How to Design Your First Electrical Schematic — cofaso Tutorial

What's up, Automation Nation, and welcome back to Le Master Tech. In today's video, I'm going to give you an introduction into how to use the electrical CAD software COFASO for engineering schematic creation in industrial controls and automation. Creating electrical diagrams is a super important skill set we need to have, but there aren't that many software providers in this space, and many of them are very expensive and don't have great trial packages or ways to learn the software platform. COFASO provides free licenses to educators and students and has agreed to give any of my viewers who email them at COFASO at COFASO.com and mention code LEMASTERTECH6, a free six-month trial of COFASO, so you can follow along with these tutorials, learn the software, and build out your own projects with this great electrical design software. Now, let's dive into a basic tutorial of how to navigate COFASO and build your first schematic together. You can download and install the software from COFASO.com, and if you need to change the interface language or run into a can't connect to MySQL DB message when booting up the software, be sure to check out COFASO's YouTube channel, as they do have simple one- to two-minute videos showing how to fix these and several other little quirks that can pop up depending on your install. Now, with the software booted up, you can initially see the system tree over here on the left, and if you right-click and just say New Project, this menu to create a new project will open up. And COFASO comes with some good examples as well, so you can see some examples on the left, but let's go ahead and make a new project, and we'll just call it Tutorial. And for now, we're going to leave most of these fields alone, but depending where you are, international or U.S., you might have 480 voltage in your cabinet or you might have 400. You can configure your control and signal voltages and everything else like that from this pop-up menu here. And the only thing I want to hover on before we move on, because this plant designation, drawing number, customer name, address, all this stuff would get populated right into the title block in your cover page. So for today, I'm not going to fill it out, but those are kind of self-explanatory. One thing I do want to call out is this Project Structure field. So the options are 1-Level, 2-Level, or No-Level. There's really no reason to pick No-Levels unless you're just making one simple standalone drawing. But 1-Level and 2-Level, the thing that differentiates them is kind of how complex of a project or a problem you're trying to solve are. So if we take a look at a 1-Level project real quick in Tutorial and we go make a new, we hit the little New page here, and it just wants to say Local Designation 1, and we just say OK. And then we hit New under that. That's going to create a page here. So because we said there's 1-Level, it just says here's your local designation and here's page 1. But if I were to go to Cofasso up here and say New Project, and I'll call this, you know, Tutorial 2, and if I made this a 2-Level project and hit OK, what you'll see now when I hit New is it says High Level. And then if I hit New, then's my local designation and then my page. So the reason that they separate this out into two different levels is because a 2-Level project might be what you want if you're going to be designing every schematic for an entire Greenfield new factory, where you're going to have 30 or 40 new control panels in the factory and you want them all here. It might make sense to have this extra designation level where you can group your different areas of the plant into these high-level groupings, and then you can group your different individual panels into this second-level groupings, and then your actual schematics are under that, OK? So the 2-Levels are a good thing to call out here in the beginning. But let's not worry about 2-Level too much for the rest of this tutorial, OK? I'm going to remove it, but you should just know what that field means. OK, so now we're in page 1 here, and let's take a look at the Symbol Factory in Cofasso, OK? So the Symbol Factory is something you'll find in pretty much every single electrical CAD software. It would be extremely time-consuming, inefficient, and inconsistent across designers if every electrical symbol, like a motor, circuit breaker, junction box, if everything that you had to drop into a panel was completely customized and built by you, it would get super inconsistent. So there are these symbol libraries that have common electrical symbols you'll see in schematics all over, and you can just go into a symbol library and drop in motors, circuit breakers, current protection, things like that. Now, a quick high-level thing about Cofasso, most menus and dropdowns and things in Cofasso heavily rely on the scroll wheel if you want to quickly navigate. So if you see up at the top here where it says IEC for me, if I were to right-click, I can see all of the libraries that currently exist. So there's SYSTEM, there's US STANDARDS, there's some symbols for the IEC here. And then there's also some custom macros that I built while I was working on, like, a panel overview drawing. And Rockwell stuff, Siemens stuff, domestic, you can see. And you can actually make your own symbols as well in the symbol editor. And those all populate in this symbol library. So for today, we're going to be working mostly in the IEC. That's one of the most standard libraries you'll see internationally. So we'll work in IEC today. But another way you can navigate that other than right-clicking and looking around is you can just hover over it and use your scroll wheel to very quickly go through all of the libraries you have available to you. So it's kind of a personal choice thing. If you want to right-click and select exactly what you want or use the scroll wheel to go super fast. And then down here, similarly, you can use the scroll wheel to quickly navigate through all of the symbols in that specific library. And you can see they have a short symbol name designation over here. X123, V123, grouped by part. And we'll use those a little bit later as well. But they also have a description, so a longer description. So you can search through your symbol library with the scroll wheel here. You can see a little preview of the symbol in the pink box below, obviously. But then you can also search in this search bar here at the bottom. So if I was just looking for a motor, I could type in motor and it's going to take me to the motor symbols. Similarly, if I wanted to search by something's short designation, I could type in in that search field like M05 and it'll take me to a three-phase induction motor. So if you have certain favorite symbols that you're using a lot of in your drawings, you will probably learn their short symbol designation and you might just use that as a shortcut to get there. Now, let's actually take a look at this M05 motor as the first component to actually drop onto our schematic and start creating our first electrical diagram. OK, so you can see we have a classic UVW designation for a three-phase motor that also has a protective earth or ground lead on it. And I can hover over this pink box and I can use the scroll wheel to cycle through all the iterations, all the permutations available for that type of object from Cofasso. That's going to be true of any symbol library that you import in any electrical software package is they'll typically come with iterations or variations and they'll be the same part number. But sometimes you might want them displayed, you know, like in the U.S. NEC drawings, NFPA drawings typically have lateral power runs where they're organized into columns. But the IEC standard will typically have your power rails kind of across the top of your screen and come down to your components. So most symbol libraries will have both those options. But for now, let's just go ahead and drop in the standard plain one with them all pointing upward. And we'll kind of do this in the IEC standard here. When I click to drop it in, you'll see that this symbol properties menu pops up and Cofasso gives a nice logical name designation to your motors. So if you don't have a standard or you want to define a naming standard later, you can just use the default Cofasso designation and connection designation to get started real quickly. And you don't have to call out what motor this will be if you don't want to. But you can either search for a part or manually define the name and quantity of part number here as well if you wanted to. But for now, we'll leave those blank and we'll hit OK. And now we have a motor on screen. You can see it's called out M1. It's a three phase induction motor and it's on our first page. So we've added our first component to our first schematic in Cofasso. Next, let's go ahead and drop in terminals to simulate taking kind of the three wires in the ground off of the motor and landing them on terminals inside of a control panel. That's pretty normally the first thing you would do. And we'll type in X01 to search for the basic, just plain terminal. And we'll go up a little bit above phase U and we'll just leave it as default. We'll say, OK, and here's a cool thing. If I go just to the right of that U and then I do V and W and P and I line them up with their phases, Cofasso is going to go one, two, three, four automatically and number those logically. And I don't have to go through the prompt every time because it's like, OK, I see you're doing this sequentially. So it's a nice little inference that the software makes. But now for the PE, we don't really want it just landed on a regular terminal and we don't really want it numbered for. So what we want to do is we want to zoom in on terminal four here and we actually want to double click and go to terminal type. And we're going to make this a PE terminal connector here. And so we'll just select that and hit apply and OK. And you'll see the wire actually turns green, which is nice. And the label stays for. So the next thing we're going to do is go into the numbering tab up here and terminals. And there's a lot of customization in this numbering menu that you can do. But for now, let's just check out what happens when we hit number and leave it on the default settings. It leaves our terminals alone. So now we have this X1 terminal strip with one, two and three being our three motor phases. But it knows that we're going to have a ground terminal elsewhere based on how we defined that terminal. And it renamed it PE. So that's a nice little inference as well. That auto numbering tab is pretty useful in Cofaso. Now, let's go ahead and insert a cable because running between the motor and our terminal box, we wouldn't actually have just four wires. We would put them in a cable. This is a very normal convention in electrical schematics. Chinco Faso will be coming over and clicking these two little blue connectors and then dragging them across the wires we want connected. And this will give us an automatic cable designation name. But in this case, we won't just leave it default. We'll actually hit these three little dots next to part type. And that'll take us to the parts management selection menu. We'll go ahead and make these filters electrical and then we'll select cables. And that'll take us to the available cables in our parts library. And let's take a look at how to define kind of a custom cable. So let's just click on cable 33. And you can see here, it's it's actually just sort of a thing that's fully customizable. So even though its name is cable 33, we can change what color code it uses. DIN, IEC and UL are kind of the most common ones. And then you can select if it has a PE conductor or not, which will automatically tell it whether it should have like a yellow, green or a blue neutral or things like that. And you can also change the number of conductors. So, you know, a very normal like four wire cable is white, brown, green and yellow, green. But if you're using the IEC color standards, it could be black, brown, red and yellow, green. So just select your cable accordingly. It's also fully customizable. So you could make a brand new cable with whatever colors. You could also make a cable that's just numbered conductors. That's very common as well. You can change the conductor cross section size here as well. So let's go ahead and say we have a 10 conductor cable. Obviously, we're powering a motor with three phases and ground. So we'd only need four of those. Right. But let's say we have a 10 conductor cable here and we'll use the din coloring standard and we'll say it has a PE connector and we'll hit OK. And you can see the part number and quantity have populated in here now. And if I hit OK there, you'll actually see it'll say, hey, this is a 10 conductor cable and we're going to use white, brown, green and green, yellow. And so if I was the electrical installer handed this drawing set and I'm like, what the heck? I have 10 conductors inside of this cable. I know which ones to use and which ones to not use based on this drawing convention. And if you need to reposition this cable at any time, the numbering and call outs will move with it, too, which is a nice feature. So next, let's add in some motor protection. I'll go ahead and just select Q03, which is a nice common power switch gear thermal overload protection. And I'll add it a little bit higher here. And I'll just leave all these default designations called out and say, OK. And you can see now I have these two components linked together. And if I were to drag Q1 all over the place because I already made those linked, the wires are going to follow and those are going to be permanently linked because every connection in Kofaso is a real connection, meaning when a wire is connecting two parts together, they're digitally linked. So now let's go ahead and add in some T points over here on our menu, which is going to let us add in the power in feed supply to these components. So we'll just go up pretty high here and we'll add in a little T points above our three phases. And we'll actually take this entire sort of trunk here, this motor plus cable, plus terminals, plus protection and T points. And I'm going to select it all. I'm going to right click and I'm going to accidentally left click. I'm going to right click and I'm going to select copy. And then I'm going to go ahead and paste it in here, making sure to keep the T points aligned for all of them. And I'm actually going to make four total motors. So this is a very common like power distribution schematic for a motor control center or something like that. I have my T points for my three phase components across common rails up top. And we also are going to want to add in T points for our protective earth. So for our ground signals, we'll come down here a little bit lower. There's no need to make those so high for ground. Very normal convention. And now what we want to do is we want to add in the potential arrows that show we're coming in the left and going out the right. That's the normal standard with this three phase power. So to do that, let's actually get off the symbols page and let's go check out the macros page. And for macros, if you have this view that looks kind of like symbol libraries and it seems to be not working just right, you want to come down and hit this wrench in the bottom menu. And this is the view you want for macro. So Kofaso kind of has this folders and files view, and then they also have the other sort of like symbol library scroll view. And we're going to grab Oklar, which means arrows. And we're going to go ahead and drop in L1, L2 and L3, this nice little macro over on the left. And then we'll add its compliment over on the right. And you can see it actually tells us what it's linked to here. So it says, hey, I'm L1. I start here and you can find me again in page one, column 10. And if I go over to column 10, you'll see, hey, I'm page one, column 10, and you can find my counterpart on page one, column one. So it's linked. And that's kind of cool. But we don't need this three arrow macro for the protective earth. We just need ground. So we'll hit the little green arrow here. That's the insert potential arrow manual option. And then we'll go ahead and just drop it in. And I want to change this L4 designation to PE designation, OK? And you can see it connects them and jumpers them all together. And I'll go ahead over on the right and I'll add a PE there as well. So this is a pretty good page that we have here. We have a motor circuit with four different motors on it. It shows what cable needs to get run, the overload protection we'll be getting and where the source of power is coming into all in just a few clicks with this pretty cool software. Let's go a step further and check out how components actually cross reference each other across pages. OK, so to do this, we'll go to projects and we'll add a new page into our project. Make sure to save when you're prompted to do so. And now let's go ahead and start by going to macros and back to Oklar. And let's just add in our potential arrows across the top again, just like we did on the last page. And one cool thing you'll see if we click back to the first page now and save this page, you'll see because L1, L2 and L3, their source is kind of here. Their cross reference callouts have gone away. That's the start. And then it goes over here and it says here, the next place you can find me is page two, column one. And if we go to page two, column one. Similarly, it says, OK, I came from page one, column ten. And then because this is the end, there's no cross reference. So that's kind of cool. You can see how fast the power feed is linked across pages in Kofaso. Now, let's go ahead and say we want to add in a contactor with a relay coil that's actually going to control one of those motors. So so to do that, we'll go back into the symbol library and we'll look for a contactor. K01 is a good just contactor and we'll just drop it on the page here and we'll take a look at this contactor selection button. So this is a unique thing in Kofaso where you can see it's kind of like the symbol library or cable menu we saw, but these will be only components that are added to the symbol library that can work as relay coil contactors. So we'll just grab one for this demonstration. Let's grab SIETF522220APA0. Again, you know, that's just for the sake of demonstration, but it's a good contactor with kind of a very normal terminal loadout. And you'll see once we've said what this contactor needs to be, all the proper terminals are displayed on this page, but nothing's been linked to them yet. So let's say the contactor exists here and let's go back to the first page and we'll take a look at where we might want to add those. So let's go to Q2, our motor over here, and let's say that we want to put a power circuit breaker in. So back to symbol library and we want a what would it be? C08, no, S08 power supply circuit breaker. And we just put that in line with this outfeed phase here. So we say, OK, and you'll see you have a little question mark here on the call out because it doesn't know what to link it to. But if we hit this three little dots and we say you're coming off the contactor LOD K1 that shows up in this designation menu, you'll see now it says, OK, K1 is on page two, column two, but it also exists on this page here. And if we add this to the other phases, we make sure it's K1. The connection designation will automatically increment to the next available terminals that could work. So you see, we add that three times and now we've said there's a contactor on the next page, but it's power breaker. It's circuit breaker is represented on this page. So if we go ahead and save this and we go back to page two, we can go down here and we can see, OK, here's my contactor. And one in two are representative on page one, column four. So are three and four and five and six are on page one, column five. So that's a pretty cool cross page linking where you can add a component on one page, but then it also aspects of that component show up on another page. And Kofaso automatically can link those components across both pages. OK, so I know that was a pretty dense tutorial and we covered a lot of stuff very quickly. But hopefully you can see how powerful a software this is. It's really cool. Kofaso has agreed to give everybody a six month free license. So email them Kofaso at Kofaso dot com. Mention Code Le Master Tech six and they'll hook you up with this software so you can start designing your own circuits completely for free. Let me know in the comments if you have any questions for me. Be sure to check out Kofaso's YouTube channel if you have any other further education sort of questions and tutorials, or you can always reach me in the comments below this video and I'll get back to you as soon as I can as well. Thank you very much to Kofaso for sponsoring this video. And we'll see in the next one.