When I started a new job as an electrical engineer 15 years ago, one of my first tasks was to update the wiring harness schematic for a system on a small airplane. The schematic had been drawn with Visio, and the change necessitated by a component replacement was easy enough to make. Another simple, but necessary step was to manually update the Bill of Materials (BOM) in Excel.
A few weeks later I was asked to fix several errors in the same schematic. One of those errors involved a cable that spanned both sheets of the schematic, so I had to make sure the information on both sheets matched. Several months later the second phase of the project began, and the two-sheet schematic grew to five sheets. I spent more than one hundred hours maintaining those schematics and the BOM. It was tedious and time-consuming work. Visio is great for graphical design, but it did not provide any automation or validation of our electrical schematics.
All along, I knew that Visio was not the right tool for designing wiring harnesses. So I tried to use other schematic capture tools I was familiar with, Eagle and OrCAD. However, it quickly became clear that applications built for printed circuit board design are not able to model many of the complexities of wiring harnesses. I began searching for a better solution and found another class of Electronic Design Automation (EDA) tools developed specifically for wiring harness design, a class often referred to as Electrical CAD (ECAD).
I found several ECAD applications on the market and tested them, some extensively. I discovered some common shortcomings that have hindered their widespread adoption. These shortcomings include the high cost, the difficulty in learning and becoming proficient with them, and the lack of compatibility with tools and processes already in place.
We have designed Wiring Planner to eliminate those common shortcomings. Wiring Planner can slash the time you spend creating harness designs and elevate customer value. Find out how you can get a risk-free trial today at www.wiringplanner.com/purchase.
