4 – Wiring

In this chapter, you will have completed step four of the schematic design workflow, that you learned about in the second chapter of this part of the book.

This chapter will show you how to wire the symbols you arranged and annotated in the last chapter.

To do the wiring, you will use the “wire” tool. You can enable this tool by clicking on its button from the right toolbar or typing “W” on your keyboard (Figure 3.8.1). Beware that there is a different behaviour between the way that the “W” hotkey and the wire button work. When you use the “W” hotkey, the editor will immediately start drawing a wire. However, if you enable the wire tool from the right toolbar, you will need to left-click inside the editor sheet to start drawing a wire.

For this example, click on the wire button to enable the Wire tool, place the cursor over one of the pins, and then left-click to start drawing. To draw a new segment and change the drawing direction, click again. To finish drawing a wire, either double-click or place the cursor over the destination pin and left-click.

Below you can see my first wire, composed of three segments, with 90-degree corners between them (Figure 3.8.2).

Continue the same process to draw the wires between all pins. Remember, you can zoom and pan during the wiring as needed. Practice zoom in/out with the scroll wheel before you finish drawing a wire to become used to this operation.

 By the end of the wiring process, your schematic will look like this (Figure 3.8.3):

This completes step four of the wiring process. Let’s continue with step five, which involves the creation of named nets.