WEBVTT 00:00.000 --> 00:13.000 Give a warm welcome. 00:13.000 --> 00:18.000 Yeah, hi, everyone. 00:18.000 --> 00:19.000 Thank you. 00:19.000 --> 00:24.000 Yeah, my name's Daniel, and I'll talk about my tool, 00:24.000 --> 00:27.000 Wirevis, to make your wiring documentation easier, 00:27.000 --> 00:29.000 and hopefully more beautiful. 00:29.000 --> 00:33.000 When we're talking about electrical documentation of your projects, 00:33.000 --> 00:35.000 we can talk about different levels. 00:35.000 --> 00:40.000 On the PCB level, let's say you're designing your small circuit board, 00:40.000 --> 00:43.000 we have excellent tools, obviously, first and foremost, 00:43.000 --> 00:48.000 KaiKed, so this one gives you schematic capture, 00:48.000 --> 00:51.000 PCB layouting, perfect. 00:51.000 --> 00:55.000 On the other end of the spectrum, if you want to document your entire system, 00:55.000 --> 01:00.000 let's say, could be house wiring, could be a big machine, 01:00.000 --> 01:04.000 some switching cabinet, you also have some tools. 01:04.000 --> 01:08.000 For example, Q Electric, probably a bit lesser or less known, 01:08.000 --> 01:12.000 also an open source alternative to generate, 01:12.000 --> 01:14.000 also some wiring diagrams here. 01:14.000 --> 01:17.000 You can see, for example, the power distribution bus, 01:17.000 --> 01:20.000 and then how some consumers branch off from that. 01:20.000 --> 01:24.000 I don't think you see my pointer anyway. 01:24.000 --> 01:28.000 Yeah, there's something in the middle. 01:28.000 --> 01:31.000 What if you need to document individual cables? 01:31.000 --> 01:34.000 This happened to me a lot in my previous jobs, 01:34.000 --> 01:37.000 and I found that there were no good solutions. 01:37.000 --> 01:41.000 To give an example, let's say you want to build this simple cable, 01:41.000 --> 01:45.000 just one into the other, maybe the pin out is a bit, 01:45.000 --> 01:47.000 not a straightforward. 01:47.000 --> 01:50.000 Let's say you need to build a small harness, 01:50.000 --> 01:52.000 where one connector maps into multiple, 01:52.000 --> 01:56.000 so this could be in your robot, in your microscope, 01:56.000 --> 01:59.000 in your rocket, you never know. 01:59.000 --> 02:02.000 What if you need to document a wire that's a bit more complex? 02:02.000 --> 02:06.000 So in this case, one and maybe needs to be fed into some screw terminals, 02:06.000 --> 02:08.000 so you have some ferials. 02:08.000 --> 02:11.000 But actually, some of the wires, 02:11.000 --> 02:14.000 also need to branch off to some other connector. 02:14.000 --> 02:17.000 And on the other side, you need to shorten some wires, 02:17.000 --> 02:20.000 some custom connector, you also need to heat shrink, 02:20.000 --> 02:23.000 solder connections, and also there's a TBS diode in the middle, 02:23.000 --> 02:26.000 because EMC said so. 02:26.000 --> 02:30.000 How do you actually cleanly document this? 02:30.000 --> 02:33.000 And when I was designing wires for my projects, 02:33.000 --> 02:36.000 both personal and professional, 02:36.000 --> 02:41.000 I didn't really find much in this respect. 02:41.000 --> 02:45.000 Stuff I found, sometimes pin out, 02:45.000 --> 02:48.000 would just be described in Excel sheets, basically. 02:48.000 --> 02:52.000 Okay, pin one from this goes to pin nine over there. 02:52.000 --> 02:56.000 But it's not pretty, it's not very readable. 02:56.000 --> 03:00.000 You can use paint or other tools. 03:00.000 --> 03:03.000 I mean, yeah, it's a bit more understandable, 03:03.000 --> 03:07.000 graphically, but could look updating this every time you change a design. 03:07.000 --> 03:12.000 You kind of use other tools, so I think this is actually a key cut. 03:12.000 --> 03:15.000 I mean, yes, it's pretty clean, 03:15.000 --> 03:19.000 it's relatively understandable, but it's not really the tool for the job. 03:19.000 --> 03:21.000 You do have tools for the job. 03:21.000 --> 03:23.000 This I think is solid works electrical, 03:23.000 --> 03:25.000 so this looks pretty fancy. 03:25.000 --> 03:28.000 You can have like build materials, 03:28.000 --> 03:31.000 colors, color assignments, graphical representation, 03:31.000 --> 03:34.000 but you need to fork out probably thousands, 03:34.000 --> 03:37.000 if not tens of thousands of dollars. 03:37.000 --> 03:40.000 And so I decided to make my own. 03:40.000 --> 03:42.000 So what is my service? 03:42.000 --> 03:44.000 Let's just simply go for a demo. 03:44.000 --> 03:48.000 We start by creating a small text file, just a demo file. 03:48.000 --> 03:50.000 And let's start describing our little wire. 03:50.000 --> 03:55.000 Let's say we just want to connect some serial port on one device with some other one. 03:55.000 --> 03:59.000 So you need RX, TX, and maybe a ground line. 03:59.000 --> 04:02.000 So let's start with the connector on one side. 04:02.000 --> 04:05.000 Let's say we have some type of molex connector. 04:05.000 --> 04:08.000 It's a plug, three pins. 04:08.000 --> 04:11.000 Then that's a basic information we need. 04:11.000 --> 04:14.000 And then if we know a very specific wire that we want to use, 04:14.000 --> 04:19.000 we can specify some, yeah, manufacturer data as well. 04:19.000 --> 04:22.000 And in this case, because it's just one wire, 04:22.000 --> 04:24.000 we don't need to show the name. 04:24.000 --> 04:27.000 It's just something we use the reference internally. 04:27.000 --> 04:29.000 Now we've got a components. 04:29.000 --> 04:31.000 Let's hook them up. 04:31.000 --> 04:34.000 So we have a section in our file called connections. 04:34.000 --> 04:37.000 In this case, we'll just do one connection set. 04:37.000 --> 04:43.000 So we specify, we want to jump from connector X1, pin1, 04:43.000 --> 04:48.000 via cable one, wire number one, two connector X2. 04:48.000 --> 04:52.000 And in this case, because we actually label the pins, 04:52.000 --> 04:53.000 we can reference them. 04:53.000 --> 04:56.000 So we want to go to the ground pin of that connector zoo. 04:56.000 --> 04:59.000 This is just for one of the lines. 04:59.000 --> 05:02.000 And if we want to wire multiple connections, 05:02.000 --> 05:05.000 we just add more columns basically to this connection set. 05:05.000 --> 05:09.000 So here you see pin 2, wire 2 to the RX pin, 05:09.000 --> 05:13.000 and the same for wire 3, transmit. 05:13.000 --> 05:16.000 This basically describes our cable. 05:16.000 --> 05:21.000 So we feed this Yamufa that we just created into our wire viz tool. 05:21.000 --> 05:23.000 It's just a command line tool. 05:23.000 --> 05:28.000 And as output, we get a graphical representation of the wire. 05:28.000 --> 05:31.000 You look at it and you immediately understand what's going on here. 05:31.000 --> 05:33.000 You have a connector on one side, connect on the other. 05:33.000 --> 05:36.000 You can easily see the crossover of the cables. 05:36.000 --> 05:41.000 You have all the information you need to procure this. 05:41.000 --> 05:46.000 You procure the connectors to assemble it and to understand the function. 05:46.000 --> 05:51.000 So summarizing, wire viz is just text input. 05:51.000 --> 05:53.000 So it's easy to edit and it's easy to version control. 05:53.000 --> 05:59.000 You can just add these files to your kit of your project and easily update them. 06:00.000 --> 06:04.000 All the graphics are all generated and auto layout it as well. 06:04.000 --> 06:08.000 So you don't even need to care about dragging some boxes here and there to make it look pretty. 06:08.000 --> 06:10.000 It will just work. 06:10.000 --> 06:12.000 It understands some color codes. 06:12.000 --> 06:17.000 So for example, we said we want to fold the din standard for the conductors in the cable. 06:17.000 --> 06:22.000 It understands American wire gauge versus square millimeter gauge conversion. 06:22.000 --> 06:25.000 So some handy tools for engineers. 06:25.000 --> 06:27.000 It also generates a bill of materials. 06:27.000 --> 06:30.000 So if you have an ERP. 06:30.000 --> 06:36.000 For example, your PC system, you can just export the bomb and you'll know what you need to buy. 06:36.000 --> 06:38.000 You can add some metadata to your wire. 06:38.000 --> 06:40.000 So for example, who created it? 06:40.000 --> 06:41.000 Who approved it? 06:41.000 --> 06:42.000 When was it created? 06:42.000 --> 06:43.000 What revision is it? 06:43.000 --> 06:44.000 Et cetera. 06:44.000 --> 06:45.000 You can add title blocks. 06:45.000 --> 06:47.000 You'll see this in a second. 06:47.000 --> 06:51.000 You can use templates if you're constantly using the same connector types. 06:51.000 --> 06:56.000 Or always wiring a bunch of SPI or simple bus connectors. 06:56.000 --> 06:59.000 You can just template that. 06:59.000 --> 07:02.000 And of course, it's open source goes without saying here. 07:02.000 --> 07:04.000 Let's look at a more complex example. 07:04.000 --> 07:08.000 So here you can see this is more of a wiring harness. 07:08.000 --> 07:09.000 Kind of thing. 07:09.000 --> 07:11.000 You see multiple connectors, multiple wires between them. 07:11.000 --> 07:16.000 You even see some LEDs and discrete components like the TBS diode I mentioned before. 07:16.000 --> 07:19.000 They're just treated as connectors right now. 07:20.000 --> 07:23.000 So if you zoom in on a few parts of this diagram. 07:23.000 --> 07:28.000 You see we don't only show the connector of our actual wiring harness, 07:28.000 --> 07:32.000 but we can show the relationship of that connector with whatever's on the other side. 07:32.000 --> 07:35.000 In this case, the Raspberry Pi like GPIO header. 07:35.000 --> 07:40.000 So now we can also map the names on the header to the names of our signals. 07:40.000 --> 07:44.000 And with a few arrows in between, you actually can understand how the data is flowing. 07:44.000 --> 07:47.000 What's going where? 07:47.000 --> 07:50.000 In the wires themselves. 07:50.000 --> 07:56.000 Obviously, the colors are very, very visual way of understanding what goes where. 07:56.000 --> 08:01.000 But if you print this out or if you're color blind or you just cannot represent it with colors. 08:01.000 --> 08:04.000 The color codes are also included here. 08:04.000 --> 08:08.000 And if the wiring gets a bit too messy and you cannot even follow the lines from one into the other, 08:08.000 --> 08:12.000 each wire also tells you, okay, where is this, for example, on the top of the red wire going. 08:12.000 --> 08:16.000 Oh, it comes from connector X1, pin number two, which is five volts in. 08:16.000 --> 08:19.000 And it goes to connect X4 pin one. 08:19.000 --> 08:22.000 So you don't need to manually trace every line there. 08:22.000 --> 08:29.000 You can see on the bottom cable, W2, it adds some extra components that you need. 08:29.000 --> 08:31.000 In this case, it's just a bit of heat shrink. 08:31.000 --> 08:35.000 Also, it's just a tool that you can use to describe graphs basically. 08:35.000 --> 08:39.000 So this is the example they use on their documentation. 08:39.000 --> 08:43.000 You have some nodes, you join them with edges or some arrows. 08:44.000 --> 08:48.000 And this is how it's created. It's just another simple markup language. 08:48.000 --> 08:53.000 If you have you define some properties, for example, the colors. 08:53.000 --> 08:55.000 I think it's quite easy to understand. 08:55.000 --> 09:01.000 And then you represent the relationships between the nodes with the arrows. 09:01.000 --> 09:06.000 So, for example, in the sub graph, you can see they, their A0 goes to A1, goes to A2, goes to A3, 09:06.000 --> 09:09.000 and that creates the little arrows that join them. 09:09.000 --> 09:13.000 So, describe the graph. 09:13.000 --> 09:17.000 It's simple language. It takes care of the layout. 09:17.000 --> 09:20.000 By itself, you just describe the relationships. 09:20.000 --> 09:23.000 And the output that it creates is pretty clean. 09:23.000 --> 09:27.000 It's a bit boring at first. It's not the most beautiful. 09:27.000 --> 09:30.000 It's a bit unpredictable, so because it does the auto layouting, 09:30.000 --> 09:33.000 you don't always have full control over what goes where. 09:33.000 --> 09:36.000 So in this case, you can notice the nodes in the B column. 09:36.000 --> 09:40.000 They're not fully aligned because it tries to optimize the distance between nodes, 09:40.000 --> 09:44.000 and stuff a bit unpredictable, but it's very customizable. 09:44.000 --> 09:47.000 So, how do we get from something that looks like this, 09:47.000 --> 09:50.000 to a pretty wiring diagram that looks like that? 09:50.000 --> 09:54.000 I'm not going to give a full explanation of how this is done, 09:54.000 --> 10:00.000 but I'll give you some little hints, and maybe you can find something that works for you 10:00.000 --> 10:04.000 in your project to use graph vids for some other uses. 10:04.000 --> 10:09.000 If we look at what wire vids generates, it generates graph vids code. 10:09.000 --> 10:12.000 In the beginning, you just specify a few basic attributes, 10:12.000 --> 10:16.000 like colors, a bit of layout information that it should go from left to right, 10:16.000 --> 10:18.000 instead of touch bottom, et cetera. 10:18.000 --> 10:22.000 And then, actually, it's a ton of HTML code. 10:22.000 --> 10:29.000 Each of the nodes, because graph vids has this nice property, 10:29.000 --> 10:33.000 that if you define your node, in this case, X1, 10:34.000 --> 10:36.000 and you define the label. 10:36.000 --> 10:40.000 Instead of using quote marks, you use these angle brackets. 10:40.000 --> 10:43.000 Everything that's within it will be interpreted as HTML, 10:43.000 --> 10:46.000 so you can start designing tables and tables within tables. 10:46.000 --> 10:50.000 It feels a bit retro, kind of, but it works very well 10:50.000 --> 10:54.000 for the structured information that I want to convey. 10:54.000 --> 11:00.000 Also, if you using tables, the cells within have a special property called port. 11:00.000 --> 11:05.000 Here you can see I've named it port P1R for port 1 on the right, 11:05.000 --> 11:09.000 and this allows you to, later when drawing the arrows or in my case, 11:09.000 --> 11:12.000 the wires to not just go to the node of the cable, 11:12.000 --> 11:17.000 but to the actual pin of the connector. 11:17.000 --> 11:20.000 And lastly, when you're defining the edges, 11:20.000 --> 11:23.000 so the arrows are wires between the nodes. 11:23.000 --> 11:27.000 If you give them a color, it will just render them on color, 11:27.000 --> 11:30.000 but you can just specify a list of colors, 11:30.000 --> 11:33.000 and it will basically draw parallel lines, 11:33.000 --> 11:37.000 so this allows us to have nice black borders, 11:37.000 --> 11:39.000 and then any color we want in between. 11:39.000 --> 11:43.000 And then when we're defining the connection between them, 11:43.000 --> 11:48.000 so we say from X1 to Y1, et cetera, 11:48.000 --> 11:51.000 we can expand this a bit with the ports that we defined earlier, 11:51.000 --> 11:55.000 so we say from X1, port 5 right to Y1, 11:56.000 --> 12:00.000 and then small W1 to specify the first conductor, 12:00.000 --> 12:03.000 so this gives us better control of how we actually link up stuff. 12:03.000 --> 12:07.000 And to make it look pretty, you can actually add one more thing. 12:07.000 --> 12:10.000 So these letters, they basically stand for east and west, 12:10.000 --> 12:13.000 and it just makes sure that the arrow or in my case the wire 12:13.000 --> 12:15.000 doesn't come in like some random direction, 12:15.000 --> 12:19.000 but actually cleanly from the east or west or from the left or from the right, 12:19.000 --> 12:23.000 and this really helps in keeping things clean. 12:24.000 --> 12:26.000 That's pretty much all I have. 12:26.000 --> 12:28.000 The main aim of this tool. 12:28.000 --> 12:29.000 At least not right now. 12:31.000 --> 12:32.000 Hello. 12:32.000 --> 12:35.000 Yeah, I'm one of you users, really like it. 12:35.000 --> 12:36.000 Thank you. 12:36.000 --> 12:37.000 Thank you. 12:37.000 --> 12:40.000 I wanted to ask, so I've had some cases where, 12:40.000 --> 12:42.000 for example, I have a connector, 12:42.000 --> 12:46.000 and I'm trying to connect pin 1 to pin 3 of the same one, 12:46.000 --> 12:51.000 and because you just showed an example of how the routing work 12:51.000 --> 12:53.000 is the graph is, so using the right side, 12:53.000 --> 12:56.000 and then usually connecting it to the left side, 12:56.000 --> 12:58.000 so kind of ends up doing a route around. 12:58.000 --> 13:02.000 Is there where you can force it to go to itself from the same side? 13:02.000 --> 13:03.000 Yes. 13:03.000 --> 13:05.000 To repeat the question, 13:05.000 --> 13:06.000 if you want to do a loop back, 13:06.000 --> 13:10.000 basically from one pin of the connector to another pin of the same connector, 13:10.000 --> 13:11.000 how that's, how that's doable. 13:11.000 --> 13:13.000 Because the basic logic is, 13:13.000 --> 13:15.000 if you are kind of left or right, 13:15.000 --> 13:17.000 so you would have the connector, 13:17.000 --> 13:18.000 then it goes to the wire, 13:18.000 --> 13:21.000 and then it kind of forces the wire to loop around 13:21.000 --> 13:24.000 and come in on the other side of the connector. 13:24.000 --> 13:26.000 It's something that's still open. 13:26.000 --> 13:28.000 One hack that I found is you can define, 13:28.000 --> 13:32.000 let's say, from pin 1 to wire, whatever, 13:32.000 --> 13:33.000 and just not go anywhere, 13:33.000 --> 13:35.000 and then as a second connection, 13:35.000 --> 13:37.000 you say from pin 3 goes to the same wire, 13:37.000 --> 13:41.000 and then you end up with like a wire shaped or like a forked wire, 13:41.000 --> 13:43.000 that goes to two places on one end, 13:43.000 --> 13:45.000 and nowhere on the other. 13:46.000 --> 13:48.000 And so if you know what to expect, 13:48.000 --> 13:49.000 or if you know what this means, 13:49.000 --> 13:50.000 it's pretty clear, 13:50.000 --> 13:52.000 but it's not the prettiest. 13:52.000 --> 13:55.000 So definitely a point for improvement in the future. 14:02.000 --> 14:03.000 Thanks for the talk. 14:03.000 --> 14:04.000 Really interesting. 14:04.000 --> 14:06.000 Is there any kind of validation 14:06.000 --> 14:09.000 on the electrical layer possible in this too? 14:09.000 --> 14:12.000 Like to grab on TX, whatever. 14:13.000 --> 14:14.000 Yeah. So the question was, 14:14.000 --> 14:16.000 is there any validation on the, 14:16.000 --> 14:19.000 basically electrical logic of this circuit? 14:19.000 --> 14:23.000 So are all the grounds connected or are there any short circuits? 14:23.000 --> 14:24.000 Not right now, 14:24.000 --> 14:26.000 an intermediate step would be to export, 14:26.000 --> 14:27.000 for example, a net list, 14:27.000 --> 14:30.000 that at least tells you which pins are connected, 14:30.000 --> 14:32.000 like if you have multiple connectors, 14:32.000 --> 14:34.000 where is one signal actually routed, 14:34.000 --> 14:35.000 where does it go? 14:35.000 --> 14:37.000 So you have a better overview. 14:37.000 --> 14:39.000 It's not yet implemented. 14:39.000 --> 14:41.000 It's definitely a cool feature. 14:41.000 --> 14:45.000 It's a bit tricky because sometimes, 14:45.000 --> 14:47.000 yeah, 14:47.000 --> 14:49.000 so, yes, go ahead. 14:49.000 --> 14:52.000 If you're also showing like connections that are external 14:52.000 --> 14:53.000 to your actually wiring harness, 14:53.000 --> 14:55.000 but just referenced, for example, 14:55.000 --> 14:57.000 like this Raspberry Pi connection, 14:57.000 --> 14:59.000 you would have to make sure that there's no, 14:59.000 --> 15:04.000 like you would also need to define those. 15:04.000 --> 15:05.000 So it gets a bit tricky, 15:05.000 --> 15:08.000 but in principle, it should be doable, 15:08.000 --> 15:10.000 but not yet so far. 15:10.000 --> 15:15.000 Thank you very much for that. 15:15.000 --> 15:18.000 How much does this scale, for example, 15:18.000 --> 15:22.000 is anybody used this to document the structure cable 15:22.000 --> 15:25.000 in system inside data center? 15:25.000 --> 15:26.000 So the question was, 15:26.000 --> 15:27.000 how much does it scale, 15:27.000 --> 15:29.000 and can I actually represent 15:29.000 --> 15:32.000 the full wiring of data centers? 15:32.000 --> 15:33.000 And by default, 15:33.000 --> 15:35.000 it deletes it because most people 15:35.000 --> 15:36.000 don't really need it, 15:36.000 --> 15:37.000 but you can specify, 15:37.000 --> 15:39.000 I only want the graph is output, 15:39.000 --> 15:41.000 and then you can use it for whatever you want. 15:41.000 --> 15:43.000 So yes, it's totally doable. 15:43.000 --> 15:44.000 Yes. 15:44.000 --> 15:45.000 Okay, thank you, Daniel, 15:45.000 --> 15:46.000 any further question, 15:46.000 --> 15:48.000 till be out in the hallway, 15:48.000 --> 15:49.000 and thank you. 15:49.000 --> 15:50.000 Thank you. 15:50.000 --> 15:51.000 Thank you. 15:51.000 --> 15:52.000 Thank you.