I am using Solidworks Routing - Electrical (I do not own Solidworks Electrical, my routing is only part of the Routing Add-In) to create manufacturing drawings for custom cable harnesses. My company designs, builds and installs tidal and run of river power systems. Almost nothing we have is off-the-shelf and while I don't have a lot of experience in other industries cable harnessing, we may be on the unique end of design problems.
My harnesses have a fairly standard configuration, one connector plugs into my subsea instrumentation enclosure then spreads out to one or more sensors. The one-or-more is the trouble I'm having with right now. I have two questions, so lets for talking point sake use the following as our example. It's a 12 pin connector broken out to four 3-pin connectors. I have multiple splices here.
Problem 1:
The cable library has made me want to put my head through the wall because I cannot grasp some of these concepts. I'd love to be able to say there is a 12 conductor cable starting at connector (1) then split, with conductors 1-3 going off to one connector, 4-12 going to the next splice where 4-6 go to connector (3), 7-12 going on, etc. I cannot find something that will help me with this. I have it set where a cable is what goes from each C-point, but tracking wires is chaotic, I've stopped applying wires to my cables. Is that the correct area? The library does not seem to like how I've added cables, it seems to expect me to use a wire library in order to build a cable, but that's not what I'm drawing and is also overkill.
Problem 2:
The splices provided by Solidworks are...not even close to correct. Because I am routing through tight areas I want to use Routing as a way to ensure I have plenty of room for bend radii restrictions and have hand access to move cables around. The problem is that the splices for subsea cables are very hefty. See here: http://www.birns.com/uploads/product_imagesorg/15_82_662_ont.jpg. I'd like to be able to specify a splice where there are multiple C-points for the splice. Some of these splices are Tees or right angles and that addition is important to have, doing things the cables normally can't pull off. Is there a way to make this work in SW?
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