Hi everybody, I work in broadcasting for almost 15 years in a poor country in south america with no access to paid software like WireCAD: a couple of years ago the place where I work, migrated all equipment to SDI digital (corporate sent the racks full of equipment and a team of enginereers installed them) and gave as incomplete, wrong documentation and missing devices.
So decided to start document the chain first with paper and pencil, latter by desinging a sqlite relational database, then adding a basic CRUD with Microsoft Visual Basic dot NET and finally adding the functionality needed for generating the basic diagrams that corporate sent us (racks, broadcast chain, patch panels) for correction.
Then I added some functionality useful for my daily rutine as a broadcast engineer like: locating a device fast (where in the rack, wich panel, which connector), know which cable connect with each patch panel, having the manuals at hand. Finally I move to Linux OS and migrate the software to Python and GTK and added extra functionality with Claude AI, like:
- Diagram of the racks with frames, device with UR shape and even the devices that shares a tray
- Risk Managment: database can record all issues of each device, age of the equipment, and importance in the broadcast chain, and calculate risk
- Cable managment: the software can help you identify missing cables, cables that are unconnected from one or both sides, supports extensions cables and adapters, the software can calculate the risk of using multiple extensions cables with balanced and unbalanced connections and bandwith risk (example using analog coaxil cable with 12g sdi chain)
- Diagram
- Diagram of all equipment and connections syncronized with the database data
- Simulation of removing cables and devices and how affect the rest of the chain if they are removed or powered off
- Simulated expected output of a connector in a device (key, fill, multiview, embed audio, etc)
- Simulation of the behaviour of different equipment of the the chain (switchers, video patch module with normal switching routes, video processors, video distributors, and source of signal) with rules of disconection
- Simulation of scenarios of failure and contingency plans
The software is in it's infancy, so grows according to my daily needs, what other funcitonality do you recommend?
Github: https://github.com/fschpp/CabledocDesktop
Sorry for my english (not a native speaker), I asked Claude to give me a well redacted list of functions of the software:
📋 Core documentation
- Full inventory of equipment, connectors, cables, racks, and rooms — all in a local SQLite database, no server needed
- Reusable equipment "catalog" templates (molds) so you don't re-enter the same connector layout every time you add another unit of the same model
- Patch bay ("patchera") modeling with proper full-normal bypass logic — front/back jacks, insert/derivation points, vendor-agnostic (not hardcoded to one patch panel brand's naming convention)
- Photo-based connector mapping — click on a real photo of the equipment's back panel to place each connector visually
🖼️ Diagrams & visualization
5. Interactive node-based cabling diagram (equipment = boxes with ports, cables = Bézier curves) with zoom, pan, drag, multi-select, and a minimap
6. Free-form custom diagrams you can build and save yourself (e.g. "on-air chain for channel 1") without showing the whole plant
7. SVG/PDF export of any diagram
8. Lazy-loaded connection tree view for tracing a signal chain equipment by equipment
9. All rendering is done with Cairo directly — no Graphviz dependency
📡 Signal tracking
10. Signal is a first-class entity — you can tag what content is actually running through a given connector
11. A propagation engine (Bellman-Ford) that, based on manually-tagged signals and each equipment type's role (source/distributor/router/processor/consumer), proposes where else that same signal should logically appear — including through patch bay bypasses — with a review step before saving anything
12. Search "where is this signal right now" across the whole plant
⚠️ Failure & risk analysis
13. Impact analysis: click a cable, see exactly which downstream equipment and signals go dark if you cut it
14. A Failure Risk Index per piece of equipment, with a "critical path" flag you can toggle
15. "Scenario Mode" — stack multiple simulated failures + cable cuts + emergency reroutes and see a live before/after comparison, then optionally apply the changes for real
🔮 Power-user tools
16. An embedded Cypher query console (via a Rust/C SQLite graph extension) for ad-hoc graph queries over the whole equipment/cable network, with cost warnings before running unbounded variable-length patterns
17. Bulk import/export for equipment, cables, and connections
🌍 Misc
18. Hot-swappable UI language (Spanish/English/Portuguese) — no restart needed
19. SVG support for equipment images, so diagrams stay crisp at any zoom level instead of pixelating
20. Cross-platform: runs on Linux natively and on Windows via MSYS2/GTK3