Looking for feedback: Automated Wire Harness Design Visualizer Tool

[partycrashercasey]

Hey everyone,

I'm an EE and do a lot of wire harness design. My usual workflow recently is defining everything in a simple spreadsheet. It's fast, easy to copy/paste, and avoids a lot of the bloat and setup time of heavy B2B harness software.

But without a doubt visual diagrams are critical for sharing, review, and the actual build. I got so tired of manual click-and-drag grid fatigue, routing all the wires, endless tweaks, and doing "PowerPoint collage art" in Visio, Lucidchart, and Draw.io that I decided to write a local desktop utility to automate the layout for me.

I figured I couldn't be the only one struggling through this, so I've been working on a release that is now available to download for free: https://terminoharness.com



Under the hood, it's a standalone offline app. You just drag in your CSV/Excel wirelist, and it automatically routes connectors with Manhattan orthogonal lines. It also keeps a live Data Panel synced to the visualizer, which has been really sweet during board builds since clicking a connector immediately highlights its nets and gauges.

My goal is to keep this utility highly focused on the actual engineering data rather than bloating it with graphical editing features, library management and all that.

I'd really like to rethink and redefine what we see as "Harness Design" and more importantly where we end up sinking most of our time and effort.
How do you currently handle the transition from wirelists to schematics? Is everyone just suffering through manual Visio/Draw.io work, or does Altium/Capital Harness have a grip on you?

I'd love to get some honest feedback from this crowd

Thanks!

[mariush]

Interesting

For me, it would be super annoying to see those legends like that.  I would prefer to have those in the form of a table with the numbers aligned to right and text aligned left .. see the picture attached on how it would look much better to me.

can you adjust the background to not be white all the time?  colorblind settings, maybe ability to see the text of the color when hovering over the lines, like a tooltip?

[partycrashercasey]

Super fair point about the pin legends and the white background. I am a light mode enthusiast myself.. but I know I'm in the minority, so I (begrudgingly) built in a dark-mode toggle!



for the pin mapping, is it the text justification that's bugging you the most? That's good feedback I will fix the justification to make the varying text look cleaner. There's also a single-line mode to minimize the pinout details completely.

If you have a chance to run a test dataset through the binary, I'd love to know how it handles your specific wirelists. Let me know if you run into any formatting edge cases and I can drop you a complimentary standalone dev/Pro license file directly.

[booscrawl]

Hey everyone,

I'm an EE and do a lot of wire harness design. My usual workflow recently is defining everything in a simple spreadsheet. It's fast, easy to copy/paste, and avoids a lot of the bloat and setup time of heavy B2B harness software.

But without a doubt visual diagrams are critical for sharing, review, and the actual build. I got so tired of manual click-and-drag grid fatigue, routing all the wires, endless tweaks, and doing "PowerPoint collage art" in Visio, Lucidchart, and Draw.io that I decided to write a local desktop utility to automate the layout for me.

I figured I couldn't be the only one struggling through this, so I've been working on a release that is now available to download for free: https://terminoharness.com

(Attachment Link)

Under the hood, it's a standalone offline app. You just drag in your CSV/Excel wirelist, and it automatically routes connectors with Manhattan orthogonal lines. It also keeps a live Data Panel synced to the visualizer, which has been really sweet during board builds since clicking a connector immediately highlights its nets and gauges.

My goal is to keep this utility highly focused on the actual engineering data rather than bloating it with graphical editing features, library management and all that.

I'd really like to rethink and redefine what we see as "Harness Design" and more importantly where we end up sinking most of our time and effort.
How do you currently handle the transition from wirelists to schematics? Is everyone just suffering through manual Visio/Draw.io work, or does Altium/Capital Harness have a grip on you?

I'd love to get some honest feedback from this crowd

Thanks!

Have you considered NOT posting links to your anonymous website with a "download now" button and no source code available?

https://www.eevblog.com/forum/chatgptai/i-automated-the-entire-part-importing-process-for-pcb-design/msg6236315/#msg6236315

[booscrawl]

Do you really expect people to trust your vibe-coded 7MB slop app claiming to be the product of some random anonymous Colorado LLC?

https://opencorporates.com/companies/us_co/20191117934

If that even is your LLC, you're late on your taxes. Pay up.

And again with the "pretty please just override the security checks for me kthxbye <3". Get real.

Since Termino is a newly released independent application, Windows SmartScreen may flag the installer as "unrecognized". This is completely normal for unsigned code during releases.

To complete the installation:

    Double-click the downloaded .msi file to open the setup wizard.
    When the blue popup appears, click the small "More info" link below the warning text.
    Click the newly visible "Run anyway" button to safely launch the installer.

You really think nobody will expect your code contains a rootkit when new AI-generated CVEs against Windows are being found on a daily basis?

https://gbhackers.com/windows-kernel-vulnerability/

If your product is good, publish it on GitHub with a license that forbids commercial use by anyone other than yourself. Right now you look like a malware distributor.

[partycrashercasey]

Woah okay, I'm not related to that Colorado LLC, that was formed back in 2019. 

The unsigned binary/SmartScreen trigger is a fair critique, though. Code signing certificates are expensive for an independent developer bootstrapping a tool out of pocket, and I wanted to get early workflow validation from actual EEs before dropping the cash on the EV cert.

Your point about security is exactly why this is a local, offline desktop application instead of a web app (though I did consider that route). I know many that are skeptical of uploading their sensitive datasets onto some 3rd party website. Running locally means your data never leaves your machine.

I'm currently working through the code-signing verification process to clear the SmartScreen warnings permanently. In the future I am also looking to deploy on the Windows Store to provide an additional layer of verification.

[booscrawl]

Your point about security is exactly why this is a local, offline desktop application instead of a web app (though I did consider that route). I know many that are skeptical of uploading their sensitive datasets onto some 3rd party website. Running locally means your data never leaves your machine.

So you're just going to pretend like an offline desktop app isn't capable of connecting to a remote server and installing malware?

[partycrashercasey]

Nope, not pretending anything like that. I understand users being cautious about unsigned software.
I am actively working through onboarding for Azure trusted signing, but to be honest, Microsoft has changed a lot about the signing requirements.
In the meantime, I submitted my code to microsoft defender security, and the file can be run through a local virus & malware scanner to verify.

I'd very much appreciate any feedback from engineers comfortable scanning/sandboxing the file, and hopefully I can move past the hurdles and get fully signed releases out there ASAP!

[gnif]

Your point about security is exactly why this is a local, offline desktop application instead of a web app (though I did consider that route). I know many that are skeptical of uploading their sensitive datasets onto some 3rd party website. Running locally means your data never leaves your machine.

So you're just going to pretend like an offline desktop app isn't capable of connecting to a remote server and installing malware?

Please stop the attacks, I see nothing here that warrants such an agressive attitude to a new user that doesn't appear to be doing anything malicious (and yes, I did have a cursory look at the binary and don't see anything immediately concerning or malware like)
Unless you have some evidence/proof of malicious behaviour by the application, stop making such claims.

@partycrashercasey - I too know what you're going through with regards to code signing, etc. It's an absolute pain in the ass and an expensive process both for the certificates but also for the FIPS hardware you must have these days to store the private key and perform the signing.

While I agree that having your product open source even if under a restrictive license would be a nice thing, there is no requirement you do so unless you have used GPL or such like components under licenses that require you provided sources. If people are truly worried, they can run it in a VM in the meantime.

[partycrashercasey]

@gnif I really appreciate the empathy. Sounds like you were eventually successful with your code signing?

I'm hoping to figure it all out soon too. It's nerdy and probably indicative I spend too much time doing wire & cable harness design, but I genuinely wanted to make a cool tool that solves a tedious problem in a novel way.

It diverges from the typical workflow a bit, but for the better, so that we can leverage automated data processing more.

[gnif]

@gnif I really appreciate the empathy. Sounds like you were eventually successful with your code signing?

Yes, I needed it for my fully open source program (Looking Glass - https://looking-glass.io) that was being flagged by Defender and Google as malicious even though full sources were available. It resulted in my entire domain being flagged as dangerous for months. Basically anything compiled with MinGW for Windows, regardless of what it is, will flag unless you sign it. Being open source actually made this more difficult because there is no "company" behind it, so it had to be funded out of my own pocket, and I had to jump through hoops to certify my company in international corporate databases before I could get a certificate. Took months.

[Colton Haseltine]

Have you tried to add an "auto-layout" feature, where it layouts the connections, given a wire list input. I'm working with aerospace EE's to develop something that has this. Trying to use AI's visual skills to determine layout. I'm also trying to build a curated connector image list. Have you made any progress with that?

My tool is called Tractus if you want to check it out, you can find it at neronis.ai/tractus