Schematic drawing

I think there's an excellent reason to produce a sophisticated schematic of this system and that's because you enjoy producing elegant schematic drawings. From a practicality point of view, I'm with Brian G. In fact, this is exactly what I did a few months ago with a sophisticated hi-fi set-up incorporating a huge 5.1 TV and all the usual add-ons. (Regular readers, at the mention of huge TVs will have recognised that this was not at my home....)

We needed to move this fiendishly complicated system from one room to another so the first exercise was to tag all the wires while the system was in situ - A to A, B to B etc. I used home made paper tapes and stickers but you can get professionally made tags easily enough.

In the new room, some of the components were reassembled in a different order so the layout of the boxes wasn't really relevant: it all came down to A to A, B to B etc.

If you are thinking about future-proofing the system well, I've two points to make:

Nick

Drawing it in any method strikes me as a waste of time. Just list what goes where.

Nick, I can't argue with you there! ;-)

Chris

I wouldn't use a dumb drawing package. Use an actual electronic simulator like LTSpice. That way you not only get the schematic, but you can check its functionality and make modifications. You can do it in multiple pages for, say, the engine compartment, the interior and the boot. Basically, this is electrical, so use the appropriate tool.

I didn't realise that, but I wasn't looking for it, either. I just moved the end of the connector to its new location, and the rest of the line followed. Unless that's what you mean anyway. Too late now!

I am so used to doing it all 'by hand' that I find all these dumbass aids to actually get in the way...

The ends of connectors will "snap" onto glue-points on shapes, so if you join two shapes with a connector, as you move the shapes around the connector will stay ... erm ... connected. There's a limited amount of "smart re-routing" for certain styles of connector, plus you can add extra glue-points to shapes

Something else to look at when I have time! Thanks.

Yeah, who needs a circuit diagram, a netlist and BOM should be plenty :-)

Is that not a little like overkill? I think one of my hates are those ever so simple connection guides you get with electronics, where little pictures of anps and the like supposedly help you, but used to mostly bamboozle me. Videos which had a bnc on one socket a pl259 on another then phonos for the audio etc, and of course when you wanted to connect them you always found you needed an adaptor of some sort on one end of some cables. Now I thought it was cracked with Scart, but no, now we have hdmi and optical connections to cope with as well. Brian

Not overkill at all. There are plenty of schematic packages that will also perform analysis. I use Qorvo. Why would one not use the tool designed for the job, especially when it is free and will remain useful for future projects?

It's a fi, not a complex electronic circuit.