Hi,
I foresee needing to make a lot of high-conductor-count cable harnesses (connector-multicore-connector configuration) and am wondering if there are any suggestions for speeding up the process. I think the most time-consuming steps come down to:
- Physically laying out the connector pins on the schematic. Each cable's connectivity is custom, so macros are probably not a good fit.
- Assigning the cable cores in the Associate Cable Cores manager.
You can see in the image below that I have a J1 connector going to J2, J3, J4, and J5 connectors. This is a relatively small cable for the type of things I work on. But even still, a lot of time is spent positioning pins on the schematic sheet and then manually assigning cable cores in the Associate Cable Cores manager. I'm aware that there is the Excel Automation and export/import Excel feature, but it looks like that doesn't allow connector pin level assignments nor X/Y positioning in the schematic.
My current workflow is something like this:
- Insert dynamic connectors (layout all pins at once). This is quick.
- Spend time picking out which pins I need, placing them into positions like seen in the schematic. This takes a while.
- Connect pins together via general purpose wire, which will be assigned to cable cores in the next step. This is quick.
- Manually assign cable cores. This takes a while.
If there there are no great suggestions for speeding up the process, I will move this into Solidworks Enhancement requests. I was thinking that Excel spreadsheets could speed this up greatly by allowing the following:
- cable core assignments between connectors/components.
- X/Y schematic positioning of individual component terminals/connector pins.
Any ideas/insight? Thanks!
