System and Method for Automated Testing of an Electric Cable Harness

A method of testing an electric cable harness, comprising:

• mounting a cable harness to a jig and connecting the cables in the harness to a switch system device;
• selecting a wire pair in the harness to test;
• applying a TDR signal to the selected wire pair and collecting responsive TDR waveform data;
• repeating the selecting and applying steps until all wire pairs have been tested;
• comparing the responsive TDR waveforms to respective test limits for each wire pair;
• and
• determining if the cable harness meets quality standards.

A tester for characterizing an electric cable harness, comprising:

• a switch system connected to every connector pin on the electric cable harness;
• a set of TDR engine modules connected to the switch system, each TDR engine module having circuitry to operate a Time Domain Reflectometer test;
• a memory holding a library of standard TRD waveform test limits for each wire pair;
• a controller connected to the TDR engine and the switch system, operating the steps of:
• (a) configuring the switch system to couple the TDR circuits to different wire pairs;
• (b) having the TDR circuits provide a TDR stimulus to their respective wire pair and collecting their resulting TDR waveforms;
• repeating steps (a) and (b) until substantially all wire pairs in the cable harness have had their resulting TDR waveform collected;
• analyzing the collected TDR waveforms;
• and
• reporting results from the analysis.