Handy Tip – Building Braided Cables for Projects

One of the things we have to do a lot in building our projects at SwitchDoc Labs is making cables for routing wires from one place to another.   It is really a pain to build exactly what you want.   Usually, pre-built cables do not work as the pins never seem to be all in the same place and order when you look at different vendors boards.

 

Braided Cables

We like our cables neat and tidy, but we don’t obsess over this.  However, when we have a bulk of wires (read more than one) running from one location to another, we like to braid the cables, rather than using a bunch of wire ties to keep things neat.  There are two ways to do this.  Recently, we took a tour of LayerZero systems in Ohio, which builds large power switching systems for server farms.  Brand new factory.  Dr. Galm, the co-founder and CTO, was kind enough to walk us through the manufacturing process and we were stunned by the high levels of automation and additive manufacturing that they had installed.  One of the coolest machines was the wire harness builder.  A wonderful piece of equipment that actually printed the labels on the wires themselves as the harnesses were built.

We want one.  But, it’s a little pricy for how much we would use it.

Low Tech Braiding

Now we come to the point of this posting.  Given that our fearless President, Laurel, will not let us buy a Zeta 656, what do we do?

The low tech solution to the braiding issue is not twisting them by hand, it is using a drill to spin the wires all while moving your hands up the wire.   Great results, for low cost.  Note that braiding of cables is not good for all signals.  It works well on short runs, but not on long runs (> 12 inches depending on frequency).  But slow digital signals (like I2C) or DC signals, it works very well.

 

I2C Cables

As an aside, one of the things this has led to a SwitchDoc Labs is to standardize I2C connections according to the Grove connector.  In the link, you can ignore all the product advertising and focus on the use of Grove for I2C.  It is great.

We will be placing a location for a Grove connector on all new SwitchDoc Labs products and will be adding the Grove connector if we modify a board in the future.