Una Nueva Herramienta CAD para Asistir a Estudiantes de Diseño Industrial en la Realización de Esquemas Eléctricos -- CADDI

Abstract

The subject Industrial Design taught in most of the engineering degrees is composed of several parts. One of those parts consists in the creation of electrical diagrams and its transformation to other type of diagrams. Depending on the degree, students often find difficulties in understanding electrical diagrams. Moreover, the available practical resources for the students is scarce, thus a didactic tool that can automatically generate the ladder diagram out of the wiring diagram would be extremely useful for them in their studies. Unfortunately, such a tool does not exist yet. We present in this paper a novel CAD tool that offers this functionality. In this work we present CADDI, a tool designed to help students better understanding wiring and ladder diagrams. In CADDI, the user can either draw the ladder diagram using its graphical interface, or code the wiring diagram using a novel simple programming language, and it will automatically generate its corresponding ladder diagram. The mentioned new language was especially designed for this purpose by the students of Automata Theory and Formal Languages subject, from Computer Science Engineering degree of the University of Cádiz. In order to make CADDI accessible to all students, it was implemented as a web page. The tool is a great assistance for students. Since its implementation, the students use it regularly during their studies.