How to design custom cables!

[@stephen_hawes]

bring your wacky gadget to open sauce!: opensauce.com/exhibit-application/

[@jakobfindlay4136]

I love that all the presenters are advertising open sauce more then will

[@KodakYarr]

Free advertisement!

[@Oysteims]

It's often a good idea to include a reference of some kind to a standard on your drawings when ordering wire harnesses from a supplier, so you know that it adheres to a repeatable industry-standard, even if it is only to the standard of consumer electronics. Usually something like "Harness X shall adhere to IPC-WHMA-A-620D - Class 1" where 'Class 1' = General Electronic Products, 'Class 2' = Dedicated Service Electronic Products, and 'Class 3' = High Performance/Harsh Environment Electronic Products. Your harness supplier will know what that means, and if they don't then they might not be a very serious supplier. Might not seem super important, until one day you're unlucky with a supplier or a specific order from a supplier, and then it suddenly is super important :)

[@ericlotze7724]

Are there separate ANSI, or Preferably ISO Standards, or is IPC *the* standard when it comes to wire harnesses?

[@stephen_hawes]

ah, great note, i should have mentioned that! before sending to our vendor we actually drop the wireviz image into a FreeCAD drawing with some notes about standards, QC procedure, details on labeling, and anything else wireviz doesn't include

[@ericlotze7724]

@@stephen_hawes neat! A video on standards and how you set up things like that for vendors would be cool.

[@Oysteims]

@@ericlotze7724 Just FYI, I am not a harness design engineer - I have only done it sporadically. However, as far as I know, IPC provide *the* standards that addresses the _manufacturing_ of wiring harnesses (and circuitboards for that matter, that is what most of their standards relate to). There are a lot of domain-specific standards that mostly describe design requirements, or installation requirements, depending on the industry. They can be extremely useful for design engineers, but if you put them as a callout on your drawings the supplier will probably wonder how or why it relates to them. It is very common to reference IPC standards in the manufacturing data you send to wire-harness suppliers and/or circuitboard fabs.

[@LarsFL]

No way, I was actually wondering the other week if a project like this existed, instead of having create images manually!

[@jamescorcoran2034]

Would you share what your ordering process is like w/ the cable vendor? What vendors you've worked with, problems you worked though, lessons learned, what artifacts they require, min order qty, etc?

[@ericlotze7724]

I watched that amazing video on Cable Harnesses by the KZbin Channel New Mind…and now here comes Stephen with an Open Source Workflow, and how he does it with his company? What a *KING*

[@sygad1]

I can honesly say, I enjoyed this video, completely beyond what I would need, but the efficiency of the workflow your company has is something to be admired

[@x_ph1l]

The thicker the harness that has to move, the more strain it would be under and will fail earlier. In this case, if you want an easier assembly, maybe think about splitting one huge harness into two, which will make it way more reliable. Of course, it also depends on cable quality and number of conductors per each wire (the more the better).

[@womacko]

Quick question: Why are you not going for USB or CAN for the "Head"? In 3D-printing it became normal to have a toolhead board for all that... Z-probe, Nozzle cam, Y-probe, extruder, hotend...

[@stephen_hawes]

awesome question. i'm constantly reassessing the benefit of making the switch! it's NRE to do so, but ultimately it means a lighter head and drag chain. there are also implications about the upgrade path for existing users. this next release of the machine is mainly focused on DFM and a couple of other improvements i don't want to gate behind that bulk of work, but after that we'll be looking into a distributed controller approach as an option! it's really cool and i think the machine could benefit from it

[@Elpollo973]

Really interesting ! I'm working on a full home cockpit shenanigans and, even I'm not far enough to address cables, Wireviz seems interesting :) (And thank you for the Index / Lumen design, I built mine ~2 years ago and it's going great !)

[@mariusj8542]

I’m running a small medical startup company and this wirewiz and your wire harness jig, made perfect sense to me 👌. Also if you figure out some BOM standards with git integration I love to hear about it. Great work!

[@BPSspace]

Hey nice shirt :) Also that cable length fixture y'all made is genius! I just put together a Shapeoko router from Carbide3d and suuuuper noticed the difference it made to have cable harnesses bundled together like you mentioned. Anyway see ya at Open Sauce!

[@stephen_hawes]

thanks dude!! yeah having lengths pre-set is such a usability improvement. super stoked to see ya!!

[@Bobbias]

Man, just hearing you talk about how much you love using git is great. It's an incredible tool that not nearly enough people use. Though I do think there should be an easier interface for non-technical users, because it's not just programmers who would benefit from git's capabilities.

[@prof1811]

Nice job. You might want to consider prebuild docker-images for your CD pipeline as this will speed up the process, has a more predictable outcome and have lese computation cost.

[@ericlotze7724]

Granted you are busy as-is, and others may have covered it, but a video on Connector Selection and how you went about that would be neat!

[@ChefBenni]

What you made / need is actually a quite old standard in the automotive industry, as your harness wants to be the same. So using standard and the way of makeing drawings would help with the right vendors etc. done that 20 years ago and a wooden board with nails is your best friend 😅

[@OscarSommerbo]

Makes a open source PnP, starts a company, creates a viable commercial product. Still has the same headphones.

[@ericlotze7724]

*We don’t take too kindly to mocking people using things for as long as possible and buying high quality products in these parts*

[@OscarSommerbo]

@@ericlotze7724 Ummm... I don't know what bias you are bringing, but my comment was merely an observation. I find it amusing, yes, but not mocking. It clearly works for Stephen, so why change it.

[@ericlotze7724]

@@OscarSommerbo ah my bad too, i was just joking about being sustainable or something. Definitely do what works for you (sidenote the fake leather on my audio technicas is *dying*, i may have to check out that open source design, granted headphone snob in me may just invest in some other headset in a few years)

[@OscarSommerbo]

@@ericlotze7724 No worries. I am still using 7 year old Chinese no-name headphones. And I am severely bummed that finding 50mm drivers in headphones seems impossible. I will use mine until they break.

[@warasilawombat]

Hey man, uh… sound comes out 🤷🏼‍♂️

[@TheRainHarvester]

Will the bigger cable harness flex enough? If a wire breaks, does one replace the entire harness of wires?

[@Luzgar]

WireViz does not support splices ? That seem like a pretty essential feature, there are hundreds of those in automotive wiring harnesses.

[@stephen_hawes]

yeah, in their docs they say it's not really meant for full-fledged harnesses, just simple cables, but it's SO CLOSE to being able to do mostly everything.

[@formatc1702]

@@stephen_hawes WireViz creator here. Thanks for the great shoutout! I can't say it's in the works, but branching off/splicing sections of a cable is definitely on the wishlist.

[@stephen_hawes]

@@formatc1702 awesome! thank you so much for building such a wonderful tool! ive been poking into the source, thinking about what a PR for something like that might look like.

[@AadityaKhare42]

Gg

[@FNmey]

Really cool tool. Can't wait to see the finished product.

[@ericlotze7724]

4:23 Redundancy Waste is Real! I’ll have to look into this and talk on discord. I don’t *think* there is some ISO standard or some shit yet, now i have to go dig!

[@sud9320]

Very cool software! May try to implement this at work if i get a chance.

[@danedwards_ee]

Its super satisfying designing/ordering custom cables.

[@DarrenPoulson]

I love your enthusiasm for all this (especially at 1.25 speed, which I've started watching youtube at!) :P I'm a devops guy, and definitely get a kick out of all the github actions that you're doing. Slowly dragging my work colleagues into it. Having everything automated is such a time saver, plus the audit path of the git logs makes it so useful. Most of my work is with terraform, but I've also some personal projects that I'm wanting to automate. Keep up the awesome work!

[@alexanderjankowski3037]

This project is so inspirational! Stephen and your team you'all doing good job.

[@joepartlow]

I love learning about new ways to do things.

[@Davedarko]

Just saw @formatc1702 hold a lightning talk about it at the Hackaday Europe event, awesome to see it mention here!

[@hed420]

You should make a machine that can read the files and automatically measures and cuts wires. You can also have it strip the wire ends.

[@deltaroboticsinc]

Hey fellow startup here! Who is the vendor you are using for your cables? Right now we are buying raw cables and manually soldering the connectors.

[@C3DPropShop]

I occasionally design pcbs and program our P&P (Essemtec Puma) at work and I think about you and your project everytime! 😅

[@johnnicol5009]

Thank you for sharing this information! I learn so much from your work and appreciate everything you do!

[@bobomurod]

I love your videos! Your machine motivated me to do my own projects and don't fear the big companies

[@alchemistalchemist6051]

Hi Stephen, thanks for covering this topic, it's nicje but super useful. Do you have any recommendations for custom cables vendors ? I see LCSC has recently launched a service fpr this, so might give them a try :)

[@christopherstaples6758]

@4:00 yes would really like to see more auto build source things without hunting everything down , and something that can visually be checked on the fly sounds great

[@ldomotorsjason3488]

Stephen, it is really cool! Is it possible to use for 3D printer cable design? or only for Lumen?

[@senfdame528]

6:18 Classic big willy transition xD

[@leofortey7561]

Is there a line in the YAML code for noting the wire shielding? Because if there is, I think you forgot to add/draw it anywhere. No lines are shown for shield draining to a common ground.

[@bouni8506]

I think having the same wire color multiple times in the main cable isn't really cost efficent as the manufacturer needs to make a non standard cable for you in order to manufacture the harness ... Wouldn't it be more efficent to use a standard color coded cable (DIN47100/ IEC60757)? Sure the connectors would no longer have the same 4 colors but that woul make it even harder to confuse them. Just random thoughts, great video 🙂

[@forrestmcmean6636]

Cool video... What software are you using for your wiring diagrams?

[@SmithyScotland]

Is there an equivalent cable manufacturer to like JLCPCB for pcb's?

[@stephen_hawes]

yes! we prefer using a vendor directly, but LCSC recently started a service, plus dirtypcbs.com has one that ive used before with great results: dirtypcbs.com/store/cables

[@Pinlights]

DirtyPCB is "decent", though they have a limited selection of connector types they support. I've just sent in my cable drawings to LCSC for some rather simple JST/Molex based cable designs, I'll set a reminder to report back here when they get in. All in all, the quote process was simple, though their online form for mapping cables to connectors is severely limited, so best to have a drawing and/or a photo of your cable as well!

[@npriester]

Just to add on here, I have used LCSC's cable service recently myself and it was awesome. Some simple harnessed with some JST connectors for AC power, plus I was able to specify some odd usage of a single crimp with two wires and they confirmed with their engineer it would work, tested it first, and reached out during each step. Highly recommend them!

[@randycox4633]

@@npriester How does their pricing work and were you happy with it?

[@irgski]

Curious - what sw app do you use to generate your system diagram?

[@paulgupta2454]

I'm very interested in your BOM management solution

[@MistahHeffo]

Stephen have you considered a usb hub chip on the mainboard to route the cameras and comms over a single usb cable?

[@octothorpian_nightmare]

Early versions had that but were problematic. Even now with separate cables you have to be mindful and plug the cameras into separate root hubs on the PC.

[@extragames4365]

What is with automatic soldering paste and heat gun?

[@ChinmayPendharkar]

Aren't there any cool wireviz like text-source/CLI based tools for doing system diagrams?

[@formatc1702]

Hi, WireViz creator here 🙂 Currently, I've been using WireViz myself in a hacky way for system diagrams. Simply define each module as a "connector", and each port on the module as a "pin". Then you can route wires from pin to pin, each wire representing a cable. It's not ideal, but it works.

[@muratkabilov]

what kind of wristwatch do you wear?

[@rickeymh]

I wish I had this wire wiz a few years ago. I had to have someone draw my cables, supply a BOM, Schematic, and assembly notes. I real pain in the ass.

[@eliasheuninck]

Very interesting to learn about this workflow!

[@Luzgar]

It would be even nicer if it exported something that contained text (like a svg or a pdf) instead of png, so that you can copy wire names and do ctrl-f to find a wire.

[@NiklasAuBln]

Wireviz usually export SVG and HTML (SVG + BOM), but due to the hacky connector Steven used to make the splices in the cable the export of SVG for those specific cables fail and only the png export succeed. -> for cables without a splice and just connector - cable - connector configurations SVG export works great

[@bjoernbuettner8382]

hmm, who manufacture these cables ?

[@ryanbeall7542]

Bro, switch to CAN like all the Voron projects. I'm never looking back

[@sniff122plays]

love tracking things with git? then youll love IAC tools like Terraform and Ansible

[@UnexpectedMaker]

Great video - Quite an interesting topic!

[@ZugEnde]

Why the switch to PH any particular reason behind this?

[@stephen_hawes]

a couple reasons: a bit smaller than the XH standard which is beneficial when switching to SMT and integrating stepper drivers, plus more pin variants in SMT!

[@samgoader2125]

Yeah pornhub isn't my cup of t... I'm more an xvideos guy

[@adrianram5524]

....whatever this guy is on ...I want some...LOL

[@ThePyrosirys]

I feel like wireviz would be fine if only it changed the curved lines for straight lines. Why would anyone ever want curvy lines in a schematic? It's supposed to be an abstraction.

[@adrianram5524]

very cool stuff man

[@deliciousfewd]

Nice shirt.

[@Max-tj7bp]

Epic.

[@larryslobster7881]

hell yeah

[@asidesigner8542]

Thanks for sharing