how to make full color wiring diagrams?

What's the easiest way to go about making lots of these?

http://www.356-911.com/912restogallery/912restopictures/wiringbig912.gif

Crayons?

In all seriousness, you're going to need something like a CAD program for that.

CAD program, make sure they're vectors so they scale to any size print, and to make it even snazzier layer the various wires so you can break them out by color one at a time, I say this because Brad Artigue made beautiful sets for the Fiat 124 Spiders of all years: www.artigue.com/fiatcontent/wiring/

I've been going through a laundry list of CAD programs and not one seems to be able to easily do wiring diagrams that are full color. And by full color I mean multi-color lines that don't make your eyes want to explode.

Can't do them on paper, that tends to be unacceptable for FSAE.

I've done them with powerpoint. Wasn't fun, but wasn't impossible either. The end result looks almost idential to what you find at the back of a Clymers manual.

That said, do layers if at all possible. It makes for a powerful diagnostics tool for you if you can isolate the turn signals as one layer, ignition as another, etc.

A programme like FLEXI 10 could do it.

I don't know about "easy", but you might try Visio?

wae wrote: I don't know about "easy", but you might try Visio?

That's what I was going to recommend; that or "Draw" which is the F/OSS equivalent that comes in OpenOffice/LibreOffice.

I think CAD would be overkill, but when it comes down to it, a wiring diagram really isn't all that different from a flow-chart. You've got objects, and connectors between those objects that make nice orderly paths.

I've been meaning to check out the freely available Solid Edge 2D CAD package from Siemens. I've drafted wiring diagrams in AutoCAD, it's not really that much fun (I didn't have their EE add-in package, which should help) as well as some other more esoteric stuff that runs on mainframes as well as Cadra (which is esoteric stuff that doesn't run on a mainframe). The Siemens stuff looks very solid from the screenshots I've seen.

Something else, don't use on screen colors in your CAD wiring diagram, because then you need a full color plotter or printer to reproduce. Use wire text. You drop text onto the wire, usually inside some parens although brackets or completely without would be fine too. Something like (BLU/WHT) for a blue & white wire. I'd use three letter because I don't like questions about blue vs. black, etc. The use of on-screen colors can sometimes be helpful to show multiple systems on the same drawing but for me it gets hard on the eye.

Personally I don't really like the sprawling drawings at the back of a Clymer or similar shop manual, I'd rather have a wire book with each system on it's own drawing sheet or sheets. If I'm troubleshooting a radio I really don't need to see the turnsignals on the same drawing. But I'm coming from aircraft so it's probably a learned preference.

<--- resident Solid Edge expert.

It could do that diagram, but doing the multi-color wires would have to be done with text like the above post. I honestly don't think the 2D environment for SE is any less painful than Autocad. In fact sometimes it is more painful, as Autocad has keyboard commands for everything.

What about inkscape? website

In reply to ProDarwin:

When I was driving wiring diagram and other related action through AutoCAD it was with 2008LT and to me it felt like a really hot take on Windows Paint. It's been a couple years and I didn't do it that long but it didn't feel that "helpful" if you know what I mean. I take it Solid Edge isn't much better?

Anything else out there for free that's been developed by people with an industry focus? I've wondered when & where I'd be doing this for my Mustang when it comes time for a Megasquirt, I'd like to have done the thinking before picking up a crimper.

check e-bay! theres a guy that sell 11x17 colored and laminated wire diagrams he even had one for my 62 dart.

In reply to 44Dwarf:

I think he needs them for his FSAE team, so totally scratch built car

I need to be able to make changes without redrawing the whole thing.

Is there really not a single piece of software that specializes heavily in wiring diagrams? (Not PCB design)

$199 with free trial. Wiring diagram software

No experience with it - but it was the first hit to the google search "wiring diagram layout software".

pres589 wrote: In reply to ProDarwin: When I was driving wiring diagram and other related action through AutoCAD it was with 2008LT and to me it felt like a really hot take on Windows Paint. It's been a couple years and I didn't do it that long but it didn't feel that "helpful" if you know what I mean. I take it Solid Edge isn't much better? Anything else out there for free that's been developed by people with an industry focus?

Autocad or SE should be really "helpful" when compared to Windows Paint. I've done plenty of wiring diagrams in SE and its quick and easy, I was just pointing out that an experienced Autocad user could do it just as easily. In autocad you can use block properties and generate the parts list from them which is also quite handy. SE you cant do the fancy 2D stuff like that - its a very 3d oriented program.

My co-workers (EEs) use Kicad (open source) and a few other programs. Any program that does PCB design can generally do a good wiring diagram with net-lists, etc.

For the OP's requirements, Autocad, SE 2D, SW Draftsight, etc. would all work fine. The multi-color requirement is the only real issue (and there are many work-arounds). You could easily make changes to all of them without redrawing the whole thing.

That's one I did in paint.

I've done lots of wiring diagrams using Visio flowcharting software. I've also done a lot of them using Adobe Illustrator so I could get the tracers colors on the wires. I only used Illustrator when duplicating or documenting an existing harness. I use Visio when designing a wiring harness from scratch.

A piece of a wiring diagram I drew in Visio.

A closeup. The colors and line thicknesses of both the wires and the "terminals" all have meaning.

modernbeat wrote: I've done lots of wiring diagrams using Visio flowcharting software. I've also done a lot of them using Adobe Illustrator so I could get the tracers colors on the wires. I only used Illustrator when duplicating or documenting an existing harness. I use Visio when designing a wiring harness from scratch. A piece of a wiring diagram I drew in Visio. A closeup. The colors and line thicknesses of both the wires and the "terminals" all have meaning. "CB" stands for circuit breaker.