tab and then click on the small arrow beside Visual Aids. In Visio 2007 / 2003, click on menu Tools | Snap & Glue.

Our Snap & Glue settings are as below:

We strongly recommend that you set your Visio settings to the above in order to have an optimal experience in Electra. Thanks for reading.

Proudly authored by: Kok Wai Yin

New in R216: Single Line Symbols.

In addition to a bunch of bug fixes and updates, we have also released some Single Line symbols that nicely complement the symbols we already have in the Electra package.

To access these symbols, click on the "More Shapes" on the left stencil area, and select "Single E6".

These Single Line symbols work like normal Electra symbols and can automatically resize if you put them on pages with different units of measurement, in addition to ebing able to rotate them horizontally and vertically with a right click.

Expect more updates and benefits soon in the next R217 release.

How to Import and Export AutoCAD Drawings.

If you have some AutoCAD drawings, be it in DWG or DXF, and wanted to use them in Electra, the good news is, they can be easily imported and exported into Visio, and once imported, can be easily made into schematic symbols or a layout symbols.

To import an AutoCAD drawing, simply click on the Insert tab, CAD Drawing and then select your DWG or DXF to be imported.

Once imported, the CAD drawing is opened as a read-only ActiveX object. The object's contents can be viewed but cannot be edited. To edit the object, we need to convert the AutoCAD drawing into a native Visio shape.

To convert the imported CAD drawing, right click on the object and select CAD Drawing Object and then click on convert.

Once converted, we can use it to make schematic symbol or layout symbol.

To create a schematic symbol, select the shape and click on Create Schematic Symbol under the Electra menu. Once you have filled in the required information, click okay and your custom symbol will be added into your custom stencil.

To create layout symbol, select the shape and click on Create Layout Symbol. Fill in the required information and your custom layout symbol will be automatically added into the layout stencil.

To understand more about creating layout symbols, refer to the help file or this tutorial video: Electra E6 Tutorial Part 9: Panel Layouts and Creating Layout Symbols (Youtube).

Electra also let you to export your drawings as an AutoCAD drawing. To do this, simply save your document type as AutoCAD Drawing or AutoCAD Interchange.

We hope with this post you will get to re-use some of your old AutoCAD drawings and also export them for other AutoCAD users. Thanks for reading.

Proudly authored by: Kok Wai Yin

Unit Agnostic Symbols and Circuits.

What is Unit Agnosticism? Simply said, it is when your symbols and circuits do not rely on a particular measurement unit. Why is it important? Because if you draw a symbol in inches, then you could not use it on a page set to any other measurement unit as it will not scale nor align correctly with the grid. In other words, you would need to draw a symbol or a circuit in inches and redo the same thing if you wanted to use it on a page set to millimeters. Let's have a closer look:

When you first open a new drawing in Electra, the default measurement unit will be in inches (internally Visio uses this unit as well). This is all good as Electra's symbols are designed for this unit and when placed on a drawing, the connection points are always aligned properly with the grid to enable easy, straight and direct connection to wires.

Despite this, increasingly, we find that many users may need to draw circuits in other units like mm, cm or even meters. It used to be, when Electra's symbols were placed on any metric system grid, our symbols will be out of alignment with the grid, and therefore, making it difficult to connect wires that are straight and easily aligned to grid.

With the launching of unit agnostic symbols on Electra E6, this is all a thing of the past. For the first time in an electrical CAD software, your symbols will scale, size and align properly irregardless of whether you drop them on a page with inches, mm, cm or meters as measurement units.

Unit agnocstic symbols automatically aligned to grid irrespective of page meansurement units.

All this is transparent to the user, and happens automagically without the need for a user to do anything. When a symbol is dropped on a page, Electra automatically detects the page units and adjust accordingly.

The best thing is, all user created symbols, including those created before this release will also be automatically scaled and aligned to grid, all transparently, without the need for users to do a single thing. Even when you duplicate a symbol from a page with one unit to another with a different unit, and back, Electra will automatically scale and align everything to ensure that your symbols will be on grid irrespective of your page units. Naturally, when you manually resize your symbol by dragging on the handles, Electra will detect this resizing and retain their sizes to skip automatic resizing.

Symbols automatically scaled to align to grid, even when copied or duplicated from pages with different units.

While we are at it, why stop at symbols? Entire circuits can be automatically resized too. Therefore, when you make a circuit on a page in inches, they will automatically resize and align on a grid with millimeters when copied over, all transparently. Prefab circuits dropped from stencils, user created prefab circuits created before this release, circuits copied from a different page unit will all automatically be resized and aligned to grid transparently.

Circuits from different page units automatically resized to align properly on grid.

In simple words, Electra users can now create symbols and circuits and rest assured that all of them will scale well and align on grid, irrespective of whether they choose to create these circuits on a page with inches, mm, cm or meters. That's great, but what if, for some reasons, you don't want to resize automatically? No problem, you can set Electra to resize or not resize through a simple option in Document Options (Automatic resizing turned on by default):

Turn off or on automatic resizing in Document Options.

One last thing, when you do choose to draw your circuits in metric systems (mm, cm, meters), our recommendation is that you set your scaling to 1:1.5 or 1:1.25, so that your symbols and circuits is displayed at about optimum size for circuit creation.

Don't forget to comment or email us as we always welcome feedback. Thanks.

3 Tips to Customize Electra for Faster Electrical Circuit Design.

Did you know that your Electrical Schematic Software is infinitely and easily customizable? Listed below are three tips that we hope will get you started right away:

1. Customizing your own New Drawing template.

If you have worked with Electra for a while, chances are, you will have some stencils of your own. Wouldn't it be great if every time you started a new drawing, Electra would automatically load all your stencils for you? Here's how:

• Open a new drawing by clicking on "New Electra Drawing".
• On the left, click on "More Shapes", then "Open stencils" and load all your stencils.
• Click on File, Save As, and made sure to select "Save as Type" as Template and perhaps name your file "My New Drawing".

From now on, when you need to start a new Electra drawing, click on "My New Drawing" and Electra will start up and automatically load all your stencils, ready for your usage.

2. Assigning Default Components to Symbols.

When you drop a standard symbol from a stencil that is supplied by Electra, the symbol would already have a default component attached to it. For example, if you drop a contactor symbol, the default component will be a generic contactor. While this is all good and dandy, we fully understand that most of our users will have their own preference on a brand or model for their contactor. Therefore, rather than manually assigning your own contactor to the symbol each and every time you draw a circuit, you can customize the symbol to default to your own custom contactor.

To customize your symbol to default to a custom component, simply drop the symbol onto your drawing, assign your own component to it, and then drag and drop the symbol onto your custom stencil. That's it.

Drop a symbol onto your drawing, right click and select Edit Reference.

Click on the Component button to edit component information as required.

Drag and drop symbol to save into custom stencil.

From then on, if you drop your contactor symbol from your custom stencil, the symbol will default to your selected component instead of a generic one.

Note: To assign your custom symbol to the same icon as it appears on Electra stencils, right click on an Electra stencil, select "Edit Stencil", then right click on the symbol, select "Edit Master", "Edit Icon Image". Press Ctrl-A to select the entire icon, and then press Ctrl-C to copy the icon.

Go to your custom stencil, right click on your custom symbol, select "Edit Master", "Master Properties", and make sure to uncheck "Show live preview in Shapes Window", then click OK. Right click on the same symbol again, select "Edit Master", "Edit Icon Image", and press Ctrl-A to select the entire icon. Press the DEL key to delete the icon, and then press Ctrl-C to paste in the icon you copied earlier from the Electra stencil.

3. Customizing your own default pin sets.

Let's say you wanted to use Omron's MY series relay for a large project, and if you look closely, it's pins are numbered 5-9, 6-10, 7-11, 8-12 for normally open (NO) contacts and 1-9, 2-10, 3-11, 4-12 for normally closed (NC) contacts. Plus, it has only 4 contacts, therefore, ideally you should be notified, if you exceed this limit.

Electra's default NO and NC contacts has it's pin numbers starting from 13-14 for NO contacts and 11-12 for NC contacts. Here's how to customize your own pin sets and have Electra do the hard work for you:

• Drop a contact onto your drawing, right click on it and select "Set Pin Names".
• Right click on the "13, 14" pin set and select "Edit Pin Set".
• Modify the pin set by typing in "5, 9", then press Enter.
• Repeat the same to change "23, 24" to "6, 10" and "33, 34" to "7, 11" and " 43, 44" to "8, 12".
• Right click on "53, 54" in set and select "Delete Pin Set" to delete.
• Repeat the deletion for pin sets "63, 64" and "73, 74" and "83, 84" and "93, 94".
• Press Enter to complete editing of pin sets.
• Drag and drop your modified symbol onto your own stencil.

From now on, if you wanted to use NO contacts with "5, 9" as default pin sets, just drag and drop your modified symbol onto your drawing. If you drop 5 of them onto your drawing, and name them all with the same reference name, the 5th symbol will automatically show you pin names displayed in red, indicating that you have exhausted all NO contacts in your relay.

New in R215: A Better Symbol.

To start off the New Year, we released R215 which contains a host of bug fixes and also some improvements to the way we make user symbols. The new "Create Schematic Symbol" can now make symbols in both "in" and "mm" measurement units and will size descriptions and text positions much better. In addition, we have made some improvements on the component database, in which components that does not have categories will now be listed in the "No Category" section.

We have also made some updates to our website for better aesthetics and will soon have a bigger release coming.