Damn people — I think I’ve finally realized the *final boss* of automation: ⚠️ Wiring and Harnesses ⚠️ I spent the weekend diving deeper to learn more about cables, wiring, harness design and the manufacturing of custom wire harnesses… Mother of god, it may be one of the *most complicated* automation tasks we have ahead of us 🤯 These things are in nearly every piece of machinery we build, and many machines have a LOT of it! For example, a Boeing 757 has more than 500 *miles* of cable inside of it — all of which has been constructed into wire harnesses This is going to be an actual, serious limitation on our ability to construct and accelerate complex machinery in the near future Today, the vast majority of wiring and wire harnesses are still constructed by human hands. There are some parts of the process which have been automated (producing some cables & small subassembly harnesses) but even still, the whole process is extremely janky and human-involved. We are the ultimate spatial assemblers, after all 🤷‍♂️ Assembling a single complex wiring harness still takes *hundreds* of man hours manually producing, routing, and connecting cables into subassemblies and final assemblies If you want to see what I mean, take a look at the process involved in producing a complex wiring harness being constructed: The issue is that everything is highly configurable. Making one wiring harness design is complicated, but not necessarily “hard”… But how do you build a system or toolchain which can easily automate the production of *any* wiring or harness design? Very very difficult! Starting with the design process: what kind of wires where? What gauge, shielding, insulation is required? What connects to what, how long is each wire, which signals are being sent where, what connectors and terminals are needed? How is it laid out in 3D space within the physical structure it will be placed in? How do you reduce signal loss and EMF noise throughout the harness? To do this design process, some firms and companies design their wire harnesses in Microsoft VISIO — yes, the flow chart / diagramming tool 🤯 Other firms do use more purpose-built wiring plugins for traditional CAD tools like Catia / Solidworks, but it seems like these tools still mostly miss the mark when it comes to practical usage for the wiring + harness design task There is another issue — ZERO of these design tools are built with automation or robotics in mind. They are not thinking about how a given design translates into robotics language. So you could not take a digital wire harness design and output GCode or other direction for how it might be assembled or constructed by a robot in the first place Now on the the manufacturing process: How is each cable cut, stripped, terminated, stripped / terminated / sealed? What connectors are you using, what wires go into which connector at which pins, which connectors route to other connectors or terminations? How are you arranging each connector and cable in physical space for the assembly process? How are cables bundles and wrapped? Which cables and bundles should be on the outside or inside of a large group? Do you add service loops to make sensitive cable routes more repairable or add flexibility to the harness in case of stretching or flexing? Complexity! There’s a TON of moving parts which need to be put in exactly the right places in space, the orientations and combinations of which can be very spatially complex. You have to manipulate a lot of small, flexible, and long components together into precisely the correct configuration, which sometimes involves thousands of pieces. Accidentally making knots, haywires, and a mess of cables is very easy After it’s constructed, you have to test it… are the right signals reaching the right endpoints? Are you losing signal or getting too much noise through a cable route? Discovered something is screwed up? Good luck taking stuff apart in order to fix it!