Socks and boots

Darryl Bennett

• March 08, 2019 01:48

How do you place shield socks and heatshrink boots on a Formboard drawing?

We often use pre-made shielded cable such as shielded Cat6 ethernet cable terminating into 360-degree EMI backshells. The shield of the cable does not fit directly on the backshell, so to terminate the shield to the backshell, we use a short piece of round braid (AA59569R36S0375 for example) to go from cable shield to backshell. This overbraid sock typically gets covered with a boot of heatshrink from the jacket of the cable to the backshell.

To place a sock on a formboard drawing, must the component be created as something other than an overbraid (since overbraid typically runs the length of a segment)? What device type is appropriate?

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  Arthur Graf

  • March 08, 2019 13:58

  Hi Darryl,

  I don't have extensive experience with E3, but in our case, but I can think of two options I would consider in your situation. 

  1) You could use the "additional parts" functionality in Harness Builder (if you have that tool).  It has been pretty convenient for placing a particular component specifically related to assembly of a particular device.  For us, this works out to the part showing up in the on-print BOM, and as a "balloon" or "find number" on the connector ("target") symbol itself.  Example follows (Find Number (FN) 40 is ring terminal and FN 46 is the insulation boot).  We'd probably work up an appropriate flag (triangle) note to explain the assembly procedure and locate the flag next to the FNs.  (FYI, the flag 11 is related to how we mark the connector designator on the finished harness.)

  

  2) The other option coming to mind is to directly place the braid and heat shrink on the wire path as their own parts.  In the example that follows, FN 165 is the heat shrink placed directly on the wire entering the housing of -P332.  The corrugated tube (FN 89) is placed over the wire and heat shrink.

  

  In this case, the heat shrink is a component of type "standard device" in the library with a single symbol of type "attribute text template" within it.

  

  I was able to get the length in the BOM (again, using Harness Builder BOM output on-print) to be driven off of the actual symbol length on print (Symbol Properties, shown above).  I think there is a way to use an "additional length" attribute on the in the properties to adjust this if you are not doing a 1:1 drawing.

  Hopefully these ideas help.  Anyone else have other ideas?

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  Darryl Bennett

  • March 17, 2019 01:35

  Part of the problem I have is that Harness Builder pulls the length information from the symbol rather than the device. We rarely do drawings to scale, so the dimension of the symbol is often meaningless, so adding an "additional length" to an irrelevant value or scaling it becomes an awkward process. Is there a way for Harness Builder to pull the length from a device attribute rather than the symbol attribute?

  Besides including the shield symbols, overbraid can include a conductor which I am sometimes not sure whether to place on the wiring diagram. How do people normally use this?

  The same manufacturer part number of overbraid or could be used in two ways: 1) as an overall shield from end to end of a cable, or 2) as a sock which connects an overall shield (be it a smaller diameter overbraid, or a shield of a cat6 cable) to an EMI backshell. Do these two ways require different device types or symbols given that (1) is placed the length of a segment and (2) is placed a short distance near a connector? Can segment lengths drive the length Harness Builder uses in either or both of these cases?

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