Harnessing AutoCAD Electrical and Inventor Professional to Take the Pain out of Modeling Wires
Part 2

Last month I discussed how Inventor Professional and AutoCAD Electrical can combine to make modeling your electrical systems a viable and useful part of the design process. That’s really only half the story, however. The most important part of the process is really the documentation – what’s the point of drawing pretty pictures if you can’t communicate to others how to make your model a reality? Thankfully Inventor Professional makes documenting your wire harnesses a snap.


The Documentation Process


The Virtual Nailboard


One of the best features of Inventor Professional’s Wire Harness package is the ability to create a nailboard drawing. Gone are the days of waiting for a prototype to be wired up just so you can figure out how to build the harness. Now that you’ve got your electrical system modeled in 3D, you can leverage that intelligence to quickly create harness manufacturing documents.

With a single button, Inventor professional will take your harness model and flatten it out onto a drawing page.



Figure 1: Creating Nailboards in Inventor Pro takes just a single click.

Now that your harness is flattened, you’re ready to annotate!


Annotate with Ease

Inventor Professional gives you all the tools you need to effectively communicate the construction requirements of your harness:


Figure 2: Nailboard Annotation tools in Inventor Professional


While Inventor Professional usually does a good job of flattening your harness, the ability to change its layout is always a plus. The Pivot tool gives you that capability:


Figure 3: Modifying the nailboard layout is as easy as drag and drop.


Simply choose the intersection you want to pivot about, then drag the endpoint of the desired segment until the preview matches the layout you’re looking for.


Now for those pesky wires. You’ve got a huge bundle coming out of one end of the segment. How are you going to attach notes without them all overlapping? The Fan Out tool will automatically separate the wires across whatever angle you specify.



Figure 4: The Fan Out tool eases wire rearrangement.


If you need even more control over wire placement, you can drag each wire around by its endpoint.

Now that we’ve got the harness segments and wires positioned where we like them, we’re ready to start adding notes and dimensions. Inventor Professional makes this process painless by associating with the 3D model. To apply dimensions, use the Harness Dimension tool and apply them just as you would any other dimension. The scale of the view is irrelevant; just as with all other 2D views, Inventor keeps track of this and reports back the true size.

But what about those really long segments? The ones that ruin your drawing by causing you to scale the view so small that you’d need a microscope to see any detail? That’s where the Broken Sketch Entity tool comes in. While its name might be a bit confusing, this tool lets you break segments of the harness, much like the Broken View command allows you to break traditional 2D views:


Figure 5: Broken Sketch Entity allows you to remove unnecessary segment length.


This tool gives you total control over how much length you chop out of the middle of those long segments. And just like traditional Broken Views, any dimensions you apply to broken segments report the true length – Inventor does all of the math for you.

The last step in the creation of the drawing is to add whatever notes are necessary for manufacturing and installation. This process is streamlined by use of the Property Display tool. It gives you access to any property associated with a given object or set of objects, and allows you to place the properties as text objects anywhere on the drawing.


Figure 6: The Property Display dialog.

You can choose individual objects by picking them from the graphics window or browser, or you can choose to select all objects of a given type by using the appropriate selection filter. Once you’ve made your selection, the dialog displays all properties associated with that object. In the case of a mixed selection set (say you’ve picked some wires and some segments) you’ll be presented with the list of all properties for both types of objects – not just the ones they have in common.


Figure 7: Choosing which properties to display and where to put them.


Once you’ve chosen the properties you want to display, by Applying you are allowed to choose a position for the text object(s). Note that you can choose multiple properties to apply at once by selecting multiple items from the Property Name list. This is a great way to get lots of information onto the page quickly.


Figure 8: You can control the size and appearance of the notes just like any other text object.

Finally, if you need to generate any tables or reports based on the information in the model (like a Wire Run List, a Component List, etc) you can use the Report Generator and Table commands to extract this information. The Report Generator will extract data in a comma-delimited format and can include any properties of any objects you specify. The Table command will take any comma-delimited file (say from the Report Generator) and place a table on the drawing. The format of the Report Generator files allows for sharing with many other software applications as well.



Rendered Models of Your Devices – the Coup de Grace

While 2D drawings, tables, and notes are necessary and often required to document our designs, there is no substitute for a nice picture of what they’re supposed to look like. I can think of no better situation where this is true than when wiring up a machine. My favorite part about the Cable & Wire Harness module of Inventor Professional is the ability to communicate exactly how the system is supposed to be wired. Inventor Pro allows you to show the harness and all of the wires rendered exactly how they should appear in reality – including the proper color and gauges of the wires:


Figure 9: Creating the system in 3D allows you to communicate your exact design intent.


You can even add control points to individual wires to illustrate bends and additional length outside the harness. That additional length will be accounted for in all reports.



Real Added Value

Very few systems these days are strictly mechanical. Like it or not, our machines and products are coming to depend more and more on electrical components to meet design criteria and customer demands. As the electrical and mechanical worlds become ever more tightly integrated, a time may come – if it hasn’t already – when you need to create accurate, intelligent 3D models of the electrical portions of your designs. Inventor Professional is ready when you are.