Wiring Diagram Software Suitable For Car Hobbyists?

It's schematic capture you're after, but don't be too put off if the software seems to cover more electronics than electrical; almost all will have basic symobols for electrical gubbins. And if not, you can always define your own symbols fairly easily.

Have a look at KiCad and Eagle.

Thanks for your help. I'll have another Google around for schematic stuff then. Had a bit of a look at KiCAD but was indeed put off because I couldnt even figure out where to begin, none of the terminology meant anything to me.

Wonder if it's just me though, would be tempted to build the software myself if there was a need.


www.circuit-diagram.org/editor/ looks not a million miles from what I need - however you can't create new components on the fly, and also (like most of the schematic tools), you can't add wire colours or label them, which is fairly essential for car wiring.

This old diagram shows the kind of thing I'd hope to produce (ignore the legend at the bottom). 



The main things I'd ideally like are:
- Some standard components for fuses, motors, switches etc
- Ability to define wires with colours, and maybe wire gauges.
- Ability to add connector blocks and have the wire pins numbered
- Ideally the ability to show the connections produced by switches in various states e.g. lights off, side beams and main beam.
- nice to have: some sort of legend generated from the diagram of earth points, connectors etc.

I'm guessing car manufacturers have their own in-house software for this...

Automotive-specific software like the pros use will be too complex and expensive for this job.

To be honest, I wouldn't be that surprised to find that the Haynes drawings were done in Visio.

Just had a quick try and it seems pretty straightforward to create that kind of diagram in a few minutes:



OK, it doesn't have the kind of automation features you want, but as a pure visualisation tool it's actually OK.

There's also lots of free Visio shapes available on the internet, so it's unlikely that you'd need to draw anything from scratch.

Are you expecting to draw lots of diagrams?

I drew this one in Illustrator.




And my friend did this one in illustrator too.

Nice details on the stalk switches!

I've been after something like this for ages! Thanks to daklone I was able to do a proper search.

I found EasyEDA and I've been playing with it for a few mins. Seems powerful enough to do all I want and more than I'd ever understand. Plus, itself free.

easyeda.com/

draftsite is very Auocad like and is free to use.
Acad symbols etc are all compatible, and creates dwg files which can be used by various software