Electrical schematic entry software / Subcontracting cabling

Slightly off-topic maybe:

Our company has a recuring problem : subsystems send out for cabling at subcontractors are often returned miswired. It seems that they always misinterprete our schematics. Partly i think this is because the people whoe actually carry out the cabling are not electrical engineers.

The electronic schematic entry and pcb layout software we are using are working out well for our electronic (pcb based) projects. But we don't find them very user friendly for designing cabling, cable harnasses, subsystems etc.

I think that most electronic schematic entry software don't allow very well to represent how a real system is build. While most mechanical CAD software do a very good job at representing the physical world, they do a poor job representing an electrical schematic. (ea Autocad Electrical)

Does anyone knows affordable packages that fill the gap between pure electronic and mechanical cad. (We don't need much rule checking and automation)

Thx

Stan

Reply to
stijnvanorbeek
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It depends on the type of cabling you are needing. If it is straight end to end between connectors (with limited links) then a cable schedule can be created in a spreadsheet package without too much effort (I use these a lot where I am working currently - but then we have a lot of cables). If the cable has some links at the connector these can be shown as drawn on bridges with the later versions of Excel and Open Office.

If it is an internal to a box cable loom then you may find that some PCB schematic capture packages are able to do that much better. These packages need to properly manage hierarchical design levels (OrCAD is a bit clunky in this respect but UltiCap and Ultiboard - now part of Electronics Workbench - was better at it).

Also, behind the electrical/electroinc CAD packages there is usually a mechanical CAD package and you should maybe explore that also. OrCAD comes with IntelliCAD which can deal with CAD in 3D. This may take some getting used to.

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Paul E. Bennett...............
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Reply to
Paul E. Bennett

Proper cable drawings, of the sort that I've seen for avionics equipment (which tend to have _lots_ of cables) don't look much like schematics. I've only been close enough to see them done in one place; there they were done in Autocad, and the folks doing them were quite happy with the process.

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Tim Wescott
Control systems and communications consulting
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Reply to
Tim Wescott

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Most aircraft these days are designed with Dassault's CATIA, I'm quite sure that it has a module for designing cabling and fitting it within the airframe. It's a very expensive piece of software, though.

Leon

Reply to
Leon

Here are some of of the more well-known packages:

WireCAD Pro $1499 WireCAD XLT $999 WireCAD XL $399

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CableCAD $7,495

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Solid Edge Wire Harness Design / XpresRoute

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Solid Edge XpresRoute Node Locked: 995.00 / Year Prerequisite: Solid Edge Classic - Node Locked (1,296.00 / Year) Solid Edge XpresRoute Floating: 1,795.00 /year Prerequisite: Solid Edge Classic Floating (5,095.00 / year per seat, minimum order of five seats)

The only one of the above that I have personal experience with is Solid Edge without XpresRoute, and I like it a lot. Some folks like Solidworks or Autodesk Inventor better; I don't know how well they do harnesses. I have worked with full Autocad, and in my opinion using it for cable diagrams is like planting a tulip with a bulldozer.

That being said, I would question the reason *why* you have a recurring miswiring problem. You are assuming that the problem is with your CAD software, but you didn't specify exactly what features you think would help, which (along with your comment about wishing that the assemblers were EEs) makes me suspect that the problem is that the people on your end who are making the drawings are not "speaking the same language" as the people making the wiring harnesses. This is quite common; EEs who speak the same language as PWB houses are more common than EEs who speak the same language as cable harness houses.

I would also at least ask whether a repartitioned overall design with a simpler cabling harness is possible. Again, EEs who make really good PWB designs are more common than EEs who know how to make really good wiring harness designs.

Depending on the size of your company and how many designs you do per year, it might make sense to hire an engineering consultant to come in and review your design process from top to bottom. There are several folks in in this newsgroup who would be good choices, but a lot depends on where they live and where your company is located.

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Guy Macon
Reply to
Guy Macon

Do you also send netlists ?

What sort of errors do they make - incorrect nets, or incorrect wire stub lengths, or incorrect crimp details ?

A good SCH Entry program, with some simple library effort and reports, should make this less confusing ?

ie

** Netnames can be the wire colour codes, ** Nett Attributes can include mfg comments ** Stub dimensioning arrows/text can come from the librtary as 2D combined lines/text ** Connector Attributes can expand to include Terminal.CrimpType ** Connector Attributes can expand to include Terminal.WireSize etc

all of those are possible in Mentor's PADS Logic (Mid priced?), and it has a report scripting language, so you can massage the info into almost any format/sorting you want ( as well as the usual graphical printout )

-jg

Reply to
Jim Granville

Dear Guy,

Thanks for the insights.

We do use Inventor for all mechanical CAD, but we never used the cable/ harnass function. Maybe we should use it give it a try and search for a good workflow between 2D Electrical cad and the 3D harnassing module in Autodesk.

Indeed, it's not just about software. It is about how to document and communicate. I think the problem is about actually building a real world item from a 2D drawing. Where actually is Pin 1 ? Do you count pins at the back or front from a connector ? As a EE we just assume certain thing. A red wire to earth and a yellow/ green wire to 100V rings a bell while assembling a system. For the girls and boys in subcontracting these are just all 'wires'.

I think they need a much more 'mechanical' drawing. Where they realy see in 3D where each wire goes. But drawing all connectors and wires in 3D is a lot of work compared to a 2D electrical schematic. This is the reason why i started looking for a easy to use 'mixed' package preferable with a basic library.

Good idea. I started looking for a good consultant a while ago. But didn't found the right person, that realy understand the whole problem (besides documentation there are other 'cabling' issues: reliability in a harsh enviroment, easy diagnostics, EMC and CE issues, safety..)

We are a SME based in Europe. If anyone feels that he could do a good consulting job on this, he is very welcome to contact us.

Stan

Reply to
stijnvanorbeek

No, we send a electrical schematic and photographs of a prototype.

All sorts of errors, they sometimes wire a circular corrector in the wrong directions, they insert the male contacts into female connectors, mistake black/white and white/black wires.. I could offcoarse blame the subcontractor, but i think that sometimes they just don't know howto.

ok. I agree. Maybe is should include much more details. I take it for granted that they use the correct terminal for a certain wire size.. Maybe i should add much more details.

Reply to
stijnvanorbeek

You can look at a package called Harnware. Raychem (Now bought out by Tyco IIRC) used to give away a license to this package if one placed a reasonable sized order with them. It is quite easy to use, specifically for military type harnesses.

Regards Anton Erasmus

Reply to
Anton Erasmus

You can never give too much information :)

Certainly a netist would help, and if the connector housing has clearly stamped numbers, use those, or a simple end-view (clear for which end, of course! )

On the cables we get, they supply us their manufacturing drawing, and in most cases, also a sample they built.

They _should_ have this, as what if you order a second batch ?

- they also should generate a unique part number for each drawing revision, and the drawing should be unambigious.

Our asian supplier is pretty good, but we caught them a couple of times not revising drawing/part codes for changes. The drawing had RevJ signed off, but the part number, and drawing name, did not change.

They number all connectors, and have a simple matrix table of colours, and pin-pairs.

-jg

Reply to
Jim Granville

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Ant>You can look at a package called Harnware. Raychem (Now bought out by

They appear to now be charging an annual license fee of £250

There is a download here: [

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It's 4.3 MB and I am on a remote jobsite with a slow connection at the moment. I will post a report later after I download and test it.

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Guy Macon
Reply to
Guy Macon

Looks nice, Altough i'm unable to run the download (dongle missing) . Where did you find the pricing info ?

Stan

Reply to
stijnvanorbeek

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snipped-for-privacy@hotmail.com wrote:

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| |From: HarnWare Manager |Date: 18/07/2007 : 14:53:49 |Subject: Vista compatibility | |Daryl, |If you can wait until our planned release date of August |1st we strongly recommend that you install HarnWare V5.4 |with Vista. To upgrade from V4.5 we encourage users to |attend one days upgrade training but later version |upgrades are free. We have, however, introduced an |annual license fee of £250 to help fund support and |new development work. | |V5.3 is only available on CD. |Regards |Ken |

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Guy Macon
Reply to
Guy Macon

For a project that I worked on years ago, I made simple assembly drawings for each cable. The drawings were made using a GP drawing package. I suppose a lite version of Autocad would be used today. Each cable drawing included a BOM, plus 2-d drawings for each connector, the length to cut each wire, and where each pin went into what connector. For ribbon cable/IDC connectors, I even showed how to fold the ribbon cable, which had needed some 90 degree turns. As a sanity check, we also made up two sets of cables, one for us and the other for the assembler. I've also made some cable assemblies in my home lab, as a sub-contractor. (Shameless plug: if anyone needs cables assembled, I'm interested.)

-Dave Pollum

Reply to
Dave Pollum

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