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I have seen this common problem across the lines of technical support for some time now. A customer whom is using the routing tools is not able to flatten the harness and have the 2d Connector Blocks come up on the drawing. The most common way that this issue occurs for the end user is that the flattened wires will show up on the drawing, but the end connectors are blank. In this article I will go through the most common reasons that a 2d Connector Block would not show up on the drawing.
There are several changes that have taken place in the requirements for SolidWorks Routing to create a Connector Block. Below are the requirements as stated in the Help menu of SolidWorks and on the SolidWorks Knowledge Base (found in the Customer Portal on the SolidWorks website) and we will also discuss some of the changes that have been made that may make some of this data a bit dated.
First Requirement: A SolidWorks drawing exists with a name that matches the connector component name. This statement is a bit vague. The drawing in question is a connector block drawing. This is typically produced by creating a SolidWorks 2d drawing of the 3d connector that has all of the drawing views that you would like to have come up on your harness drawing (typically a side view and an end view). The file is then needs to be saved out as DWG file and then re-imported into SolidWorks as a standard SolidWorks slddrw file. This process strips off all of the 3d data and leaves you with a plain 2d drawing comprised of lines and arcs. For the full process of creating these blocks you can log onto the CATI support website here. The second part of this rule is that the name no longer matches. In theory a matching name will work, but the new way of doing this adds a “-hblock” to the end of the harness block file name. For example the part “connector1.sldprt” will have a connector block that is named “connector1-hblock.slddrw”.
Second Requirement: The second requirement has to do with the location of the connector block that is created from the First Requirement. Typically if you ask someone whom has been using routing they will tell you if the connector is located in the electrical folder as it should be then you need to place the harness block in the <design library install>routing\electrical\harnessing\packages\ directory. This was true for some time, however late in the 2007 release a slight change was made that would allow for the connector blocks to be placed in the electrical folder. The routing software now will look in the electrical folder for the connector block and if it does not find the block it will then go and look into the packages directory.
Third Requirement: The third requirement states that wire(s) need to be defined between the connectors using edit wires. This was true at one point that you needed not only the route but also needed some type of wire to be defined between the connectors in order for the blocks to come up on the drawing. This requirement is no longer 100 percent true either. The connectors need to be routed to each other, but they need not have a wire connected between the connectors.
I hope that these guidelines have help to clear up any confusion about the connector blocks. Remember that there are videos that outline how to create the 2D Connector Blocks that can be found on our web site www.cati.com. Click on the support login feature in the upper right hand corner and once logged in browse to the Technical Videos area.
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