General terminals

The handling of terminals is a topic which, like the Contactor manager, gives rise to a lot of questions. The following section therefore explains the general functions of  terminals and the internal details of the automatic functions.

Standard terminals each have one internal and one external con­nection and one jumper pin.

The word Terminal includes all components designated as ‘Terminal’.  A normal terminal must have at least 2 connection points.  One of these pins is designated as ‘internal’ by having the pin name attached to this contact.  As a rule this pin is marked by a full stop, but it could be any letter (or ‘+’ or ‘-’).  Our standard terminals each have 3 pins:  one each on the internal and the external sides and also a so-called jumper pin, which can only be used for forming jumpers within a terminal bar.

The reference name of a terminal can be omitted if it can be al­located from another terminal by the auto­matic process.

As the components concerned have special characteristics, you will normally find them in the library ‘ELEKCROS’.  In order that the automatic process can combine the individual terminal connections into a terminal bar, the reference name must be given for each individual terminal connection.  An exception to this are terminal connections where the reference can be trans­ferred from another terminal.  In this instance the automatic process looks for terminals which are drawn on the left at pre­cisely the same height.  Then the reference name must be present only on the left most terminal (or on the top).