When Point B Is Outside of the Board

Creating a cable can be a frustrating endeavor. Being an electro-mechanical device by nature, its mechanical considerations are just as important as its electrical aspects. Let's face it. It wasn't something discussed in the engineering classroom.

To muddy the waters further, most companies don't have tools for cable design purposes. Many of these designs are done in all-purpose drawing tools such as Visio and Paint, or drawn in an EDA or MCAD tool in which one pushes the tool beyond its intended capabilities.

We will take a good look at cabling and the essential aspects to consider:

• The different types of cable and wire available
  

• The different connectors types available
  

• The information that one needs to consider putting on a cable drawing to ensure that it will be built as envisioned
  

Zuken E3 will be shown as part of this process, though the presented information can be applied to any drawing tool.

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Wire/Cable Harness Design in Zuken E3

Have you ever wondered if there is a better and easier way to design wire and cable harnesses? Look no further!

Cable harnesses are a challenge in product design, requiring mechanical and electrical information. Yet, creating a harness design has generally been relegated to whatever drawing tool was available within the design team. In many cases, mechanical CAD or schematic capture tools (developed to create PCBs) have been used to create harness and cable designs. As a result, these drawings are typically 'dumb' drawings, without intelligent data, nor are they easily manipulated to accommodate changes.

What if you are designing machinery in which there are dozens of cables? What if the physical layout of those cables must be understood for the mechanical and electrical teams to constrain their designs? To add to this complexity, consider that there could be numerous subsystems that need to be interconnected. The E3.series solution by Zuken was developed to handle these large cable harness design efforts. Mil/Aero, automotive, robotics, and heavy machinery companies have turned to E3.series to take cabling and system engineering design beyond static drawings. To add to this, E3.series can also effectively handle the design of hydraulic and pneumatic systems and electrical so that an entire system design can be achieved in one design environment.

The E3.series presentation will cover the various capabilities of the E3.series solution including:

• Creation of Schematics and Interconnection Diagrams
  

• Rapid creation of cable connections
  

• Use of 'objects' to define different views of the interconnections, e.g., interconnect diagrams, wiring diagrams, manufacturing documentation
  

• Seamless integration between schematics, cable, and formboard designs
  

• Integration to 3D Mechanical Design tools for cable routing
  

• Auto-generation of reports, including BOMs, Cable Lists, and Connection Lists
  

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Ethernet Cable Design with Zuken E3

This video demonstrates the relative ease of pulling together a custom cable in the Zuken E3 tool. This video draws an Ethernet cable consisting of two RJ-45 connectors and a CAT-6 cable.

Though Zuken E3 has much of the look and feel of a schematic tool that one would use for PCB schematic design, this tool was constructed to handle both the mechanical and electrical aspects of system-level design. One must remember that EDA tools are designed for electrical schematic designs, dimensionless by their nature. This is why making a cable design with any intelligence (i.e., properties, parameters, attributes, etc.) in an EDA tool is complex.

The E3 tool is genuinely a system engineering tool; cabling is one of several core capabilities.

We have a webinar recording that goes with this demo video, and you can find more information at https://ninedotconnectssandbox.com/video-wire-cable-harness-design

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Cabling in Altium Designer

The term "off-label" is used to describe the use of a product for which it was not intended. For example, it may surprise you that many system engineers use Altium Designer's schematic as a drawing tool. They may also use it for the ease of creating a bill of materials by simply declaring an item (such as equipment, test fixtures, racks, tools, etc.) as a library component.

The same can be said about Altium Designer's assistance with cable creation. The trick is to know what features of the cable are electrical, physical, or both. It requires creativity and recognizes the inherent limitations of using the Altium Designer "off label" for cabling.

This webinar will summarize the cable creation capability within Altium Designer:

• Expectations
  

• Physical versus electrical elements of a component
  

• Use of DXG/DWG to create 2D graphics in minutes
  

• Library configuration consideration
  

• Example of a completed design
  

You may download the same example cable project used during the webinar here.

Download Cable Project

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How do you want your harnesses: Altium Off-Menu Classic or the AD Harness Deluxe?

Designing a few harnesses can be a headache for those who create only a handful each year. Such quantities do not warrant the effort of tools like Zuken E3 or Dassault SWE (SolidWorks Electrical). About a decade ago, Nine Dot Connects discovered an "off-label" method for creating harnesses in Altium Designer, but like any square-peg-in-a-round-hole solution, it's not efficient. If you wish to review this flow, you can watch it here:

Cabling in Altium Designer

Recently, Altium Inc. introduced a Harness Editor. However, this is only included in the Professional version of Altium 365.

Our webinar will explore the Harness Editor and its functionality. We will also compare and contrast with the "off-label" method. This is the perfect opportunity to see the tool in motion and to determine whether the Deluxe or Classic method is best for you. Order up!