CAD Forum

I am wondering what cable routing software does others use?

Do you create 3D cable harness / cable routing in your model?
What software do you use to create cable routing? Do you use the CAD addin/extension (eg: SOLIDWORKS routing, CREO PCX) or do you use some other 3rd party software (eg: EPLAN Harness ProD)?

My experience with routing so far...

SOLIDWORKS Routing
(Did not really use it for a real project...)
A big headache with various bugs (or maybe i am just not using it correctly)
The amount of external reference required and how easily things get broken also worries me...


CREO Cabling
Works quite well if you know what you are doing
Have the nice option to turn on and off the cable display (toggle between pretty cable and sketch line)
More robust in handling the external references


EPLAN
Works quite well if you know what you are doing
Very steep learning curve... contradicts with a lot of common MCAD practice (trying to mate connector is a disaster)
Non-parametric / non-history based... drag and drop however you want (good and bad at the same time depending on how u look at it)
3rd party software... passing work in progress files around can be a pain
Terrible cable drawing (from a designer standpoint...)

Watching this with interest. I have been running a couple of tests with SW harness / routing (will be routing pipes as well at some point) but waiting to see how well this plays with our electronics engineers, who are keen to try Altium's (new?) harness module. This is 2D, I believe.

I will start with the statement that I havent used this one for cable routing but,...

SolidWorks Routing - we decided NOT to use SW Routing for our rigid (bent) tubing routes for its incompatibility with our current PDM system. We have third-party software called Aton/SolidPDM. For one, I couldnt figure out a robust workflow for maintaining the tube assemblies, but also SW Routing didnt give enough benefits to be worth the upkeep.

Then again... while doing this testing and research I got to this feeling that the piping and tubing modules in SW Routing are neglected and the major updates during these couple of years have been mainly addressing the cabling module.

Just 'my few pennies'...

And Siemens NX and Solid Edge both have some cabling functionalities but that's all I can say...