Mentor Graphics has introduced a harness engineering tool into its Capital Harness System automotive wiring design suite.
“Employing Internet-based integration technologies and a data-driven graphical styling engine, it enables customers who serve different organisations across multiple locations to work with common tools and processes,” said Mentor.
Dubbed Capital HarnessXC, and replacing the earlier CapitalH, the package merges cable length and connector type data and produces a bill of materials including all the clips, grommets and other hardware needed to make a loom; as well as generating data to drive loom production equipment design software.
“It automatically selects the correct end terminals depending on the wire diameter and the receptacle it has to fit,” Mentor’s product director Nick Smith told EW.
The big changes between CapitalH and Capital HarnessXC are data-drive graphical styling and design change management, said Smith.
Data-driven graphical styling allows harness drawings to be rendered in formats aimed at particular car makers. “The software is configurable and has if-then statements,” said Smith.
Change management has introduced the concept of ownership for each attribute of each object and is fully-automatic. For example, said Smith, the diameter of a wire could be owned by the car manufacturer, whereas the colour of the wire could be given to the loom-maker. This means colour data included with diameter assignments from the car maker would not overwrite existing colour data in the design.
From scratch, car wiring design involves three steps, said Smith: system design, system integration and harness design.
System design involves connecting physical black boxes with named signals.
The next step, system integration, assigns signals to actual connections, through a CAN bus or a single wire, for example.
It also brings in the physical design of the car. Black boxes are locked in place and cable bundles are routed through bodywork voids.
Mentor’s Capital Harness System includes tools for both steps: Capital Logic and Capital Integrator respectively. HarnessXC follows these.
The tools are also aimed at aeroplane and train wiring design.
www.mentor.com/harness