Motorsport harnesses

Motorsport harnesses

Motorsport harnesses live in a hostile world… CableEye makes sure they are ready.

If you stop to think for a moment of the environment that motorsport harnesses have to operate in, it’s a pretty mean place.

  • Chemical contamination
  • Extremes of temperature
  • Vibration
  • Electrical noise

Cimbian UK, working as exclusive distributor for CableEye from CAMI Research, has many years of helping people to both improve their processes and, up-rate their testing to ensure that cable-harnesses leave the assembly department ready for reliable, long-life operation.

CableEye provides two real options for testing motorsport cable-harnesses:

  1. A low-voltage system (M3U) for testing continuity between programmable thresholds as well as measuring resistance and testing diodes.
  2. A high-voltage (HiPot) system (HVX) which does everything the M3U does but also provides a parametric test at high-voltage to test for insulation breakdown and/or whiskers.

The unique measurement algorithms used in CableEye ensure that every point is tested against every other point at high speed, and is tested using a bi-polar method to ensure that the continuity is good in both directions.

After a cable-harness has passed its low-voltage test it will then switch, automatically, into the HiPot mode. Here the assembly undergoes several different stages of test including dcV and acV, both with a programmable ramp-up and ramp-down rates to prevent damage to the insulation that may lead to early life failures (vehicle breakdown).

 

Motorsport harnesses - programmable ramp-up

Both the CableEye M3U and the CableEye HVX use the same software, which includes serial number entry by barcode (a single barcode can contain Serial number, batch, operator ID, part-code and more), data logging, and reporting.


Testing motorsport harnesses in the real-world:

Colin Harmer, owner of Creative Motorsport Solutions and user of a 256 pin HVX HiPot tester, seen below, said:

In this test, the customer had an issue that pointed at the corner looms being “suspect”. These were not looms we built but because the CableEye tester is so flexible we could quickly reverse engineer the loom, check it against the supplied drawings, and perform a Hi-Pot test in very little time. In general, motorsport-type builds are typically low volume which puts a premium on flexibility with fixtures and ease of use, which is a true delineator of the CAMI testers. We are now able to easily Hi-Pot test every product we produce which ensures that the client receives a goods that are exactly to specification. By keeping records of all the tests, we can easily retest at a future point to ensure that there’s been no change in the loom.

Motorsport harnesses - Test result

There are no “off the shelf” (interface fixture) solutions for motorsport connectors, so these have to be made.” “Each board is a breakout of 64 test points. Boards are modular so you can mix and match to fit the loom you’re testing.

Motorsport harnesses - test station and report

Image (courtesy of Creative Motorsport Solutions) of  a 256 Test Point continuity & HiPot harness tester with interface fixtures comprising a 128 Test Point base unit ,with one expansion module. The tester is further expandable to 1024 Test Points.

For more information on how a CableEye cable test system can help you in testing your motorsport harnesses simply fill in the form below and drop us a line.

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I need a cable harness tester, CableEye does both.

I need a cable harness tester, CableEye does both.

I need a cable harness tester,  not a cable tester!

During a recent discussion with a customer, he declared that he started out looking for a cable harness tester but was put-off by the price and complexity so he decided to opt for a cable tester to handle the ‘simple’ cables.

As the discussion moved ahead we went through some of the hundreds of applications currently running on CAMI Research CableEye systems around the world when the penny dropped for him… CableEye IS a cable harness tester!

CableEye also self-learns, tests, logs the test result data, and generates a test result record.

Customer specific interface harness tester

He laid one of his cable harnesses on the table. the cable harness, which had seven connectors sections, was from a “mission-critical” project, where ‘near-enough’ was not ‘good enough’. Three connectors could clearly be seen as ‘one end’ of the harness whilst the other four were along the rest of the cable harness. This was, simply, no problem for CableEye.

As soon as the connectors had been selected/created in the PC’s library and added to a CableEye ‘fixture‘ it was a simple case of learning the cable harness, checking the learn against the design drawing, and saving. CableEye was now ready to test these harnesses. Development time around 10 minutes… test time, less than three seconds, including generating a PDF report!

Cable harnes tester report

It is the power of the PC-based architecture that enables CableEye to be so versatile. Capturing continuity is one thing, using the captured results in a meaningful and useful way takes a PC and very special software.

FAQ

What is cable harness tester?

A cable harness tester is a precision electronic instrument that will verify that a cable or wiring harness is connected correctly between the different connectors fitted. For example, CableEye is an automated tester that will also learn the correct connections from a known-good cable or wiring harness.

What is the difference between a cable and a harness?

A cable is typically made ‘end-to-end’. It may have multiple connectors on either end but don’t, generally split-out to additional connectors. a wire harness, on the other hand, may have one or multiple connectors at one end and may split out across several connectors along its length

How is testing a cable harness different from testing a cable?

The principle difference is in the software. Testing a harness requires advanced algorithms, such as in CableEye, to make sense of the interconnections between the terminal connectors. Most cheap cable testers struggle with this.

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