Ms Visio Wiring Diagram
Abigail Tyrie
Visio is the best, but SmartDraw is cheaper and is a decent software package for creating basic network diagrams. You can use Spiceworks to aid you (assuming you have managed switches) to tell you what port a device connects to on your switch. From there you can then trace manually to what port on your patch panel.
Layering with Visio is also one of those features that cannot be overlooked when making wiring diagrams. Used it quite a bit myself. Visio 2013 is quite a treat to use too, just installed an upgrade for myself last week.
As for documenting cables and Jacks, I just added them to the spreadsheet above. I did it as part of a phone rollout so we did it as a 100% manual process. Took about 10 man hours for 100 computers :S
maybe someone of you can have the original wiring diagram of the Hohner G2T because I recently purchase one of this guitars and the wiring it's a mess I was trying to fix it but this guitar came with a small circuit (Hohner VBS-1) on it that I don't know how to soldering again due to some cables are not in place and I can't find the original wiring on the web...
one question, is the vbs circuit compatible with active EMGs? correct me if i'm wrong, but i thought the vbs only cuts the highs/alters the tone..it doesn't have anything to do with pickup splitting right?
CAD program, make sure they're vectors so they scale to any size print, and to make it even snazzier layer the various wires so you can break them out by color one at a time, I say this because Brad Artigue made beautiful sets for the Fiat 124 Spiders of all years: www.artigue.com/fiatcontent/wiring/
I've been going through a laundry list of CAD programs and not one seems to be able to easily do wiring diagrams that are full color. And by full color I mean multi-color lines that don't make your eyes want to explode.
I think CAD would be overkill, but when it comes down to it, a wiring diagram really isn't all that different from a flow-chart. You've got objects, and connectors between those objects that make nice orderly paths.
I've been meaning to check out the freely available Solid Edge 2D CAD package from Siemens. I've drafted wiring diagrams in AutoCAD, it's not really that much fun (I didn't have their EE add-in package, which should help) as well as some other more esoteric stuff that runs on mainframes as well as Cadra (which is esoteric stuff that doesn't run on a mainframe). The Siemens stuff looks very solid from the screenshots I've seen.
Something else, don't use on screen colors in your CAD wiring diagram, because then you need a full color plotter or printer to reproduce. Use wire text. You drop text onto the wire, usually inside some parens although brackets or completely without would be fine too. Something like (BLU/WHT) for a blue & white wire. I'd use three letter because I don't like questions about blue vs. black, etc. The use of on-screen colors can sometimes be helpful to show multiple systems on the same drawing but for me it gets hard on the eye.
Personally I don't really like the sprawling drawings at the back of a Clymer or similar shop manual, I'd rather have a wire book with each system on it's own drawing sheet or sheets. If I'm troubleshooting a radio I really don't need to see the turnsignals on the same drawing. But I'm coming from aircraft so it's probably a learned preference.
It could do that diagram, but doing the multi-color wires would have to be done with text like the above post. I honestly don't think the 2D environment for SE is any less painful than Autocad. In fact sometimes it is more painful, as Autocad has keyboard commands for everything.
When I was driving wiring diagram and other related action through AutoCAD it was with 2008LT and to me it felt like a really hot take on Windows Paint. It's been a couple years and I didn't do it that long but it didn't feel that "helpful" if you know what I mean. I take it Solid Edge isn't much better?
Anything else out there for free that's been developed by people with an industry focus? I've wondered when & where I'd be doing this for my Mustang when it comes time for a Megasquirt, I'd like to have done the thinking before picking up a crimper.
Autocad or SE should be really "helpful" when compared to Windows Paint. I've done plenty of wiring diagrams in SE and its quick and easy, I was just pointing out that an experienced Autocad user could do it just as easily. In autocad you can use block properties and generate the parts list from them which is also quite handy. SE you cant do the fancy 2D stuff like that - its a very 3d oriented program.
For the OP's requirements, Autocad, SE 2D, SW Draftsight, etc. would all work fine. The multi-color requirement is the only real issue (and there are many work-arounds). You could easily make changes to all of them without redrawing the whole thing.
I've done lots of wiring diagrams using Visio flowcharting software. I've also done a lot of them using Adobe Illustrator so I could get the tracers colors on the wires. I only used Illustrator when duplicating or documenting an existing harness. I use Visio when designing a wiring harness from scratch.
We currently use Visio for our "wiring diagrams", see the example. However, we have a problem when it comes to cables. As you can see, we try to make our cables look like the actual cables rather than just a wire. In other words, a USB cable will have connectors that look like USB connectors. The problem with Visio is that there's no way (at least that I can find) to have a "USB Cable" symbol or subassembly. You have to manually go in and select two connectors out of the library, place them and then connect them with a line/connector. And because there's no way to have a cable subassembly there's no way to autogenerate a BOM that calls out the cable.
In ACADE, you can basically assign any catalog entry to be the subassembly of any other entry. That's not quite out-of-the-box functionality, but it's not hard to do. So, in short, YES you can use this software to generate a BOM showing your connectors as 'mains' and your cables as 'subs'. Or, you can make each thing its own entry with no subassemblies.
However, in the real world, you don't buy USB connectors (the 'mains' in your example) and then connect them with cable (the 'subassemblies' in your example). You buy a USB-to-USB cable. It's a single thing with one part number, and therefore, one catalog entry. This would be the most likely output, using ACADE.
Sometimes, you might purchase field-wireable connectors and then get some bulk multiconductor cable and wire the connectors yourself. In that case, you would have multiple part numbers. Whether or not you chose to make the cable a subassembly to the connectors, or vice-versa, would be up to you. This would almost certainly never happen for USB, but it's not too uncommon to see it elsewhere. Here, we do it for literally every other kind of connector, even shielded Ethernet. We always place these into the BOM as 'cable only' and treat the field-wireable connectors as bulk items, just like terminal blocks, electrical tape, and wire ties.
As for the graphics, you'd have to create your own blocks in order to recreate what we see in your example. If you're not at least somewhat familiar with base-level ('Vanilla') ACAD, then you might be in for a bit of a learning curve there. ACADE expects some blocks to be built a certain way and it's helpful to go in to that already knowing how to draw blocks in ACAD.
I would like the full cable (two connectors and wire connecting them) to be a "part", "object", "subassembly", "symbol" or whatever the proper Autocad term is for something that you grab out of a library and drop into a drawing. In addition to this, I would like:
2. The cable "symbol" to be "flexible". That is, I want to be able to put the cable symbol on the drawing, move one connector to wherever I want to connect it to, move the other connector to its destination and have the wire stay connected to the two connectors. This is where Visio fails. If I make the cable a "shape" it's not possible to move one connector without moving the other connector and wire. And if I don't make it a "shape" it shows up multiple line items on the BOM.
In ACADE, the connectors and the cable that connects them will be separate entities, graphically. They aren't 'dropped out of a library' together, they have to be made separately. Because of that, you won't be able to, say, pick it up by the connector and have the cable move along with it. (There is a way to join them all together as a single group, but it locks the orientation of the connectors and cable together so that if you move one part they all move, just like in Visio.) Any reconnections you'd have to do, you'd have to move the connector, then reattach the cable. But, judging by your example, this wouldn't be too big of a deal.
*The connectors would be simple 'dumb' blocks (In ACADE, a 'smart' block is one that holds attributes that the software can do things with, like make reports, automatically generate tags and xrefs, etc.)
*EDITING: If I needed to change where a cable connected, I would first move the connector, then draw a new wire from the relocated connector to the old wire. This will put a wire dot at the intersection of the wires. Then, use AETRIM to erase the now-unconnected piece of wire. AETRIM will also erase the wire dot as part of this command.
I'm not sure if this process would be very advantageous over what you're currently doing. That's really up to you. While ACADE does support creation of wiring diagrams to an extent, it's more focused on schematics and panel layouts. It doesn't really have a lot of wiring-diagram-specific tools.
While a lot of this is beyond entry level developers, the principles are sound, and will help beginners understand how & why a good circuit schematic is so important during development and debugging / repait - and much more use than a Fritzy diagram or scribble.
KiCad is terrible as it separates the components from their footprint which just creates unnecessary work if you intend to create PCBs. It also lacks a simple preview of the footprints when you're picking them for parts which is just amazingly bad design. If you need to move parts around after wiring them up, the wires don't move with the parts so you have to manual rewire everything. Mind-blowing stupid design.
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