Wiring Diagram Software

[ryanmills]

For more physical wiring diagrams, for example, I have a power box that has breakers, high voltage relays, timers, and a controller and I need to draw up the connections on a per-wire basis. Does anyone have suggestions on third party software for the diagrams. I'm just a lowly KiCad user, so I'm guessing most of you are using something in Altium. But is anyone using anything with a smaller price tag?

Currently I am doing them by hand in illustrator but it's very time consuming. I tried Visio, utter garbage. SmartDraw looked promising and works decent for everything but drawing a line where you want it, honestly baffling poor design given the name. There is no way Northrop Grumman is using that to make their missile wiring diagrams. I looked at a few more that all look like Visio clones. Have not used fritzing in a few years, might be an option. I have SVG stencils for everything, really just need something that can draw a line the way I want it, did not think it would be that hard. Figured I would ask if anyone else has been down this rabbit hole.

[tooki]

Do you mean electronics wiring diagrams (wire harnesses, connections between PCBs, etc), or electrical diagrams (i.e. more along the lines of what electricians use)?

Since you say breakers, relays, etc, I’m assuming the latter. If so: I’m also looking for something decent. The big professional program for that is E-Plan, but it’s $$$$ and from the looks of it has a learning curve. I have Altium, but it’s really not made for that.

[ryanmills]

Do you mean electronics wiring diagrams (wire harnesses, connections between PCBs, etc), or electrical diagrams (i.e. more along the lines of what electricians use)?

Since you say breakers, relays, etc, I’m assuming the latter. If so: I’m also looking for something decent. The big professional program for that is E-Plan, but it’s $$$$ and from the looks of it has a learning curve. I have Altium, but it’s really not made for that.

Really it could be either, I design exhibits for science centers. A wiring diagram can sometimes be as simple as 5-6 connections between a switch, power supply and pi. Sometimes its 20 components and 100+ connections and when they get that dense, I struggle to it by hand and keep it readable. A lot of its just meaningful thought in the layout, but smartdraw for example auto snaps the traces with no way I found to disable it. And that would be fine, but it will snap things collinear to the edge of an object, over the top of another trace, traces will snap and only move left and not right, sometimes they snap and can't be edited. Can't even change the direction of the line jumps. I spend more time fighting the snapping than I do making the drawing. It should be as simple as everything defaulting to be perpendicular to the starting edge, but it's simply not. Baffling design choices.

Ohh EPLAN does look good, sadly its unlikely I can get approval for what I'm guessing is a price tag with a few zeros. I work for the type of people who would rather me burn 30 billable hours doing it by hand than spending $500 once for me to do it in 1.  In a way I could crowbar KiCad to do it but its time consuming. I do my mechinal work in Solidworks and again, I can kind of crowbar it but, clunky.

[Nominal Animal]

I have SVG stencils for everything

Tried Inkscape yet?  With suitable grids (both regular rectangular, and axonometric for hex grids) and snap options, it might be a good fit for your needs.  I use it a lot.

[CatalinaWOW]

You might try QElectroTech.  Its free and has both good and bad points.  Seems oriented to plumbing, hydraulics and electrical wiring diagrams that need to be more physically descriptive than schematics.

[ryanmills]

For anyone who finds this, I ended up looking at SkyCAD: https://skycad.ca/ Meant more industrial control systems but it's got its own block generator you can use to create pretty much anything with terminals or wires on its free tier. The next tier up does panel layouts as well. So far, a much better option than all the "smart draw" visio clones and its built-in generator means I don't have to make all the parts in illustrator.

[jpanhalt]

I use Eagle for plumbing, household wiring, and solderable breadboards.  I need to define my rules to fit the occasion as there are only 2 signal layers.  Assuming KiCad allows more signal layers, and I was proficient with it, that is what I would use, rather than go through a learning curve.  Attached are two unrelated diagrams.  For the breadboard, you still have ERC, which is nice and you can check for unrouted airwires easily.

[ryanmills]

Do you mean electronics wiring diagrams (wire harnesses, connections between PCBs, etc), or electrical diagrams (i.e. more along the lines of what electricians use)?

Since you say breakers, relays, etc, I’m assuming the latter. If so: I’m also looking for something decent. The big professional program for that is E-Plan, but it’s $$$$ and from the looks of it has a learning curve. I have Altium, but it’s really not made for that.

After spending the day with it and finding it pretty easy to figure out, you might peek at  https://skycad.ca/ they have youtube tutorials for every little thing and so far, seems pretty good. Plus the free tier does quite a bit. Paid tiers add on panels and some other tools but cost is a lot more reasonable than EPLAN and I found it fairly intuitive after using it a bit.

[Doctorandus_P]

I draw Cabinets and/or DIN rail stuff very rarely, and for the few times I do, I just use KiCad too, because I have no interest in learning some other program just for those two boxes. And KiCad works quite adequately for me for this too. It's quite easy to make a bunch of symbols that represent "DIN-rails" stuff.

I never used it myself, but I do know there is some specialized software for this, such as for example: QElectroTech (I just found out that is an open source project too).

[nvmR]

I've played around with wireviz lately. It is visually satisfying for straightforward stuff, and visually clear.
However! If you get too complex, it gets convoluted and barely readable, and you need to split it into multiple diagrams.