Its time to start exploring areas of Solidworks that I normally have never used mainly because my current job didn't use it. Of of those areas is Routing. If you have Solidworks Premium, its an add-in available to you. I have spent the past few days going through the beginnings of the Routing training manual, and thought I would share some initial how-to's from it.
The first lesson will deal with setting up a connector so it will play nicely in your Routing assembly. Of course the first thing you need to do is make sure the Routing add-in is turned on:
Once turned on, you can then activate the Routing Tools tab of the Command Manager:
One of the first lessons deals with inserting ring terminals into an existing assembly and then creating some simple Auto-routes:
As you can see all the connectors are nicely lined up, but they didn't just automatically line themselves up so nice. Inside your assembly, on the Routing Command Manager tab, select the Auto Route Button:
A second ring terminal needs to be added to this light. Once you activate the Auto Route option, you then go to the routing tab on the task pane, and grab the ring connector. The connector has a pre-defined mate reference on it. As you drag it close to the taped hole on the light, the connector will snap concentric to the tapped hole:
Unfortunately the rotation of the connector is less than desirable. Here is the trick: while you are still holding the connector over the hole, and before you release the mouse button, hold the shift key, and press one of the arrow keys. The connector will then rotate to the position you want:
The key here is that the connector has an axis feature in it thats named "Axis of Rotation". Without that feature, you will not be able to rotate the connector:
Once you place the connector and rotate it, you can place a matching connector on the terminal block in the assembly:
To complete the Auto Route of the wire, you simple click the blue end of the Cpoint (connector point) on each connector, and they appear in the selections box of the Auto Route property manager:
You will also have a preview of the completed route:
Click OK a few times, and you will have the completed cable:
Thats it for rotating connectors, and creating simple Auto Routes. Next up is routing through clips, and assigning wire types to cables. If you would like to download these sample tutorial files, they are available on the Solidworks website at this link: Routing Training Files. The files have not been updated to 2009 yet, but they will still work. Other Solidworks training files are available at this link: Solidworks Training Files.
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