Cable Harness Design Overview in Altium         Designer

Cable harnesses are a challenge in product design, requiring mechanical and electrical information. Yet, creating a harness design has generally been relegated to whatever drawing tool was available within the design team. In many cases, mechanical CAD or schematic capture tools (developed to create PCBs) have been used to create harness and cable designs. As a result, these drawings are typically "dumb" drawings, without intelligent data, nor are they easily manipulated to accommodate changes.

It may surprise you to know that Altium Designer can be used to create intelligent cable drawings. This can be useful when a handful of cables are needed for testbeds or to interface one PCB to another PCB or computer. However, this requires a deep knowledge of the library, the Altium schematic tool, and its limitations.

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