WireViz: Wiring harness documentation tool
Posted: Tue Jun 28, 2022 2:00 pm
Just stumbled across an interesting tool called WireViz which may be useful for documenting wiring harnesses.
The idea is you specify the wiring harness using a simple YAML text file with details of the connectors, cables and connections. The tool then renders a pretty diagram showing how things are connected and creates a BOM with the details of the connectors and wires. This is something I've wanted to find for years as drawing harnesses in 2D CAD or a schematic tool like Kicad is possible but takes a lot of work to produce a clear drawing.
The only significant shortfall for our uses that I can see is that it is not currently possible to specify a connection as a twisted-pair (for CAN, resolver, etc). The connections for which pin does what will be captured OK but the twist will be missing from the diagram. There is a feature request for this so it may appear in future releases.
The software works on Windows, Mac and Linux and is Open Source.
As an example you start with something like this:
and end up with a diagram like this:
Anyway, hope this is useful to someone.
The idea is you specify the wiring harness using a simple YAML text file with details of the connectors, cables and connections. The tool then renders a pretty diagram showing how things are connected and creates a BOM with the details of the connectors and wires. This is something I've wanted to find for years as drawing harnesses in 2D CAD or a schematic tool like Kicad is possible but takes a lot of work to produce a clear drawing.
The only significant shortfall for our uses that I can see is that it is not currently possible to specify a connection as a twisted-pair (for CAN, resolver, etc). The connections for which pin does what will be captured OK but the twist will be missing from the diagram. There is a feature request for this so it may appear in future releases.
The software works on Windows, Mac and Linux and is Open Source.
As an example you start with something like this:
Code: Select all
connectors:
X1: &template1 # define a template for later use
pinlabels: [GND, VCC, RX, TX] # pincount implicit in pinout
type: Molex KK 254
subtype: female
X2:
<<: *template1 # reuse template
cables:
W1:
wirecount: 4
length: 1
gauge: 0.25 mm2
show_equiv: true
color_code: DIN # auto-assign colors based on DIN 47100
shield: true # add cable shielding
connections:
-
- X1: [1-4]
- W1: [1-4]
- X2: [1,2,4,3]
- # connect the shielding to a pin
- X1: 1
- W1: s