Cable Harness Tester - Any literature, resources?

[japasetelagoas]

Hi everyone.
I'm thinking about developing a project of a cable harness tester to be used in the company where I work at.
We build a wide variety of products focused on the transportation market (locomotives) and as expected, there are tons of cable harnesses with several different plugs and receptacles.

There's this company called Cami Research that sells a cable tester where you can switch its input and output modules depending on the connectors needed for the job. I was thinking about developing something similar but WAY less complex than the product that they offer.

I've looked on the interwebs for something similar, IEEE library, didn't find much that would guide me properly.

These are the main questions that I have at the moment:

-What would be the best platform when it comes to I/O to use on this project considering that some of our connectors (DIN 41612 series) have 96 pins on each end? Microcontroller, CPLD or FPGA?

-Like on the CAMI research "modular connector boards", I suppose that whenever someone plugs a different module that contains different connectors the software recognizes that, switching the layout displayed on the screen. Does that mean that every different modules needs its own firmware ?

Maybe this project is a bit too much for my current knowledge.

Thanks.

[Stray Electron]

  I don't know of any literature other than various manufacturer's literature that advocate their own products but it's probably still worth looking at.  FWIW I have a couple of Cirrus Systems 1000Rs and I really like them.  They make and sell a huge number of interchangeable connector adapters.  I think that even the OLD 1000 series can handle hundreds of connections and I've seen but not used big non-portable units that will have many thousands of circuits.  Here's a link to a Youtube video of the slightly newer 1100R series.

  OK I just looked up some of my old Cirrus literature and the 1100R model will test up to 1024 circuits.

   There used to be a lot of the CS stuff on E-bay but I only found two testers with no adapters when I looked just now.  But FWIW the adapters are simple circuit boards with a card edge connector and the connector of choice so it should be easy to make the ones that you need.

[KG7AMV]

I know this is an old topic but i have an older Cami Cableeye M2-Full Serial version inbound I will be doing a teardown of it eventually. 

[Smokey]

Why not a real scanner/switch system?  You can pick up Keithley 7001 systems for almost nothing now.