Using Excitech Tools to Create Coordinate Schedules

Have you ever adventured into the land of site works in Revit and needed to provide contractors with eastings and northings but not known how to go about it?

There is a great way to do it with a free addin from Excitech called The Revit Toolkit. You need to create an account with Excitech to download the addin, but it is otherwise free of charge.

Due to limitations with Revit family categories, Excitech can only work with some element types so because of this, I have decided to use the Telephone Devices family category for what I will call my Excitech Marker however you can use any one of the supported family categories that you like, just make sure that you set the marker family to shared in the family categories dialogue.

2015-03-20_9-56-35

The marker itself is just a simple small extrusion; mine is a 50dia x 15mm cylinder that resembles a hockey puck. You could also use model lines however I wanted to be able to see the marker in all views, not just floor plans.

2015-03-20_8-59-04

Within the family, I have added a shared parameter named ITEM_ID, the parameter is an instance parameter and I’ve placed it under the Identity Data group. The ITEM_ID parameter is included so that you can easily identify an item, in the example of a pit it would be the pit number. You can use any suitable parameter that you have created previously.

2015-03-20_9-03-23

I’ll save a master copy of this family as EXCITECH_MARKER_X_R15.RFA. The X will later change depending on what family we are nesting the marker into as this will allow us to sort our schedule far easier. As you can see in the screenshot below, I’ve nested the marker into a hydraulic pit family and renamed the nest marker family EXCITECH_MARKER_GRATED PIT_R15

2015-03-20_9-12-01

 

I’ve also added the same ITEM_ID shared parameter as an instance to the hydraulic pit and mapped it through to the nested marker.

2015-03-20_9-18-38

 

Once done, load the family into your model, I’ve placed mine in an example model at varying locations.

2015-03-20_9-25-30

The next step is to create the coordinate schedule itself. First, you want to select the create parameters button in the Excitech Toolkit and select the family category that you decided to use from the list. This will create parameters named ExcitechX, ExcitechY and ExcitechZ and associate them with your selected family categories.

2015-03-20_9-54-41

Next you want to select your settings from user options in Excitech Toolkit. Make sure that you again select the category to publish coordinates to and then choose either project or survey coordinates, you most likely want survey coordinates but it will depend on your project setup.

You can also choose when you will be prompted to update the coordinates, however I’m leaving all these unchecked.

2015-03-20_9-59-31

Finally, click on coordinate schedule to publish the coordinates to the Excitech parameters.

2015-03-20_10-14-23

 

To finish up, we want to configure our schedule, remember the schedule is for whatever family category you made your marker, in this example even though we are scheduling the coordinates of hydraulic pits, the category of our marker is Telephone Devices.

2015-03-20_9-53-51

Select all the relevant parameters for the schedule. I have selected ITEM_ID, Family and Type, ExcitechX and ExcitechY which are all highlighted in yellow below. The parameters that are highlighted in blue are calculated values.

2015-03-20_10-03-42

 

The reason I have the calculated values is that site works contractors will usually work in metres rather than millimetres like a building services contractor would. The calculated value is a length parameter and simply ExcitechX * 1 and ExcitechY * 1. Multiplying by 1 is required t convert the Excitech number parameter to a length parameter.

2015-03-20_10-02-28

 

Under the sorting and grouping tab, sort by Family and Type and then by ITEM_ID. If you’re scheduling different types of elements and therefore different marker family names, check the blank line box after Family and Type, this will give clean separation in your schedule between different element types.

2015-03-20_11-22-45

 

Next, hide the Excitech parameters from your schedule as well as the Family and Type parameter.

To match the standard accepted format of coordinates in metres with 3 decimal places simply change the format of the calculated values to reflect.

2015-03-20_10-04-03

 

Your schedule output should look something like this

 

You can locate your newly created coordinate schedule on one of your drawings or alternatively you can also export your coordinate schedule to a *.CSV file using export -> schedule to format or distribute as required.

2015-03-20_11-32-20

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.