Is there any free software that people use to design their avionics loom? I have some of the smart Czech guys I am dealing with have free software that they use. I suddenly find myself with an avionics guy with 3 weeks on his hands. Would be sweet to have it on paper first before we lay out any wire.
Cheers,
William
The US EAA membership gives you a license to use soildworks which might be worth the membership price.
eHangar is a free package for panel design, but, again, mostly aimed at US E-AB.
Last, but not necessarily least, is XPanel which can be had for $80.
Do let us know what you end up using, I for one am interested in what works for you.
edit: ah, loom, not panel, serves me right for being too eager to help… alas, do let us know what you find.
Those links are nice, we are fitting all into a standard 6.25" rack and standard Cessna 3.125" holes. It’s the wiring behind it all I want to draw out so that we get the full connectivity from each box and have a nice Form 337 at the end also.
Something more electrical is needed.
If you just want a simple pin out diagram I often use Digi-Key’s free Scheme-it software. You can see a simple project below. I find it is pretty quick and easy. It doesn’t have all the features of full blown CAD, but it is free…
Perhaps surprisingly, over the decades a lot of wiring diagrams were done in AutoCAD. This program has owned the drawing market since about 1982… It was very expensive, last time I looked.
All the time you don’t need integrity checking (spotting short circuits, output wired to output, etc) you can use any program for drawing.
I tend to use OrCAD of which I use a 1995 version 
and use that for PCB designs and it does a fine job for wiring diagrams – example. I can’t recommend it for non-anoraks though; not trivial to set up. It does integrity checking and all the other stuff you need for a design which goes to a PCB.
That Digikey software looks great.
I use the gEDA gschem software for drawing schematics including wiring diagrams (plus the netlister and gEDA pcb when I’m going to make one of those) which is software libre. Not sure what the status is for Windows versions though, it’s written to natively run on Unix-like operating systems (e.g. Linux, MacOS, *BSD etc)
