Terminals

January 2021

Terminals provide a connection point within your circuit to make it easier to wire up components and typically external items outside of the control cabinet.

Circuit includes a feature to add Terminals to your schematic, plus number them so they can be uniquely identified to assist in wiring connection accuracy.

In the above example we have added 4 terminals of X1 Series to allow the pushbutton and the lamp to be mounted outside the control panel and wired into the circuit.

Setting Up Terminals

The steps to using Terminals are as follows:-

• • use the Node toolbar to select and add Terminals to your Sheet (there are 2 types - vertical and horizontal)...

• • assign a gene of $terminal, element of main, Group and Text attributes to the primary Terminal element in any Series

  • assign a gene of $terminal and Group only to all subsequent Terminals in the same Group

  • run the Assign Terminals feature to complete

A terminal Series would be groups of terminals with the same function or placement, for example all common 24VDC terminals could a series, all terminals in a remote control station might be another series.

In our example all 4 terminals are in the same enclosure and facilitate the remote controls to be wired in, so just one Series, X1 would be sufficient.

First Series Node Setup

Add the first vertical node...

Then double-click into it and ensure it has the following attributes assigned, in the order of $terminal, main and X1 as shown...

No need to set the text of X1 as this will be updated automatically later when the Assign Terminals function is run, though for a large project entering a Text now might be helpful for a visual clue.

Additional Series Nodes

For each and every subsequent node in this Series set the attributes as follows...

Assign Terminals

This function will enable you top automatically number all the terminals in all the Series in your project.

Now SAVE the Sheet before the last step!

To run the terminal numbering function, choose Circuit > Assign Terminals...

To add automatic numbers press the [Number] button...

Terminal numbering will be updated...

Press [Commit] to write these values back to the terminals on the schematic.

The result should reflect the screenshot at the top of this page.

Manual Terminal Numbering

Of course, as with most things Circuit, using the above automation is entirely optional.

You can freely edit the text reference of terminals to suit your needs, just tap your required reference right into the text row, for example...

That's all for adding Terminals for now.