Reporting on the path of your wires with SOLIDWORKS Electrical 3D

With SOLIDWORKS Electrical Schematic and SOLIDWORKS Electrical 3D, we can autoroute the wires in our panel.  This allows us to report on all the lengths of our wires, confirm inventory, and even balance out duct ratio fill as needed.  The question becomes how we use this functionality to standardize and communicate how a panel is routed.  We could certainly suppress wire styles and show color coded snapshots for every wire style, but this is not enough information to communicate each individual wire path.

As it turns out, this is built-in functionality in SOLIDWORKS Electrical.  We just need to perform a bit of setup to get what we need.  Let us start by setting up our from-to report.  After adding the “List of wires origindestination tags” report, we can navigate to properties and right click on the column headers.  Here we will select to add the duct path column to our report.

Now that we have our report setup, it is time to configure the assembly.  For this functionality, it is required to have the ducts added as component items rather than parts in the properties of a location.

Now we can proceed to route our wires in our panel for this project.

After the wires route, we will need to run the “Calculate Cable Duct Filling Ratio…” command. This is located in SOLIDWORKS under “Tools” ->”SOLIDWORKS Electrical” while the SOLIDWORKS Electrical add-on is enabled.

At this point, we can run our origin destination report we created and see the listed paths for each wire routed through a duct in our project.

Not only does the addition of SOLIDWORKS Electrical 3D allow us to unify our BOM information and improve our communication between departments, but we can utilize the SOLIDWORKS suite of products to also communicate assembly documentation that provides the required path of each wire.  This allows us to improve the consistency between product builds and more effectively utilize wire cutting machines.  Yet again, we have demonstrated how SOLIDWORKS Electrical can improve our documentation, the assembly process, and the quality of our products.

Mark Talbott
Sr. Application Engineer Specialist, Electrical
Computer Aided Technology, Inc.