Altium Designer Wire/Cable Harness Design & E3 Series         

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.

It may surprise you to learn that Altium Designer can be used to create intelligent cable drawings. This can be useful when you need a handful of cables for testbeds or to interface one PCB to another PCB or computer. However, this requires a deep knowledge of the library, the Altium schematic tool, and its limitations.

What if you are designing machinery with 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 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 systems so that an entire system design can be achieved in one design environment.

Whether you are looking to push Altium Designer an extra mile or need a cable/hydraulic/pneumatic design solution to help you design your next product,

In Altium Designer, we will demonstrate:

• Foundation of a cable library component
  

• Discuss the method of cable creation through examples in the schematic editor
  

The E3.series presentation will be provided by Geoff Lydon, E3.series Solutions Manager at Zuken, who will walk you through 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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