Easily and beautifully document cables and wiring harnesses.

Built out of frustration with existing wiring documentation tools, WireViz uses human-readable, YAML-formatted text to describe the makeup of a cable or wiring harness, and automatically generates an easy to understand graphical diagram including pinouts, wire lengths, color schemes, mating connectors, images, assembly notes, etc. together with a bill of materials for stockkeeping or ordering.

Since the input is purely text-based, it lends itself perfectly for integration into a version control system. The tool fills a gap between classic PCB-level eCAD/EDA tools (such as KiCad), and the world of traditional electrical plans (QElectroTech being an open source representative).

This talk will show some sample diagrams to highlight the tool's most useful features, give a look at how the GraphViz engine –running under the hood– can be (ab)used to create highly appealing technical drawings, and show the ups and downs of being a mechanical engineer (with no professional coding experience) suddenly having an open-source project explode in popularity.