In the Pipes

Girl in Oz, again

So I'm back in Australia again.  This makes it my third trip to Australia in 18 months.  It's no Amsterdam, but I am finding that I am starting to appreciate this place. I'm learning new words: Stubby. Punter. Wild rocket. I verified that water from the bath drains counter-clockwise. I feel I should apologize to previous bosses about my years of refusing to travel down under. So if anyone sees Rich, tell him I'm sorry!   

My hotel room is right on the beach - beautiful to look out at the Pacific when I get down time in the room. It's odd to be looking east over the Pacific and not west like we do from California. This morning there were surfers and dolphins visible from my window, as well a ships in the distance queuing to load up on coal. Although after a while of watching the waves crash I remember that I'm irrationally afraid of whales (too many Jonah stories in my childhood or something), and close the curtains.  It is a fun phobia to have, particularly that year or two I worked offshore oil rigs.

Anyway, this time I'm here to teach a seminar to first year engineering students at University of Newcastle.  I am amazed at how fast these students pick up software.  Rarely have a had a class that everyone kept up as I introduced entirely new software concepts - but this group of 40 stay right with me, and sometimes get rather a bit ahead.  They remind me of some annoying Whitney Houston song or something.  It certainly is a different experience for me to talk to university students -  they are so quick with the technology, but clearly have no idea what I mean when I start using industry terms like loop or spec or pig.  (I did spend some time defining the pig for the class.)   

It's a 12 hour course on P&ID, and I took the liberty of expanding the scope to cover the broader topic of Plant design - discussing the FEED stage, PDFs, P&IDs, 3D detailed design, Orthos & Isos, procurement, fabrication and construction.  When I studied engineering we never had much of the "real world" sort of overview.  I'm hoping at least some of it sinks in. This is is the first University where we present Autodesk Plant software, although we do have intentions to get it into other institutions.  If you happen to know of others that may be interesting in such a session, please let me know.

Introducing P&ID Property Acquisition

It's Friday in April at Autodesk, and we just had one of our division parties -  Champagne (well actually Cava) and chocolate covered berries.  I love my job!  Lynn Allen was here, but I didn't get a chance to talk with her.  I was busy talking to designers about design stuff, and deciding if I could/should have another glass of Champagne before blogging. . .

Anyhooo - I'm been wanting to introduce another one of the new features in AutoCAD P&ID 2009 for some time now.  I've been bogged down in a frantic work stretch, Easter and other distractions, but things are quiet this afternoon (if one can ignore the Xbox 360 gaming going on down the hall).  A perfect time to write!

In P&ID 2009 we introduce a feature we call Property Acquisition.  In previous versions of P&ID, when you insert a valve in a pipe line, the valve inherited that line's size and spec.  Or if you attached a pipe line to a nozzle, the nozzle will acquire that line's size.  If you wanted to, you could override the acquired size, but normally you wanted the size/specs to say in sync.  This inheritance behavior was hard coded - and while it made sense, it wasn't clearly indicated in the dialogs.  You had no visual clue telling you what was being acquired and what wasn't.

Additionally, we received a few customer queries on if other properties could also get this inheritance behavior.  Thus, in AutoCAD P&ID 2009, the "Property Acquisition" feature was developed.

Now in P&ID 2009, you can see immediately what data properties are acquired.  For example, if you look at the Properties palette for an inline valve, you will see a new lightning bolt icon on the size and spec properties. (I used to call this the SHAZAM marker, but people told me I was dating myself.)  And you find that this property is read only. If you click on the property in order to change the value, you get a tooltip that informs you that this property is in acquire mode.  At this point you get the chance to change from acquire mode to override mode.  If you change to override mode, you can key in a new value.  In override mode, the icon changes to from the lightning bolt to a user icon.   (Similar iconic indications are displayed in data manager.)

 

For new properties, you can use project setup to set acquisition behavior.  You can set up property acquisition rules when the following component relationships exist:

• Line and inline asset
• Line and start asset
• Line and end asset
• Annotated and annotation
• Line and break
• Line and off  page connector
• Line and nozzle
• Pipe line group and pipe line
• Connected off page connectors
• Between a control valve and its actuator

The P&ID 2008 help topic "Set Up Property Acquisition" has a good explanation on how to setup property propagation for your own project properties.  Basically you set the property as type to Acquisition, then select the source value.  

 

Pretty neat.  Wish I could take credit for this design, but I can't, as it came out of our team in Singapore.  You go guys!