[HN Gopher] WireViz: Easily document cables and wiring harnesses
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WireViz: Easily document cables and wiring harnesses
Author : luu
Score : 220 points
Date : 2024-04-14 23:22 UTC (23 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| SAI_Peregrinus wrote:
| 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.
| jhogendorn wrote:
| I wrote an integration to make this available as part of kroki,
| if anyone wants to use this as a service.
| temren wrote:
| hey there, how can i check out this integration?
| moondev wrote:
| https://niolesk.top/#https://kroki.io/wireviz/svg/eNqNkMGKwj.
| ..
| jve wrote:
| I think https://kroki.io/ deserves its own submission.
| mdaniel wrote:
| Your wish showing up in the face of a submission just 14
| days ago and then another 29 days ago must be indicative
| of why there are so many dupes all the time:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=kroki.io
|
| You can feel free to submit the GH repo, as that one
| doesn't seem to have been submitted before
| https://github.com/yuzutech/kroki
| jasongill wrote:
| This is great, thank you. I wish there was a way to
| activate "zen mode" in the URL so that it could be
| bookmarked
| friend_and_foe wrote:
| I never thought I'd see a perfect use for YAML. This is
| fantastic.
| lloydatkinson wrote:
| Yeah, this is _excellent_. Useful for multiple disciplines too.
| tjoff wrote:
| WireViz is great, are there similar tools for other areas?
|
| I tried to find a good way to illustrate packets in a simple
| protocol and went for the _bytefield_ package for latex (pdf
| manual https://texdoc.org/serve/bytefield.pdf/0 ). 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.
| v9v wrote:
| There's https://wavedrom.com for digital timing diagrams, not
| exactly the type of diagram you want but still useful.
| nickthenerd wrote:
| bytefield-svg is an npm package: https://github.com/Deep-
| Symmetry/bytefield-svg
| bartlettD wrote:
| WaveDrom also have a package for making bitfield diagrams
| (https://github.com/wavedrom/bitfield). Has anyone used both
| of these? I'd be interested to see how they compare.
| arrw wrote:
| Quite a few years ago I wrote a tool as a university project
| that can extract C (and to a lesser degree C++ and Pascal)
| struct definitions from DWARF debug symbols and output VHDL or
| LaTeX/TikZ diagrams: https://gitlab.cs.fau.de/arw/st
| mjsir911 wrote:
| I've been looking for the same, and the closest I've come to is
| the protocol utility & the more-maintained protocol-go re-
| implementation.
|
| https://www.luismg.com/protocol/
| https://github.com/ryungmin/protocol-go
| heffer wrote:
| There is nwdiag which is part of blockdiag:
| http://blockdiag.com/en/nwdiag/index.html
|
| Unfortunately, it seems the package is abandoned with the
| maintainer being unresponsive. But I've been using it within
| Sphinx to generate some documentation for a Bluetooth protocol,
| and it generates pretty useful diagrams.
| sprayk wrote:
| Can anyone recommend some business that would make harnesses from
| such a specification?
| bartlettD wrote:
| Your search term would be "wiring harness manufacturer". I've
| not come across anyone in this space that would take a web
| order like PCB fabricators unfortunately, the demand isn't
| there.
|
| If you need wiring harnesses or other cable assemblies you'd
| usually make them yourself, buy a COTS cable that is close
| enough and make your design match that or bite the bullet and
| go to a fabricator and pay expensive Non Recurring Engineering
| (NRE) costs. Anyone good will have an IPC-A-620 certificate.
|
| Unless you're Toyota, its probably worth buying your own set of
| crimp tools rather than going down this route. WireViz is a
| great tool for documenting cables for your own purposes, but is
| only part of what would make up a full drawing pack for a wire
| harness.
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| > its probably worth buying your own set of crimp tools
|
| I used to make a product that required a wire harness with
| about 50 conductors (TBF, half of them were Ground). I'm not
| Toyota, just some dude in a basement, but I found an outfit
| that would cut to length & strip wire and crimp on the
| terminals I specified, for less than it cost me to just buy
| the wire myself. Economies of scale FTW! Unfortunately, that
| company was bought by another and they no longer make wire
| assemblies for outside businesses.
|
| Crimping wires in bulk reliably is slow and time consuming if
| you're doing it by hand, even with the right tools (expensive
| too). It's generally better to have a supplier with automated
| tools do it: even the terminal manufacturers seem to think of
| their manual tooling as second-class citizens. Digi-key has a
| pretty wide selection of off the shelf crimped wires; I think
| Pololu does also.
|
| Like you said, there's not a lot of demand and it seems like
| the harness manufacturers are dying off.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| A particularly well-known example in the German automotive
| industry is Leoni [1], they mostly make wiring harnesses for
| vehicles, but also for one-shot projects (e.g. spare parts for
| long-since discontinued models). Bit pricey from what I hear,
| but if you have a need just contact them.
|
| [1] https://www.leoni-special-vehicles.com/de/produkte/
| antoinealb wrote:
| I heard good stuff about Dirty Cables:
| https://dirtypcbs.com/store/cables
| jasongill wrote:
| https://www.yourspec.com/ This company will do custom harnesses
| but AFAIK they don't support any external formats, although
| they do have their own online editor.
| alright2565 wrote:
| I haven't worked with them, but lcsc also does this:
| https://www.lcsc.com/customcables/landingPage
| buescher wrote:
| Call your quick-turn CM. A lot of them do cable harnesses also.
| eiktyrner wrote:
| Does anyone know of a similar tool for complete wiring of a
| system?
| 0xEF wrote:
| Do you mean like a block diagram? You might have to be more
| specific about the type of job you're working on.
| airbreather wrote:
| www.dad.net.au
|
| The UI is terrible, concept is good, but it is basically a
| ported node graph - system defined by nodes and
| interconnections.
|
| I have used it to design entire industrial plant facilities.
|
| I have been working on a Qt version on and off for a while, not
| sure if it will be personal use or see the light of day.
| satiric wrote:
| RapidHarness is good, although it's paid. If you're at a
| university, they sometimes provide educational licenses for
| free if you ask nicely.
| satiric wrote:
| RapidHarness is good, although it's paid. If you're at a
| university, they sometimes provide educational licenses for
| free if you ask nicely.
| spacecadet wrote:
| Thanks for sharing! I should use this to replace my hand drawn
| diagrams for various cars over the years.
| twarge wrote:
| Does it depict twisted pairs? Often needed to disambiguate
| colors.
| johnwalkr wrote:
| I think it doesn't out of the box, but there are forks/patches
| that do.
| cushychicken wrote:
| Wire harness docs: a creation process so painful that _hand
| editing YAML_ is an improvement. XD
|
| RapidHarness is a paid alternative that makes some pieces easier
| - particularly sourcing and 3D visualization. It's the Altium to
| Wireviz's Kicad.
| jasongill wrote:
| I'd never seen RapidHarness before, thank you!
| myself248 wrote:
| 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.
|
| 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.
|
| (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.)
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| > some sheets to be the harness that connects them
|
| Love that idea!
| hypercube33 wrote:
| 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
| filcuk wrote:
| I don't think mermaid or similar are extensions of markdown.
| They are standalone notations that a markdown editor may
| implement/render.
| epalm wrote:
| 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.
|
| 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.
| baby_souffle wrote:
| Put everything into a docker container? That's about as close
| to a single executable as you'll get without a ground up re
| write or some other non trivial engineering.
| adolph wrote:
| 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:
|
| https://youtu.be/CbZXuFmViiQ
| sircastor wrote:
| This is the third time I've seen this in 3 days. I guess it's hit
| connecting consciousness in the community.
| nick238 wrote:
| Do you have a related project "WireWiz"? Was that the original
| name? (Ctrl-F on your README :)
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