Cable Diagram Tool

Based on the WireViz project: https://github.com/wireviz/WireViz

1. Input files defining the cables are in the yaml directory
2. Templates common to all the project's cables are in common.yml
3. Pictures are in the images directory (mostly showing connectors)
4. Output files go into the out directory

Even though this project is just a bash script, it uses the Python tool WireViz. And also, experiments for further automation on the dev branch are using some Python tools to parse the KiCad schematic netlist. Therefore, it is best to run this in a virtual environment:

$ python -m venv venv
$ . venv/bin/activate
$ pip install -r requirements.txt`

It may be desirable to bypass bash and make diagrams entirely within Python. See this issue issue on GitHub, where it seems a possiblity now in current releases.

There also is a GUI front end available for WireViz. This looks like a good tool for working with an individual cable (not tried it yet).

Note the use of common.yml file and templates. This saves a lot of extra and often duplicate entries in the cables' yaml definition files.

Prepare the Input Files

Generate the WireViz input yaml files for each cable of interest. Keep them in the yaml directory.

Generate a Cable Drawing

Use the doit.sh script as follows, for example W1:

$ doit.sh w1 [yamldir]

The name of the yaml directory can be specified as an optional second argument, and defaults to yaml.

The output will be generated and put into the out folder. For example:

$ ls -l out
total 3016
-rw-r--r--  1 rclott  staff     868 May 26 12:55 w1.bom.tsv
-rw-r--r--  1 rclott  staff   19929 May 26 12:55 w1.gv
-rw-r--r--  1 rclott  staff  782172 May 26 12:55 w1.gv.png
-rw-r--r--  1 rclott  staff   57270 May 26 12:55 w1.gv.svg
-rw-r--r--  1 rclott  staff   64582 May 26 12:55 w1.html
-rw-r--r--  1 rclott  staff  555472 May 26 12:55 w1.png
-rw-r--r--  1 rclott  staff   56569 May 26 12:55 w1.svg

Description of the files:

• w1.bom.tsv BOM file, tab separated fields
• w1.gv.png -- PNG image of cable diagram
• w1.gv.svg -- SVG image of cable diagram
• w1.html -- HTML of cable diagram (images not linking?)
• w1.gv -- intermediate file, ignore
• w1.png -- intermediate file, ignore
• w1.svg -- intermediate file, ignore

Generate all Cable Drawings

Use the doall.sh script as follows, for example W1:

$ doall.sh [yamldir]

The name of the yaml directory can be specified as an optional second argument, and defaults to yaml. You can generate all of the example files, for example:

$ doall.sh examples

Clean the Output Directory

$ clean.sh

Note so self: could really create a Makefile to do all this.