When one considers equipment families (electrical or mechanical), then one can easily select them by category in Dynamo.

However, electrical panels, for instance, is differentiated from other sub categories of equipment through their built-in Part Type Parameter.

Here the parameter name is shown it is in the Application Programming Interface (API)

Here are the possible enumerations in the API.

When one interrogates the equipment elements for their type property value, they return an integer. This integer corresponds to the index in the enumeration, and one needs to create a dictionary to interpret the value, as I have created below.

Next the electrical equipment is paired down to the panels through a mask based on the part type.

At the time of writing this blog I am working on isolating the panels directly in the FilteredElementSelector using a rule instead.

Clearly the same method must be used for the rest of the categories when they need to be broken up by part type.

On very large projects a lot of time can be saved by using the FilteredElementSelector to exclude all other fart types in the selection, as this used less overhead resources.

If you need help using Revit, Dynamo or Python, or if you would like to have Micrographics to program applications for your automation, please do not hesitate to contact us so we may be of assistance. Depending on the task, automation can save you hundreds (if not thousands) of man hours and is worth the investment.