Let's take a look at some manual cable
routing in Creo Parametric. First, I will orient you to my assembly. I have four
different connectors in my model that I'm going to route some wires between
and a couple of clips down at the bottom of the tray that I am going to adjust
the routing through. To get into cabling mode, I will click on Applications and
then Cabling. Most of the icons in the ribbon are grayed out because I do
not have a harness part currently. So to create my harness, I will go to the
Create Harness button. Here we see Part and the sub type is set to Harness.
For lack of originality, I'm going to call it Harness 1 and then click OK.
Now you can see I have my harness part. At the bottom of my Model Tree, there is
a little green diamond at the bottom of the icon indicating that it is the
active harness, because you could have multiple different harnesses inside of
an assembly. If you want to change which harness you're working on, you go to the
Modify Harness button. Now you notice that a lot more icons are available to
me in the ribbon. The next thing that I'm going to do is designate the different
components I'm going to use as connectors. Now this isn't required: what
I like to do before I do that, though, I'm going to turn on the display
of my columns. If I go to the Type drop-down list, I can change to Cabling Info. I'm going to add a column for the
Designation. Let's crank up the width a bit and click the OK button. Here
you can see that a couple of the connectors have already been designated,
but this one hasn't. Neither has this one. To designate those as connectors for
routing, we go to the drop down list here from Auto Designate and then choose
Designate. Then it's asking me to select a component for connector
definition. Let me select this component over here. You could read in
parameters from a file, but I'm just going to take the default values. Let's turn
on the coordinate system visibility because now I'm going to designate an
entry port. I'll click on Entry Ports and then we have the Add / Modify command in
the Menu Manager. I will select the entry coordinate system, then click OK. It asks
me for the length of the cable inside of the connector. Right now my coordinate
system is on the front surface. I need to account for a little bit of wiring going
inside of the connector. I don't know what that value is, but I'm just going to
guess a value. Let's say it's gonna be a tenth of an inch. Now we have the choice
of how we're going to use this: if this can accept only a single conductor, we
would use the Wire option. If you are going to take multiple different
connectors, you could choose either Round routing or Flat, and this would most
likely have flat routing and would probably have multiple different pins
located in there. I will select that option for the grouping, and then I can
just hit Done and Done out of here. Now we can see that we have a
designation for this particular connector and let me figure out which
one isn't designated. Okay, that one over there. Let's repeat the designation
process one more time. Designate, pick the component, I'm not going to read in any
parameters from a file. Let's go to Entry Ports again, and I'll choose ENTRY
for this one and then OK. Length of cable inside of there, again I'm just
making up a value over here, and let's say that this is only going to accept
one particular conductor. Let's choose Wire and then Done and Done
Return. So there we have our different connectors designated. Now I'm going to
create a spool that I'm going to use for routing. I can click on Spools
and here in the Menu Manager we can click Create. This is going to be a
wire spool. Be aware that you can also create cable spools,
sheaths, and ribbons. But for wire, I'm going to enter in a spool name. We're
going to use 16 AWG and here we have the Electrical Parameters dialog
box. We've got the name of our spool here. We have "WIRE," and for the thickness, this
is actually going to be value of 0.05. Now we have our Minimum Bend Radius. I've
seen people use anywhere from 2 times the thickness to eight times the
thickness. Hopefully you have this information from your particular wire
vendors. There are times when I've actually called up vendors and asked
them, "Hey, what's the minimum bend radius?" They're like, "What the heck are you
talking about?" For this one, I'm going to use a value of 0.2. I'm going to use 4
times the thickness. Here we can specify what color it's going to have. If
you give the color a name that actually exists in your
color map, then it'll actually use that. I'm not sure if I
have a color called blue, but I'm just going to type in "BLUE" anyways.
That is good. You are able to add additional columns in here. If I go to
View and Columns, here are all the different columns that are available to
you. One that you might want to add in here is the Density. Be aware that
this density is a linear density and that way it'll be able to calculate the
mass of your wires based on their length and the linear density. Let's click OK
out of here, and since I don't know what the linear density is, I'm just going to
leave it non-existent for now. This is good for my spool definition. I will
click OK and we can click Done Return out of the spool's menu. now I am ready
to route some wires. To do that, we will go to the Route Cables command.
I'm going to just create a single individual wire feature to route. There is a
default name which you can change if you want. Here we have our spool.
In this dialog box you could create a new spool on the fly, but I'm going to
use the standard spool. For the routing, we have Simple Route. If I had
some existing cables, I could follow that cable, or here we have Follow Pipeline if
you have some piping features created in your model. But I typically use Simple
Route, and then adjust the routing later on. From the Options drop-down menu,
we have "Preview" turned on. Here's where you can allow an undesignated coordinate
system, and this is how you can skip the process of designating beforehand.
You can Allow Locations, and I'll show you what Locations are in a moment. For
routing the cable, we're going to choose Route, and I'll start it routing from
this particular entry port, and then for the To, I will select this one over here.
There we have it created in here. Then we can click the OK button, and I'm
happy with it so far. Now to adjust the routing, I always like to turn on the
display of my axes. Here we can see the preview of the wire. it's displayed
in a thick cable display, but I can use this button to go to a center line
display. Then when I click on the particular wire, I can right click on and
choose to Insert Locations. Here we have the drop-down list for the items panel.
Right now here's where we can add different locations. I turned on the axis
display so I could select this particular axis and then drag it out.
That way we get it going a little straighter out of the connector. That's
good for that one. Let's hit the checkmark and that way I've just made it
a little more like how I want it to look. A lot of times when I'm cabling, I'm
toggling between the center line display and the thick cable display.
Next up, let's create a couple of wires that go from the LCONN connector to the
ones on the left. Again, we will go to the Route Cables dialog box, and I'm going to
click on the button to create an individual wire. Let's go from ENTRY again and this
time I'm going to go to this particular coordinate system. Be aware that you can
hold down the right mouse button. You get a pop-up menu where you can choose the
To collector. We also have the options in here to Allow Locations, Allow
Undesignated Coordinate Systems, and also for creating new different entities. But
I'm happy with the To collector being active. I will select this one over
here. That is good. If I click the Apply button, it resets the dialog box so I can
create another wire going from this particular coordinate system to this one
over here. We see the preview and again I can click OK, and just like
before I can adjust the routing of this particular cable. So let's click on it
and then right mouse click and hold and choose to Insert Locations. Maybe I
want to simulate that this wire is actually going to go down and be located
a little bit off of this surface over here, so I can click on that location. You
can see the preview of the routing. Maybe it's going to end up being routed along
this side of the box, so there we see our next location, and if I hold down the
right mouse button, I can change how I'm locating the next location point. If I
choose Use Direction, then I can pick something like an edge in my model and
then translate off of here some distance. Let's say I want it exactly value of
10 from the previous location. I've entered in the values and it may be
hard for you to see but there are these little dots for the different locations
that I have selected, and those are location points. When I was routing, if
if I held down the right mouse button, I was able to change the option to use a
location. Locations are the different points along the routing. For
the next routing for this one, I can choose Along Axis and pick this axis
from my clip. Just making sure I'm getting that
routing axis... right now it's being offset... Oh, actually, I'm still on Use
Direction. Let me change to "On," and if I go to the items tab let's delete that
one. Now we have Along Axis selected. That's good. Let me change to this
particular axis, and when you do Along Axis, it's actually going to create two
location points on both ends of the axis. and I'm just routing to make sure that Along Axis is still selected. That's good. Let me select this particular axis over
here, and then for the next location points, I'm going to turn off the Along
Axis, and make sure that I'm still on the "On" option. Let's say I wanted to
go over here for the next location point, and then next location "Use Direction," and
then pick this particular axis over there.
Again, if I want to adjust the dimension I can, or I can just drag it out and
eyeball it to where it's going to be and leave it at that particular point. Be
aware when you are using the "On" option, for these different location points it's
actually going to be located slightly off of the surface that you pick. It's
going to be a value of 0.6 times the wire diameter. The center of the wire is going to
be 0.6 times the wire diameter off the surface. In other words, there's going to
be a clearance of 10% of the wire diameter between the outside of the wire
and whatever surface that you select on. This is good for this particular wire
over here, and I can see the routing and later on I can adjust these different
location points if I don't like how they are located. For example, I can edit
definition and say hey, I want this more over here. That's good for that
particular one, and then adjust any other location points that I want. For
example, maybe I want this to be instead of negative 10, negative 9. That makes it
look better. Great, and hit the check mark, and for this other particular wire, for
routing it, since I've already defined a bunch of different location points in
the previous wire that I routed, in the Mini Toolbar, we have this Reroute
command and with the Reroute command, we can follow the routing of other wires.
I can say hey, let's start at this location to pick it up and the end
location, we'll put the end location over there. So now we have both of those wires
going along the same routing. I can hit the check mark, change over to a
thick cable display, and there you see the harness that I've created with the
three individual wire conductors, and inside of the harness part you can see
that there are a bunch of different features. Here we have in the
Designation column the names of the three wires. Also one last thing to
point out, the spool that I created is actually an assembly level feature. I
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