Autodesk Manufacturing Tech Day – Mechatronics using Inventor and AutoCAD Electrical

Justin Hoey of Autodesk gave a presentation on Mechatronics, the field where Mechanical and Electronics overlap each other. He used AutoCAD Electrical and Inventor in an example showing the work flow of the design of a wiring harness. I have been noticing an increasing level of communication between various the platforms that make up the Autodesk product range. This example showed exactly that. Here I am not talking about simple data exchange. For users of different platforms (in this case, AutoCAD and Inventor) to effectively work with each other they need to exchange much more than just geometry.

In the demo, a wiring harness designed by an Electrical engineer using AutoCAD Electrical was imported into Inventor. This also imported all the electrical data and made it available to the Mechanical Engineer using Inventor who modeled the cabling. This Inventor data was then sent back to AutoCAD Electrical in order to update the necessary layout drawings.

Here are some pictures. Click the images for larger views.

Wiring harness in AutoCAD Electrical

Wiring harness imported into Inventor

Cabling created in Inventor

Wiring harness imported back into AutoCAD and dimensioned