WireViz

Summary

WireViz is a tool for easily documenting cables, wiring harnesses and connector pinouts. It takes plain text, YAML-formatted files as input and produces beautiful graphical output (SVG, PNG, ...) thanks to GraphViz. It handles automatic BOM (Bill of Materials) creation and has a lot of extra features.

Features

• WireViz input files are fully text based
  • No special editor required
  • Human readable
  • Easy version control
  • YAML syntax
  • UTF-8 input and output files for special character support
• Understands and uses color abbreviations as per IEC 60757 (black=BK, red=RD, ...)
• Auto-generates standard wire color schemes and allows custom ones if needed
  • DIN 47100 (WT/BN/GN/YE/GY/PK/BU/RD/BK/VT/...)
  • IEC 60757 (BN/RD/OR/YE/GN/BU/VT/GY/WT/BK/...)
  • 25 Pair Color Code (BUWH/WHBU/OGWH/WHOG/GNWH/WHGN/BNWH/...)
  • TIA/EIA 568 A/B (Subset of 25-Pair, used in CAT-5/6/...)
• Understands wire gauge in mm² or AWG
  • Optionally auto-calculates equivalent gauge between mm² and AWG
• Is suitable for both very simple cables, and more complex harnesses.
• Allows for easy-autorouting for 1-to-1 wiring
• Generates BOM (Bill of Materials)

Note: WireViz is not designed to represent the complete wiring of a system. Its main aim is to document the construction of individual wires and harnesses.

Examples

Demo 01

WireViz input file:

connectors:
  X1:
    type: D-Sub
    subtype: female
    pinlabels: [DCD, RX, TX, DTR, GND, DSR, RTS, CTS, RI]
  X2:
    type: Molex KK 254
    subtype: female
    pinlabels: [GND, RX, TX]

cables:
  W1:
    gauge: 0.25 mm2
    length: 0.2
    color_code: DIN
    wirecount: 3
    shield: true

connections:
  -
    - X1: [5,2,3]
    - W1: [1,2,3]
    - X2: [1,3,2]
  -
    - X1: 5
    - W1: s

Output file:

Bill of Materials (auto-generated)

Demo 02

Source - Bill of Materials

Tutorial and example gallery

See the tutorial page for sample code, as well as the example gallery to see more of what WireViz can do.

Usage

Installation

Requirements

WireViz requires Python 3.7 or later.

WireWiz requires GraphViz to be installed in order to work. See the GraphViz download page for OS-specific instructions.

Note: Ubuntu 18.04 LTS users in particular may need to separately install Python 3.7 or above, as that comes with Python 3.6 as the included system Python install.

Installing the latest release

The latest WireViz release can be downloaded from PyPI with the following command:

pip3 install wireviz

Installing the development version

Access to the current state of the development branch can be gained by cloning the repo and installing manually:

git clone <repo url>
cd <working copy>
git checkout dev
pip3 install -e .

If you would like to contribute to this project, make sure you read the contribution guidelines!

How to run

$ wireviz ~/path/to/file/mywire.yml

This will output the following files

mywire.gv         GraphViz output
mywire.svg        Wiring diagram as vector image
mywire.png        Wiring diagram as raster image
mywire.bom.tsv    BOM (bill of materials) as tab-separated text file
mywire.html       HTML page with wiring diagram and BOM embedded

Command line options

• --prepend-file <FILE> to prepend an additional YAML file. Useful for part libraries and templates shared among multiple cables/harnesses.
• -o <OUTPUT> or --output_file <OUTPUT> to generate output files with a name different from the input file.
• -V or --version to display the WireViz version.
• -h or --help to see a summary of the usage help text.

Syntax description

A description of the WireViz YAML input syntax can be found here.

(Re-)Building the example projects

Please see the documentation of the build_examples.py script for info on building the demos, examples and tutorial.

Changelog

See CHANGELOG.md

Status

This is very much a work in progress. Source code, API, syntax and functionality may change wildly at any time.

License

GPL-3.0