Our wiring team is searching for an efficient way to plan the wiring for our robot (electronics and pneumatics).
We realized that drawing by hand results in a very messy diagram.
Are there any good programs for making electrical diagrams?
Honestly? Visio.
I’m sure someone else will have a more special purpose software suggestion but as someone who has routinely used Visio to route thousands of cables in rack after rack after rack after rack of servers… it works great for this. Sadly, it’s not available on the Mac and out of all the Office tools, it still hasn’t actually made the jump to the browser and that makes me a sad zebra…
Thank you! :]
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Here is an example of a diagram for us:
It’s not so detailed as to have both power and ground for the power plane wiring or ALL of the different motor controllers on the robot or other things but you can see how you can use it to create simple diagrams that can be expanded with more details:
Lucidchart gets my vote. It’s got nice integration with google drive, plus some electrical symbols built in.
I would suggest you use a drawing program like Viso, or whatever you have, to make a template sheet like what Marshall has shown but with only the connections that will never change (i.e. Ethernet connection between the radio and RoboRio). Lay out the components roughly as they are laid out in your robot. Make several copies of the template sheet. You can then try different routings for the various power connections and signal connections with the objectives of not running power and signals together and only crossing at 90 degrees. Use different colours for the power and signal connections. Concurrently, make a table showing what is connected to each “channel” of the PDP and what is connected to each PWM/DIO/Analog channel on the RoboRio. This makes it unnecessary to follow all your lines on the diagram. After trying some layouts, you might want to re-arrange some of the components and try the layouts again.
I have tried using mechanical CAD programs and electronic CAD programs to document the wiring and found that they tend to be overkill for what is needed in FRC and often requires too much overhead to become effective to be worthwhile. I use such programs in my day job, just different ones. It is probably quicker and easier to find someone who can draw neatly.