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Cable/Wire Routing mass and BOM
trevin
Member, pcbaevp Posts: 6 PRO
I have used the cable routing tool in a recent product design with lots of internal wiring. It worked pretty well but when I started putting together a release I ran into some issues.
- I can't assign two different cables the same part number even if they have the same BOM and the same length. In reality they are the same part and will be built using the same drawing but will be oriented and routed differently in the assembly. So the BOM should call for 4x of this one part. Instead the BOM has 4 separate line items with the same part name and part number and when I try to release these it throws an error that each PN needs to be unique. I tried adding these different shapes to an assembly and configuring which one was unsuppressed then inserting that assembly 4 times and changing the configuration of each instance but it had the same behavior. The only solution I could find was to make another configuration that only contained a single mate connector and assign the cable PN to that and insert that assembly (4 times) along with the assemblies that actually contain the geometry while excluding the actual cable from the BOM. Is there a better way to do this?
- Cable BOM. The routing tool creates a closed composite part and effectively erases all of the properties and information I have entered in about the connectors including the connector name, part number and mass. It would be much better if this tool created an assembly or an open composite part so that I could insert this into my top level assembly as a subassembly. Then when someone looks at the BOM to figure out what needs to be ordered they can actually see what connectors and wires need to actually be ordered for the cable to be assembled. I could build all of this manually in the cable drawing but then the procurement team has to go dig up and read through all of the drawings before they can put together a complete BOM
- There is no way to estimate mass other than manually calculating the wire mass and summing with the connector mass. I have already assigned the mass/material of the connector models but when the composite part is created this information is lost. The tool calculates the diameter and length of each wire already so it should be easy to assign a density or mass/length value and get an accurate estimate of the final cable mass. The BOM is incomplete without this info.
Is there a workaround that I can use right now to get the cables to show up in the BOM, in a release candidate with no errors, with the proper part numbers, masses, and subassembly BOM? I thought about adding the connectors into my empty configuration as items but I can't figure out how to assign a mass to items. I'd really rather not make a bunch of floating spheres that I assign part numbers and masses to and scatter them around my assembly.