2D Cable Routing

I searched around but didn't find anything applicable off the bat.

I'm doing some drawings of server racks in 2D and am wondering if someone has or would have some starting points to route cables.

Was thinking that you could define anchor points at the beginning and end, define a thickess, and automagically space the curves/cable out so you can see the different cables. I'm thinking something with collision detection or detractors.

I'm not sure, any input appreciated.

ryan

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by martyn hogg on December 20, 2016 at 4:46pm

Have a look at the Shortest Walk stuff on this forum... That might be a starting point?

Permalink Reply by peter fotiadis on December 21, 2016 at 12:38am

It is most unlikely that you can achieve routing (kinda a PCB routing etc etc) without coding. And the worst news are that I would be greatly surprised if someone could provide gratis a source code on that matter.

Anyway there's 2 types of routing: X-Y routing involves at least 2 routing layers with connections done in one only direction (contemporary PCB's have multiple layers). Maze routing allow the wiring of complete nets on a single layer (if possible - used in very simple PCB layouts).

For example this ("isolated" so to speak) snapshot illustrates the shortest connection of 2 nodes within a grid of random candidate nodes - the black ones - where diagonal connections are allowed - meaning that for a List of from nodes to a List of to nodes ... you should loop the routing Method (X-Y routing).

Permalink Reply by Juliana on March 3, 2019 at 11:47am

Would you be so kind to share your gh file please?

Permalink Reply by peter fotiadis on December 21, 2016 at 1:17am

BTW: This is a classic Dijkstra routing working against a line graph (yields all shortest paths from all nodes to a destination node) taking into account an Adjacency matrix (nod to node connection cost).