Pinouts

A Pinout is a drawing of a connector housing seen from its mating face: the outline, its keys, and one pin for every cavity in its real position. You can choose to see pinouts from the harness side instead. Place it next to a connector on the Schematic or Layout view to see at a glance which cavity is which, and to check the harness against the connector in your hand.

Pinouts come with the connector part. Connectors added from the Parts Catalog bring their pinout with them, and a connector part you created yourself can borrow one from the catalog. The pinout is stored with the part, so it follows the part into part libraries, local .harness files and the PDF export.

Showing a Pinout on the Canvas

right-click a connector on the Schematic or Layout view and select Show pinout. The pinout appears next to the connector, joined to it by a tether line. left-click-drag it to position it.

To remove it, left-double-click the pinout, or right-click it and select Hide pinout.

Resizing a Pinout

right-click a pinout and use the Size row’s − and + buttons to make it smaller or larger, one grid unit at a time. The size is the length of the pinout’s longer side; the other side follows the shape of the housing. The top-left corner stays where it is.

Pins and Wires

Each pin is one of the connector’s cavities and carries its designation.

Select a wire, and its pin lights up in the wire’s colour; left-click a pin to select that cavity and highlight everything connected to it.

A connector part with a pinout shows it beside the part image at the top of its details, and in the Parts Catalog’s part details.

Assigning a Pinout to Your Own Part

A connector part you created yourself has no pinout to start with. Set its number of cavities, then open its details and click Assign pinout from catalog next to the part image to pick one of the catalog’s pinouts. Only pinouts with the same number of cavities can be assigned, and the search starts filtered to that count.

Search by the pinout’s name, its manufacturer, or the part number of a catalog connector that uses it, and narrow the list with cavities:, shape: (rectangle, oval, circle, triangle, trapezoid or irregular) and manufacturer: filters. Turn on Mirrored beside the search to show and assign every pinout mirrored. It starts on when the part’s current pinout is mirrored. Assigning a catalog pinout to your own part doesn’t change the part in any other way.

To swap a pinout, click the pinout in the part’s details and pick another. To mirror it, hover the pinout and click Mirror pinout: use this when your part is the opposite gender of the housing the pinout was drawn for, since a mating pair’s faces are mirror images of each other. To remove it, hover the pinout and click Remove pinout. This works on parts added from the catalog too; updating a part from the catalog puts the catalog’s pinout back.

A connector’s top and side drawings are assigned from the catalog the same way, with Assign drawings from catalog in the part’s details.

Mating Side or Harness Side

Pinouts are drawn from the mating face by default. To see every pinout from the back of the connector, where the wires go in, open Main Menu → Preferences → Appearance → Pinouts and set Show pinouts from the to Harness side. The pinout is mirrored, and each cavity keeps its designation.

Tick Show side labels to write Mating side or Harness side under every pinout, so anyone reading the drawing knows which way it faces. The preference applies everywhere pinouts are drawn: on the canvas, in part details, in the pinout picker and in the PDF export. Read more…

Export

Pinouts shown on a view are drawn in the PDF export of that view, in the same position and size as on the canvas.