Using Visio for Cable design

Started by Rafi, July 31, 2021, 03:26:12 PM

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Rafi

Hello friends,
Many of us in the industry need to create production drawings of cable assemblies.
There are many applications that offer "smart" tools to do that. See: PTC Creo Cabling, AutoCAD Electrical, SolidWorks Electrical and many more. These packages offer fantastic tools which help us create high quality drawings, with minimum effort.
Unfortunately, these packages require a big investment in purchasing, adapting to the company standards and needs, and training of specialized personnel.
For most medium and small-scale companies this is not an option. Many companies use Microsoft Visio. Most of them utilize it as a bare drawing board.
In the last 8 years, working with many small companies as a wiring consultant and designer, I found it necessary to explore Visio's capabilities in order to use it efficiently for cable design.
I managed to use Visio's capabilities to quickly create high quality cable assembly drawings, including the electrical diagram, assembly drawing and BOM.
I also use this tool to create Cable Block Diagrams for large machines and provide real time status of the project's progress.
Following, please find attached a simple sample of a cable drawing to show you what can be done.
This project of mine is solely for the benefit of the public. I do not expect to make a profit from it
What is the purpose of this post?
1.   Option 1 – To find Visio experts who can collaborate in improving this tool.
2.   Option 2 – To submit my entire findings to someone who would be interested in making it into a useful tool for everybody.
3.   Option 3 – To interest Microsoft in developing this product.

Nikolay

#1
The demo diagram looks great!

I think one of the best platforms to start with public projects today may be GitHub. You can share your code in a controlled manner,
accept contributions, track issues, collaborate with other people, and maybe even find those who are excited about drawing cables in Visio.

IMHO, the interest may depend on the type of solution you have, i.e. how easy could it be for others to understand, install and use it.
Like, the hard part here may be to provide educational material (videos, articles, documentation, etc). If you already have this, it's awesome.
If not, then I'd be a bit pessimistic about the future of the tool outside a customer-specific project(s)

Regarding participating in development - I think it's hard to tell if this is possible for others without actually looking at the solution...
According to the classic citation (Linus Torvalds), "talk is cheap - show me the code"  :)

Surrogate

#2
I agree with Nikolay, you can share your solution via GitHub, you must create a lot of education materials.
For example, in 2009 I made my stencils for create documentation  in accordance with Russian ex-Soviet national standards  freely available. Over the years it has been downloaded more than 100,000 times. No more than 1,000 people actually use it. The reason is that I failed to create quality content: video and text descriptions.

To interest MS, your solution must be of interest to many thousands of users. Perhaps millions!


Rafi

Dear Nikolay and Surrogate,
Thank you indeed very much for you wise and knowlageable advice.
I shall work on it, preparing demoes and tutorials.
This post was my first attempt to get a feel of this forum members interest in the subject, and to get advice like yours.
Thank you for your time and consideration.
Best regards,
Rafi