This page is in progress

What is a Cable Harness?

Cable harnesses have 3 parts: connectors, crimps, and wires.

**photo of each part

Assembly types

On CTS-SAT-1 we had four types of manufacturing processes: COTS (Commercial off the shelf) cables, Supplied, Spliced, and Direct Connection.

COTS cables are purchased directly from a supplier (mostly digikey or mouser) by us. A subcategory of COTS for us is Rewired COTS. For these ones we need to unpick the individual wires and move them around.

**a cable diagram as an example.

Since many cable assemblies are constructed such that Pin 1 goes to the last pin, Pin 2 to the second to last, and so on, we have to rewire a lot of the COTS harnesses.

Diagrams and Documentation

We used WireViz to make the diagrams. This software makes the diagrams very beautiful but it takes some time and effort to install and get it working. Using a spreadsheet or a different software might be better to ensure everyone has easy access to the diagrams and can work on them easily.

Purchasing

Buy assemblies over individual components where possible to save money. If you need to buy the components individually, buy the connector in the size you need and then buy assemblies and pick the wires out. This will ensure you buy the correct wires.

When we put together the order for all of the harness parts we needed, we made a table of all of the harnesses we would need, with the parts for each harness in one of the columns. We still bought some of the wrong things. We should've continued to use the spreadsheet we already had instead of making a new table because we didn't order enough for the solar panel harness because we forgot we needed four of that one. We should try to design the spreadsheet to make it easier to translate between harness information and shopping lists.