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Wire Harnesses Summary
Wire Harnesses Summary
Every year since 2014 I have been on some sort of robotics team where a wiring harness was needed to connect all the electronics. For a large number of years since then I was the lead responsible for designing and creating these harnesses. Admittedly I am by no means a natural for wire harness design, however over the years I have been slowly learning and refining my process. As I have continued making new harnesses each year, I have looked for tools that aid in this process and have since stumbled on a tool called Rapid Harness. This tool has allowed me to create wire drawings that specify build instructions that anyone on the various robotics teams can make.
Computer Aided Design
Computer Aided Design
In the last couple years I started attempting to design out the entire electronics system well in advance of the actual fabrication. To do this I have been using a program called Rapid Harness to design each connector, wire, shielding, terminal, and device that I use in the harness. Using this tool also allows me to generate bills of materials (BOMs) very rapidly and created assembly drawings so that anyone with the proper tools can fabricate the harness. I cant even imagine how I was able to stay organized before using cad to model the entire system.
Schematics
Schematics
Along side with the individual wires I generally attempt to create high level schematics for each system. Previously before I found a CAD program I enjoyed using I would draft the schematics either on paper, or whiteboards. On the right is an example of Digikey's Schemit schematic tool that was useful and produced nice looking diagrams however was very tedious and often frustrating to use. The diagram was for the Cardinal Space Mining Team's 2018 robot and performed as well as it could have given the extremely short testing period we were given.
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