Wire Lists & Single Wires

By Jeff Walsh on 2025-04-25 - 09:55

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By Jeff Walsh on 2025-04-25 - 09:55

Description

This tutorial describes how to allow each individual wire in your schematics to have its own size/gauge, number, color, part number, etc. As a result of this, you will get automatically generated "from-to" (a.k.a. "point-to-point") wire lists.

Please note the purchase of at least the Advanced License is required for the features described in this tutorial.

Topics covered

Wire, wire list, gauge, size, color, from to, point to point.

Main content

Please follow this tutorial should you wish to achieve any or all of the following:

Generate "from-to" (a.k.a. "point-to-point") wire lists
Have each individual wire on a net (potential) have their own unique wire number
Have the ability for each individual wire on a net (potential) to have different colors, wire sizes/gauges, etc. (e.g. power distribution wiring sometimes requires this)
Save single wires to your catalogue

Once you've drawn some schematics, go to the Home tab (if you're using V1.3.25 or higher, go to the Schematic Tools tab instead), and select Orient Connections.

Move your mouse over an intersection between two or more connections and a blue circle will appear. Click and you will be presented with four options:

Each of the four options affect how the wiring is interpreted.

Below are examples of how these Orient Connections options are interpreted.
In all the examples below, the W number is used to represent the wire number (e.g. W3 and W4), and the number after the dash represents the net number (e.g. 6).

This type of oriented connection means that there are two wires (W3 and W4) in C1 and one wire in each of the other components shown:

This type of oriented connection means that there are two wires (W3 and W4) in PB1 and one wire in each of the other components shown:

This type of oriented connection means that there are two wires (W3 and W4) in PB2 and one wire in each of the other components shown:

Once you've inserted your connections and used Orient Connections where applicable, run Wire Renumbering/Processing to process the wires. (Note: a wire must be terminated on both ends for the wire to be processed.)

Now, you can see your automatically generated wire list by selecting your project in the tree view, going to the Show tab and selecting Wire List. As with any list in SkyCAD, you can show/hide/move columns as desired, as shown in the Managing Parts Lists & BOMs tutorial at 0m35sec.

From this wire list, you can change wire numbers, sizes, colors, part numbers, etc.

These properties can also be changed from the schematics by selecting the wire, going to the Home tab and selecting Explore single wire.

You can also show the wire information on the schematics if you like, such as wire number, size and color use the Wire Info symbol:

To use the Wire Info symbol, simply insert it onto a wire where you would like the information displayed.

By default the W_ number is not shown directly on your connections.
If you'd like this shown, please follow these steps:

Right-click on your connection in your symbol library and choose Open Block
Go to the Connection Tools tab and select Set connection text properties
Select the Value cell, go to the Home tab and select <A> Process property queries
Replace the query in the Value cell with:
<r:Parent.GetNetBranch.DisplayedLabel>-<r:Parent.NetID>
Close and save the connection
Close and re-open SkyCAD
Run Wire Renumbering/Processing and you should see the difference

If you want to change the W letter to something else:

Select any wire in the wire list
Go to the Catalogue Tools tab and choose Explore selected element's class
Change the Root from W to whatever you wish
Run Wire Renumbering/Processing to see the difference on your schematics

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