EPLAN has announced important upgrades to EPLAN Electric P8, its highly regarded computer aided engineering (CAE) package for electrical applications. The latest version of the software, EPLAN Platform 2.8, has a new graphical user interface, enhanced ergonomics and augmented macro technology. It boasts additional enhancements in the areas of configuration, bus data, and round-trip engineering with Siemens TIA Portal.
The new version of EPLAN Electric P8 incorporates a variety of improvements in the bi-directional interaction between EPLAN and the Siemens TIA Portal. Users will benefit from the AutomationML format which effectively supports round-trip engineering and optimises the configuration of PLC data. In the “Edit terminal strip” dialogue, users will soon be able to assign several alignable accessories at the same time. All of the devices selected in the appropriate context menu are then assigned to the marked terminal strip, which saves time and helps to reduce design costs.
A new menu item makes it easy for engineers to transfer configuration projects – for instance the data for a PLC box – to the corresponding bus ports, eliminating the time-consuming task of manually inputting the data for each individual port. If an individual bus port is assigned to another configuration project, this value can then be manually changed, which provides more flexibility during the design process.
Until now, EPLAN Electric P8 users could only input bus data for single-line network/bus wiring cable connections, but the new version supports properties dialogue for bus connections in the “Bus data” tab for all representation types. This means that bus data can be entered into the schematic and displayed without a single-line representation being specified. A key advantage is that the bus data is no longer deleted when changing the representation type, which offers greater flexibility.
The new version of the EPLAN Electric P8 is available across the UK to new and current customers. For more information and support, simply email [email protected].
