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Creating Folded Ribbon Cable Routes
armandoRR
Member, pcbaevp Posts: 23 PRO
Is there an existing Featurescript out there for folded ribbon cable routes? Or does anyone have a nice workflow?
This is a task that has been quite tedious without 3d sketches. I'm currently using a combination of routing curves, many orthogonal sketches, and a collection of sweeps for the flat bends.
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Answers
I would use the sheet metal tools. Then you either need to live with weird transitions where the 45 degree bends are, or you need to create a straight cable and use the bend feature which will make it tricky to line everything up.
Is your main goal to make sure that you have a reasonably accurate length and pin 1 lines up with pin 1? Do you need perfect flat pattern drawings?
Simon Gatrall | Product Development Specialist | Open For Work
Thanks Simon, I was hoping for the auto-router from SOLIDWORKS, but seems like this is all being manually done. I'll need to dedicate some time to see if I can replicate it in FS.
I use sheet metal tools for flat flex and rigid flex, but I limited my thinking to only rectangular cross sections. I can definitely use this for ribbon.
There is a suite of features which are in beta for cabling, but as far as I know there's no immediate plan for ribbon cables. @NeilCooke is leading this effort. Much like his beams custom features became the built-in Frames tools, I assume that wiring will become built-in at some point.
https://forum.onshape.com/discussion/18756/custom-feature-cable-wire-routing/p1
Simon Gatrall | Product Development Specialist | Open For Work
@NeilCooke do you know if ribbon cables will be supported? If so, I can put my FS on pause.
It's not too bad, but it's definitely an abuse of sheet metal. I do like the use of unfolding the model to get an approximate cable length.