How often do you wait until you have a physical prototype in hand to start
your wire harness design? Do you see revisions to your mechanical assemblies
that force changes to your wire harnesses? Have you seen delays to product
launches due to waiting for your wire harnesses to be designed and built? If
you answered yes to any of those questions, you might want to start
integrating your wire harness design into your
SOLIDWORKS
assemblies. This can be done in several ways.
SOLIDWORKS Premium Electrical Routing
The routing tools that are part of SOLIDWORKS Premium are a great starting
point if you only need to integrate a few wire harnessing elements into your
SOLIDWORKS assemblies. It gives you the ability to design the harness on the
fly by dragging and dropping the connectors from your design library, then
define the routes with 3D sketches. The size of the harness adjusts as you add
or remove wires from the harness. Then, utilizing SOLIDWORKS Drawings, you can
detail out the flattened state of the harness. The big drawback with
SOLIDWORKS Routing is the need to build your library up with all the
connectors, wires and cables.
SOLIDWORKS Premium Electrical Routing
SOLIDWORKS Electrical
Another option for integrating your wire harnesses into your SOLIDWORKS
assemblies is to utilize the
SOLIDWORKS Electrical suite, consisting of
SOLIDWORKS Electrical Schematic Professional
and
SOLIDWORKS Electrical 3D. The advantage of SOLIDWORKS Electrical is that it will automate 80 percent
of the work you will do using SOLIDWORKS Routing. This is done by taking the
design requirements from the Schematic. Then, Electrical 3D will import the
information needed directly from the Schematic, eliminating the need to build
up a cable and wire library for routing. The connectors that are used are
listed on the Electrical Manager next to the design tree, eliminating the need
to search the Design Library for parts. The one drawback with this solution is
the limit to the size and shape of the harness, as you increase the number of
wires and cables in the harness and the number of branches, the flattening of
the harness can become unpredictable.
SOLIDWORKS Electrical Schematic
SOLIDWORKS Electrical 3D
Enterprise Harness
Even with the strengths of both SOLIDWORKS Routing and SOLIDWORKS Electrical,
they both have shortcomings. This is why we added our last harness design
offering,
Enterprise Harness. Enterprise Harness from Landmark Technologies is a SOLIDWORKS partner
product that works with your SOLIDWORKS assemblies. Enterprise Harness allows
you to design your harness in a lightweight environment that is not restricted
by the strict rules of SOLIDWORKS Routing.
You can utilize a from-to list generated from a variety of tools, though we
recommend SOLIDWORKS Electrical Schematic Professional because of its powerful
backend database. Enterprise Harness is a much more robust tool for larger
harnesses, with the ability to handle a larger number of wires and branches
with ease. Enterprise Layout is the drawing and detailing tool with robust
Flattening ability helping eliminate excess work. Your completed 3D harness
shape can be exported back to your SOLIDWORKS assembly with a single push of a
button.
Enterprise Harness
Enterprise Layout
No matter your design requirements we have a solution to help speed up your
wire harness design integration into your mechanical assemblies. Visit our
website to explore
SOLIDWORKS Electrical
features, as well as other ECAD options we have offer. If you have any
questions,
contact us
at Hawk Ridge Systems. Thanks for reading!
