Detection of faulty cable in cable rails

Projects General Guidance
1

Hello everyone,
Does anyone know of a way to use an Arduino Uno Nano to identify broken cables among the numerous cables in a cable rail?
Note : it is not like to find location of fault in underground cable.
Thank you
Regards
Abhi

2

Welcome to the forum

I assume that you have access to both ends of the cables

How many cables are involved and can they each be identified by colour, marking or labelling ?

3

Excuse my ignorance, but what’s a ‘cable rail’?

4

Thanks for reply,
Yes we have access to both end of cables.
40 cables are there which are connected to different sensors through cable rail, and they are same colour but different labelling.

5

Thanks for reply,
All cables are placed inside cable rails.

6

If you short the cables at one in in pairs then you can detect whether the short is in place from the other end using digitalRead(). If a short is not detected then one of the cables of the pair has a break in it or you have a bad connection

It is only going to be worth using an Arduino for this task if it is going to be repeated multiple times with the same setup. Otherwise you might just as well use a multimeter to test for continuity of each cable pair

Of course, if you are not getting readings from a sensor then you should test its cables first

7

Thanks for the reply, I’m still not sure what a cable rail is…
Maybe a cable tray or duct ?

Anyway, from your description, it sounds like there’s nothing in common about the cables other than they’re in the same container / trunk.

@UKHeliBob seems to be on the right track,
If the cables are longer, matched pairs, or utilise coax etc - you may look at using TDR to locate faults and other deviations from the expected performance.

8

Just throw a wild thought in here...forget any arduino, group the cables in lots of 8 and use a 2 bob network cable tester.

9

Might also be a cable reel - a roll of multiconductor cable.
Go to Amazon
tester

Or, go to any supplier of quality instrumentation. The ones I've used from Amazon don't last, mostly I suspect because they're not designed robustly, mostly just using chips intended to drive a few cm of PCB trace, not 1000 feet of wire. Yet another example of 'ya get what ya pays for'.
For a one time test, go with your multimeter. If your going at this repetitively, buy an instrument.

10

This question comes up frequently. If you use the Search feature you might find someone who's posted their solution already.

11

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