wire/cabling

Hi Folks,
We have several photo kiosk designs under development for in stant
digital printing. My users have already built one version and are starting
on the next.
They are wondering what is availble for Solidworks to assist
with the placement of wires and cables throught the box. We had made
inquires about Embassyworks, but found out that they are now an ACAD only
product. Does any one have a product or technique to recommend.

-regards,
Larry Zolla
Polaroid

 

Actually, EmbassyWorks still exists and there is technical support for
it, but there are no plans to update it in the future (naturally, as
AutoDesk has no interest in supporting SolidWorks apps). The last
version is 4.0. If they still have the same price structure there is a
basic version that does most of what anybody would want it to do for
around $5000, and the full-up version is abour $8000. Not cheap,
certainly. If you were trying to design wiring harnesses for something
REALLY complex (like an airplane or a tank, for example), it would be
worth it. But there's a fair chance that at some point in the future it
won't even work with the latest versions of SolidWorks. You could still
design stuff, however. Just keep a workstation with the older version
of SolidWorks and when it comes time to design the wiring harness you
could export Parasolid (or STEP or IGES) from the later version of
SolidWorks, import it into the earlier version, design the harness, and
then import the result into the later version of SolidWorks. Doing that
it would lose some of its intelligence, however. That doesn't mean you
couldn't maintain that intelligence at the single workstation, though.

Actually, a buddy of mine has a license and wouldn't mind selling it.
It's version 3.0 and you probably would want to update to the 4.0
version. I have no idea what it would cost, but you can ask them. I
think my buddy wouldn't ask anywhere close to the original cost
(probably not half), but I can't speak for him.

'Spork'

 

Thanks all,
I will present your info to the group. One guy said he heard that SW
Piping was going to be reworked into a wire/cable/harness tool in 2004. Can
anyone confirm that?

-Larry Z

 

I've worked for 2 different lighting companies and a stereo headphone
manufacturer in the past and we never bothered with modeling the wires
or wire harnesses for the same reasons that were stated by previous
posters.

But what we did do is determine where we wanted the wires/wireharness
to run through the product we were making and put wire clips or tie
downs in locations where they wires would need to run. When we built
the prototypes, we would simply build a wire harness by hand,
determining what the wire lengths needed to be.

Richard