Harness Drawing & Assembly

[MadMango]

Ok, how many of you out there have to design and document Harnesses for your products? How are you currently doing this? If you are using some 3rd party software, can you please tell me which one?

I have heard of EMbassyWorks, but would not want to use them since it has been bought-out by AutoDesk. I have heard of Harnware, but it's just a spec tool from Tyco. It looks promising, but you can only specify components from Tyco (

http://www.harnware.com).

I've heard that SW04 Routing has some capability, but is it enough to do production work of electrical harnesses?

My company has been using a hybrid drawing, half wiring diagram and half assembly diagram. It's not even close to industry standard. We have our own electrical department that makes all of our harnesses, but last week they were a bit over capacity, so we decided to send a harness out to purchase.

Turns out the 2 vendors we sent the drawing to couldn't make Heads nor Tails of our company's drawing. I've been complaining about the lack of "standard adherance" of our harness drawings for over 5 years. Now it seems that everyone sees my point, and we are looking for CAD software to do design and documentation for us. Any leads?

MadMango
"Probable impossibilities are to be preferred to improbable possibilities."
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[ctopher]

I havn't seen it, but I heard 'Embassy Works' works pretty good. It is designed to work with SW.
see

http://www.linius.com

 

[SBaugh]

yes but Autodesk bought them up. If I remember right they have been removed from the partner site of SW. If they are in the partner site of SW I wouldn't hesitate to use it then since Embassy works is the only wire harness program available to me knowledge.

I used to make my own wire harnesses without the use of Embassy works and I got good at it, but I took longer since I built each wire separatly, etc...

Regards,

Scott Baugh, CSWP
3DVision Technologies

http://www.3dvisiontech.com

http://www.scottjbaugh.com

faq731-376
When in doubt, always check the help

 

[JNR]

Embassy is extremely expensive and frankly limited. Its nail board stuff is pretty good (also some net list input), but the 3D is lacking. There are not a whole lot of seats out there. They basically use IGES surface data to transfer. Their harnesses can be kinda referenced to sold goemetry when you create them, but you can then drag them into interference situations really easily.

After looking at the new piping/routing stuff in SW2004 I asked the obvious question. The answers I was given by the SW rep. (not the VAR) was "Look for about SP4".

From what the Embassy folks told me a while back they were going to drop out of the partner program because maintaining the standards SW required for the parnter program was too big an investment for the number of copies they sold to SolidWorks customers.

Currently we use manual methods for harnesses, however ours are relatively limited (but ugly).

3/4 of all the Spam produced goes to Hawaii - shame that's not true of SPAM also.......

 

[MadMango]

As an update to this, SW Piping may be the way to go. My VAR told me that they are selling Piping now for $995. Then, sometime in October, SW will revamp Piping a bit and call it Routing, the price will shoot up to $2495.

It looks like SW Routing is the way to go for harnessing.

MadMango
"Probable impossibilities are to be preferred to improbable possibilities."
Have you read faq731-376 to make the best use of Eng-Tips Forums?

 

[ctopher]

wow! $2495?! My company might go for $995, but not $2495!
I hope they bring the price down because we sure can use it. We do wire harnessing all the time. I guess still manual for a while.

 

[Standing]

You can find the full story at:

http://www.tenlinks.com/NEWS/PR/solidworks/091503_routing.htm

We are using AutoCAD 14 for our cable drawings. We are trying to get management to let us try a license of Routing. I really think this maybe the way to go.



Bradley

 

[MadMango]

[blue]Ctopher[/blue], I'm trying to get my company to buy at the lower price now... when the upgrade happens (thanks for the link [blue]Bradley[/blue]), existing users will get the newer version for free. According to my VAR the $995 price was good till... today! Yikes!

MadMango
"Probable impossibilities are to be preferred to improbable possibilities."
Have you read faq731-376 to make the best use of Eng-Tips Forums?