A proper wire-harness visualizer would run in place of pcbnew in Kicad. A harness still has a schematic (albeit usually without components in it), and then the physical instantiation of that schematic has properties like trace width, er, wire gauge and stuff. It has an orderable BoM just like a board. If you decide that a particular pinning would be easier, you should be able to back-propagate the changes from the harness up to the schematic. All these things already exist in Kicad.<p>This would allow some sheets of a Kicad schematic to be the boards/modules, and some sheets to be the harness that connects them, and only the physical boards/harnesses would differ.<p>(I've used both WireViz and RapidHarness and while the latter sucks less, they both suck. Being completely outside my existing EDA worklfow is not a feature.)
WireViz is great, are there similar tools for other areas?<p>I tried to find a good way to illustrate packets in a simple protocol and went for the <i>bytefield</i> package for latex (pdf manual <a href="https://texdoc.org/serve/bytefield.pdf/0" rel="nofollow">https://texdoc.org/serve/bytefield.pdf/0</a> ). It is a bit heavy, as if requiring latex wasn't heavy enough, so at first I dismissed it and thought there would be something simpler. But I couldn't find anything else that I liked so I stuck with it and think it was worthwhile in the end, the output looks great and is very clear.
Wire harness docs: a creation process so painful that <i>hand editing YAML</i> is an improvement. XD<p>RapidHarness is a paid alternative that makes some pieces easier - particularly sourcing and 3D visualization. It’s the Altium to Wireviz’s Kicad.
I use this often for documenting cables. Every time some EE decides to rearrange the SWD pin order on a new board I make a new diagram and a new cable.
This looks really nice! Something my staff would definitely appreciate, especially the ability to 'version' the text file (even if it's just different copies of yaml files in a directory). But the deployment aspect is a non-starter, I just can't tell my staff "install (the correct version of) graphviz (for your OS), then install (the correct version of) python, then run it from the commandline giving the yaml file as an argument". At minimum it'd have to be a standalone executable, and running it would need to be simplified, maybe not with a real GUI but perhaps "drop the yaml file on the executable" would suffice.<p>Perhaps I could rig up an internal webapp where a user could submit/post a file from an html form and it would download the resulting image, but that'd be a bit of a clunky process for the user.
I just saw reference to WireViz the other day in a video by someone making a pick and place machine. The video describes WireViz’s use and how they went from an internal process to a vendor for making the harnesses:<p><a href="https://youtu.be/CbZXuFmViiQ" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/CbZXuFmViiQ</a>
This is super neat but am I the only one kind of disappointed it's not an extension of markdown like mermaid charts? Itd be neat to be able to share these on GitHub and have them render directly in projects