The Wiring Diagram Generator has proven to be the most successful script in my portfolio. It has been used on 5 projects and has wired several thousand instruments with no negative feedback.
I was tasked with developing that script to synergize database with CAD drawings. In the past, the designer typed all of the data in a CAD drawing manually, and had the instrument termination drawing on one side with the IO list containing DCS termination on the other side. Having a junction box complicated that process even more.
Since the majority of instrumentation has the same wiring schema, showing just one representative wiring diagram for a group of instruments and table below with instrument specific data significantly compacts drawings and makes it more coherent for the wiring crew on site. A table is also easy to build with external data e.g. Access database.
All wiring data like instrument terminations, cable tags, wire colors etc. are stored in the Access instrument table within the dedicated fields. All available Access functions like filtering, copying, etc. make the wiring design process fast and relatively easy. The [Tag Generator] script can be used to fill the cable tag field.
Once all necessary fields are populated, the Access query collects wiring info along with the DCS/PLC termination data and generates an Excel export file. The program running on the Excel platform loads the export file, creates new Microstation documents with instrument wiring schema, builds the table, and pastes it into the Microstation drawing as an embedded Excel document. This function makes the document easy to edit in the future. The script populates the title block with the drawing number and title. Afterwards, the drawing is closed and the process mentioned above is repeated.
The program also has an option to generate wiring diagrams in Excel spreadsheets (!) if CAD software is not available. The drawings printed out of the Microstation document and Excel spreadsheet are visually identical.
The wiring diagrams can be generated as AutoCad or Visio documents as well.
There is no need to track changes on wiring diagrams to cloud them. Having saved previous Excel export file all changes can be marked up with Compare Spreadsheets script and all colored cells will be transferred to next revision drawing.