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.