Route Harnesses

The design of the harness, in terms of components, runs under SOLIDWORKS Electrical Schematic. SOLIDWORKS Electrical 3D allows for the automatic routing of harness cables and wires.

Harness management

SOLIDWORKS Electrical 3D Toolbar (Project)

With Harness management, you can view and delete harness component parts. You can add items in SOLIDWORKS Electrical Schematic.

Harness routing

To access Route Harness:

  • SOLIDWORKS Electrical 3D menu: Route Harnesses
  • Menu: Tools > SOLIDWORKS Electrical > Route Harnesses.

When you run Route Harnesses, the dockable panel changes to display various options. Several of these parameters are saved in the SOLIDWORKS Electrical file and are specific to the file. The others are saved in the registry and are common to all SOLIDWORKS Electrical files.

Routing Analysis

Show errors. Displays a report at the end of the routing that shows all routing errors. Click Help on a line of the report for information about the routing error.

Select renderer type

Add tangency. Automatically generates curves at the end of straight lines.

Harness Selection

  • All harnesses. Launches routing across all the electrical project harnesses for which all components are present in the assembly.
    • Route active location only. Limits the routing of a harness to the top-level assembly only.
      • If the wires or cables of the harness pertaining to the top-level active location have their origin or destination components in another location or sublocations of the electrical project, only those wires or cables get routed along with the wires or cables of the active top-level location.
      • If the wires or cables of the harness pertaining to the top-level active location have their origin or destination components in another location that is out of scope (for example, the active location is a sublocation, and the wire or cable of the harness is at the top location), the wire or cable of the harness is not routed.
  • Selected harnesses. Launches routing on specified electrical project harnesses. Click Harness selector to select the harnesses to route.

Routing parameters

The first parameter specifies the distance between two routing paths.

The second parameter specifies the distance between a connection point and routing path.

Manual harness. Imports the From to list. The route is not created and only the guidelines are available. You can route the harness manually.

The graph allows you to quickly view connections between components. There are two options available: one for display, and the other for deleting the graph.

Harness flattening and integration into electrical project

After you route the harness, you can generate a flattening.

To generate a flattening:

  • In SOLIDWORKS, click SOLIDWORKS Routing > Flatten route.
  • In SOLIDWORKS Electrical 3D, click SOLIDWORKS Electrical 3D > Flatten route.

You can add the file as an electrical project drawing with 2D drawing/Create a drawing.