Layout & Bundles

The layout view is the physical side of your design. The schematic defines what connects to what; the layout defines the trunk bundles between nodes and their lengths — and every wire’s cut length falls out automatically.

Switch a pane to the layout view with 2 (rebindable — see Hotkeys), or open schematic and layout side by side with the ◫ split button. The same nodes appear in both views; only their positions differ.

Create a trunk bundle

Drag from one node’s connection handle to another node. In layout mode this creates a bundle — a physical trunk segment — instead of a wire. Bundles draw as thick loom-colored lines; the tool refuses to create a second bundle between the same two nodes.

A dashed line labeled mate is a connector mate, not a bundle — mates route wires through at zero length.

Set a bundle’s length

Every bundle carries a chip at its midpoint. Until you give the bundle a length, the chip reads length?; after that it shows the value with the document’s unit, e.g. 600 mm. The chip also shows ⌁N — the number of wires whose route passes through this trunk.

Click the chip (or select the bundle) to edit it in the Inspector:

Field	Meaning
Length	Physical trunk length between the two nodes. Every wire routed through updates live.
Sleeving	Loom / convolute type — feeds the BOM.
Loom / cover color	Drawn on the layout trunk.

Selecting a bundle also fans out the member wires as parallel colored strands, so you can see what runs inside the trunk.

Tip

Right-click empty canvas and choose Delete empty bundles to remove every trunk no wire routes through.

Insert a branch point

Right-click a bundle and choose ⑂ Insert branch point. This splits the trunk at the click position with a small junction node — a layout-only node with no cavities that exists purely to shape the bundle tree (it never appears in the schematic).

The original segment keeps its measured length on one side; the new segment from the junction onward shows length? and needs measuring. Splices work as branch points too — any node can be a fork in the tree.

Re-route a trunk

Select a bundle, then drag one of its ends onto a different node. This is how you merge an existing trunk into a branch point without deleting and redrawing it. A reconnect that would duplicate an existing trunk is ignored, and any cosmetic bend points on the edge are cleared.

You can also grab a bundle anywhere along its length and drag to bend it around other nodes. These drag points are purely cosmetic — they never change the computed length. Right-click near a point for Delete this point, or right-click the bundle for Straighten bundle.

How cut lengths are derived

Wire lengths are never stored — they are recomputed from the layout on every edit. The bundle graph is expected to be a tree, so each wire routes along the unique path of bundles between its two endpoints:

cut length = Σ(bundle length along the path)
           + breakout tail (node A) + extra @ A
           + breakout tail (node B) + extra @ B

Term	Where you set it
Bundle lengths	Length on each bundle’s Inspector (via its chip)
Breakout tail	On the node’s Inspector — the fan-out from the trunk to that node’s contacts, added to every wire ending there. Shows as a +N tag on the node in layout.
Extra @ A / Extra @ B	On the wire’s Inspector — per-end service loop or strip allowance
Override	On the wire’s Inspector — a manual cut length that bypasses the routed value entirely

All lengths are plain numbers in the document’s length unit (mm or in), chosen in the harness Inspector (click empty canvas with nothing selected). Bundle chips, Inspector fields, and the cut list all label values with that unit. Changing the unit relabels existing numbers — it does not convert them. A bundle with no length yet contributes zero to routes through it.

A wire that can’t be routed gets a status instead of a length:

• unrouted — no bundle path exists between its endpoints yet. This is a normal state: a finished schematic with zero layout is valid, and pending wires still appear in the cut list.
• ambiguous — the wire’s endpoints sit in a part of the bundle graph that contains a loop, so there is no unique path. The Issues panel flags this as layout.cycle.

Caution

The tree rule is the one real constraint of the length model: no cycles in the bundle graph. Physical harnesses are trees, so this is natural — but if you close a loop, every wire through that region goes ambiguous until you break it.

Because lengths are derived, changing one trunk updates every wire routed through it instantly — the cut list is always in sync with the layout. See Exporting for getting the cut list out as CSV or drawings, and File Format for how bundles are stored.

Connector documentation cards

In the layout view, connectors render as documentation cards instead of cavity lists:

• Header — a housing glyph, the label, an M/F contact-gender tag, the assigned part number, ⇄ mate chips, and the +N breakout-tail tag.
• 2D face view — the connector seen from the mating side: a round shell with a keyway tick for circular connectors, a rounded rectangle otherwise, with one filled pin (male) or open socket (female) per cavity arranged by the part’s face layout. Hover a pin for its cavity label.
• Pinout table — one row per cavity: Cav, To (the far end of the wire landing there), a color swatch, and Ga. When a crimp contact is known from the assigned library part, two more columns appear: A (the limiting current — the minimum of housing, contact, and wire ratings) and Contact (the contact part number). A ⚠ marks a wire gauge outside the contact’s crimp range.

Terminals, splices, and junctions stay compact chips. To lay out the enclosures and PCBs these connectors mount onto, see Devices; isolated sections of the layout are grouped and named as described in Harness Groups.