How to use Schematic CAD for Harness Drawings and Cable Assemblies: Part 4

Doing the cable assembly drawing in a Printed Board layout assembly

Now that we have created the computer-aided design circuit, it is time to lay them out in our design. You will see that placing the part can easily be done in an orderly fashion. Initially, how I structured my multi-part circuit, the face of the connector head will be placed first as seen in figure 1 below:

Figure 1. The face of the connector head comes first from the circuit.

However, as stated before, it is up to the user to decide how to organize and structure their libraries. The key thing to note is how do you want to lay them out in the schematic editor and what will work best for the board circuit.

In my case, the side-view layout drawing, PCB schematic representation, and line item bubble sub- follow in placement. After the connector head is laid out as seen in figure 2, we proceed with laying out the rest of the cable drawing schematic page in this fashion.

Figure 2 Schematic Layout of the connector head component footprint

The other connector heads are laid out in the same format with the exception that the face will be rotated (which can be done by pressing the spacebar). Of course, you may be designing a wiring harness drawing with many different end-points, so appropriately space and rotate the connector head as needed.

When you have appropriately placed the within your schematic layout, double click on the line item bubble part and enable the visibility for the line item and type in a numerical value (i.e. 1 or 2, etc).

After placing both the line item bubble and schematic symbol, you will use the Line and Bezier Curve to create the cable assemblies. The figure below shows the highlighted part that is the bezier curve connected with the lines.

Figure 3 Highlighted area shows how the bezier curved is placed

An alternative to layout drawing this parallel bezier curve representation of the actual cable assemblies, is to use thick graphical lines. This may be especially useful on large sheet sizes with cable harness drawings where you want a diagram with scaled cable lengths, and corner locations. This is known in the cabling industry as a “nail board” diagram, and when printed to full scale is used on a backing board with nails at corners for assisting in manual harness assembly. An example of this is shown in figure 4.

Figure 4. Using a “nail board” with the schematic cable drawing for cable harness drawing assembly.

(Source: http://www.e-z-hook.com/ viewed April 2014)

Adding the electrical schematic

The cable drawing is laid out on the top center of the page. But we also include a corresponding electrical schematic drawing below it. The electrical schematic is used with the schematic symbol sub- from the cable head assembly components. Apart from specifically symbolizing and calling out the cable assembly and pin assignments, this schematic version of the cable drawing enables netlist creation from head to head, which may be used later on with cable test jigs in the factory. It will also facilitate some cabling design rule checks, which we will look at in the final blog in this series. The finalizes design of a high performance cable should look as shown in figure 5.

Figure 5 Finalized layout of cable assembly drawing

In my next blog, I will discuss the areas of design check, B.o.M cross-check, and adding the design and fab notes.