RapidHarness is a software solution for designing and documenting wiring harness. My team was looking to start using a better wiring harness documentation system than the EAGLE schematics we used in the past, so we decided to try RapidHarness (disclosure: they provided us a free professional subscription for educational use).
While using RapidHarness over a few months to document several harness designs for my team, I had a chance to play with a number of its features. I was fairly happy with the resulting design printouts, but along the way I found a number of problems, mostly things that slowed me down as I tried to use the software. I would recommend that anyone interested in this software compare alternatives before settling on it.
Designing a Harness
When you open a new harness design, you’re dropped into a blank canvas with a few data tables. For a basic harness, you’ll need to add connectors and wires, then connect them together.
To add a connector, right-mouse click Connectors and click Add Connector.... A window opens up, listing all available connectors.
To add a wire to the harness, we similarly right-mouse click Wires then click Add Wire.... There’s no clear way of organizing these wires though, so we have to either scroll through a long list or type in a search query every time we open this window - quite annoying for any reasonably-sized harness. The one workaround I found for this was to add lots of wires at a time so that you don’t have to deal with the difficult “Add Wire” process as many times.
After adding connectors and wires, you must create “Connections”. These specify which cavities/terminals on which connectors each wire terminates at. Creating a connection requires selecting 4 things: “From” connector, “From” cavity, “To” connector, “To” cavity, and lastly the conductor. I would like to see a quicker way of specifying all of this, for example allowing dragging and dropping a wire into a connector.
After creating a connection, the software will select the next cavity in both the “From” and “To” selections, as well as the next conductor in the list, potentially saving some time if things are already in alphabetical order. Personally, I found the “From” and “To” designations confusing, although perhaps there are some use cases where direction is important.
As you add components, RapidHarness generates a Bill of Materials which is quite nice. You can specify the contact/terminal part numbers in use which will be reflected on the Bill of Materials, but it is time consuming to do so. I would expect that when adding a Connector to the parts library, you could specify which contacts are compatible with it, but this functionality is not included. Barring that, I would expect that there would be a way of selecting multiple contacts to update them in bulk, but this functionality is not there either. Instead, you must open the design explorer and go to Connectors → CONNECTOR_NAME → Contacts → CONTACT_NAME, then right-mouse click the contact and click Specify Design..., finally selecting the contact part number you wish to use for that specific termination. This is quite time consuming if you have hundreds of terminations in your harness!
If you need to modify your design, you may run into issues. First, ctrl-z does not always work as expected. For example, if I merge bundles of wires together, I cannot use ctrl-z to undo that. Second, RapidHarness doesn’t seem to support replacing items such as wires. If you want to change the color of the wire, you’ll have to delete the old wire and connect the new one all over again. (Edit: I later found that you can change the wire type by opening the Assembly then right-mouse clicking the wire and clicking Change design.... It would be nice to have this functionality in the Connections view.)
I ran across a number of other UI and UX issues in the design window. The list on the left side of the screen will show all of the wires and connectors you’ve added, but all of the wires show as red no matter their color - not very helpful. Trying to rename items can also be annoying. If you use an unsupported character in your name, RapidHarness won’t tell you until after you’ve typed the whole name out, requiring you to type it all over again.
They do seem to have gotten some things right. For example, if you update an item in your library, it doesn’t automatically update your harness designs. It adds an upwards arrow icon in the list instead, indicating that a newer version is available, which you can apply from the right-mouse click menu.
RapidHarness makes it easy to change wire, splice, and other specifications (right-mouse click object then click Change design...), although there doesn’t seem to be a quick way to move a wire into a multiconductor cable or vice versa. Another concern with cables is that you cannot name the individual conductors - instead they use the naming convention of <cable name>.<wire color>. This is especially annoying if the cable has multiple conductors with the same jacket color.
You also can’t delete multiple items at a time from the navigation list. This was particularly annoying to me when I needed to delete a large number of extra wires, and my workaround was to hit del then alt+d lots of times until the extra items were cleared out.
Overall, my experience paints RapidHarness as a program that still needs a lot more work in the UI and UX space.
Libraries
When you first install RapidHarness and begin to design a harness, you will likely quickly realize that the built-in component library is quite small. While I was able to find many of the wires I needed in their library, other component categories such as connectors were very sparse.
If you’re using only Deutsch DT series connectors in your design then you might be fine, but that seemed to be about the only type of connector provided. You can add custom devices to the library, but I found the process to be slow. Considering that the developers went to the trouble of including a library of components, I’m surprised that they didn’t put more effort into populating the library so as to be more useful out of the box.
Adding a connector is fairly straightforward, with the options to include part number, description, and manufacturer. They even support specifying cavity names or naming conventions (letters vs. numbers, etc) and they allow you to type in 1-13 to quickly create cavities named “1” through “13”.
There’s also a spot to attach a “Front View Image” of the connector, although for some reason it always defaults to the Desktop folder to select an image. Once you attach an image though, it shows up quite large and if you try to drag to resize it, it changes exactly as you drag it, meaning you’ll end up with a library of connectors with arbitrarily sized images - not very professional looking when you try to print out a harness design.
Once you finish a connector design, you can save it and it will show up in your library. But don’t expect anyone else to be able to collaborate with it just yet!
Collaboration
RapidHarness supports collaboration between multiple users, but we ran into multiple problems while trying to utilize this functionality. First, every design that anyone in your company creates will show up in a giant list. There seems to be no way of categorizing these designs such as tags or folders. There also doesn’t seem to be a way to keep designs from being shared across the company. With the ability to “Search Within” either “All Designs” or “My Company”, it seems like more filtering functionality was planned but it has not been implemented.
When someone in your company creates a design, it shows up in this list, but by default you cannot open it. Before you can open it, the owner must go through the “Create Version” process, creating a named immutable version that others can then open and modify.
Interestingly, the text in the versioning window states “Create an immutable Version of this design that can be shared within your company” even though you can’t actually modify whether the design is shared or not.
Creating a smooth experience around collaboration is not easy, and it looks like the RapidHarness development team has a lot of work to do. The simplicity of this revision control system means the RapidHarness team didn’t have to worry about some of the more difficult challenges of collaboration, but the tradeoff was ease of use. Currently, if the other user forgets to version their file, I cannot access it at all. At the very least I would like the option of taking ownership of files that haven’t been versioned so that I’m not stuck waiting for the other person to log in and version the file.
I believe at one point we also ran into an issue where someone couldn’t open a file I had been working on because it was still open on my computer. Even though I had created an immutable version, they were still unable to open it until I closed the file. These situations can cost you time and money if you are relying on the collaborative features of RapidHarness.
Cloud
If you use RapidHarness, you must be comfortable storing everything in the cloud and not on your computer. Hitting the “Save” button uploads changes to a RapidHarness server, and there is no way to save design files locally. In some ways this simplifies collaboration, but it also creates new concerns. What happens if the RapidHarness servers go down? What happens if you want to switch harness design software? This cloud-only system definitely promotes vendor lock-in.
Conclusion
After using RapidHarness for a few designs, I have mixed feelings. The simplicity of the software means you can probably get up and running more quickly than if you were using more a featureful harness design platform. For the basic designs we have needed to so far, RapidHarness has had the tools we needed.
When it comes to the user interface and experience however, the software falls on its face. RapidHarness is full of complicated menus that don’t follow standard design principles, workflows that require many more steps than necessary to complete simple repetitive tasks, and a collaboration system that hinders productivity.
RapidHarness is still in active development so I hope their software team will fix the issues I’ve seen, improving the usability of the software. The resulting design printouts from this software have been very useful to our team so we may continue plodding through the interface for now. However, until RapidHarness usability improves, I’ll be on the lookout for a better software solution.