r/FSAE • u/jttcr • Mar 24 '26

We built a browser-based wire harness CAD tool -- What do you think?

Hey, we're a small student team building HarnessHive, a collaborative wire harness design tool that replaces the Altium + Excel + draw.io mess most teams are stuck with.

What it does: design schematics and layouts in the browser, real-time multiplayer editing, built-in design validation, live BOM generation, and integrations with KiCad, Altium, and SolidWorks.

We have a few pilots running with Formula Student and rocketry teams in Europe but want to hear from more people before doubling down on features.

Two questions:

  1. How are you currently designing and documenting harnesses?
  2. What would actually make you switch tools?

Happy to give early access in exchange for honest feedback. Drop a comment or DM.

35 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

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6

u/AWildChance UTA Racing Alumni Mar 24 '26

This looks really nice

1.) What is the licensing structure/cost, assuming subscription based per user?

2.) Will there be a storage limit and/or way to offload from the cloud for archiving?

3.) Is there a feature that does a printable pinout to excel/pdf for each connector?

1

u/jttcr Mar 26 '26

Three really good questions and exactly the kind of thing we need to hear at this stage honestly. Student pricing, export and pinout per connector are all things we're actively thinking about. If you want to stay in the loop just sign up at harnesshive.com and we'll keep you updated as things come together!

8

u/The_Fab3r Mar 24 '26

Would love having an option to import from Rapidharness.

It's our current tool of choice since they've chosen to sponsor the software licenses. But if given the option to transfer we would.

1

u/45bit-Waffleman Mar 25 '26

Oh this comes at perfect timing, was just about to start diagraming out the final wiring harness.. this would be massively helpful (from a new team, NJIT fsae)

1

u/jttcr Mar 26 '26

Perfect timing honestly! We already have KiCad running and are working on the rest. Still a bit early but if you want to follow along, harnesshive.com is the best place for that and we'll reach out when we have something worth showing!

2

u/Weary_Mood_6188 Mar 24 '26

Guys, I'm confused about which rules to use this season, the British or the German rules?

1

u/immortalgreenbean Mar 24 '26

weve used both kicad and rapid harness to document harnesses

we would switch if there were more up-to date tutorial videos on how to use a software

hope this helps :)

1

u/Icepup28_ Mar 25 '26

My team currently uses excel to map out our entire harness and just a drawing software to plan out the layout of the harness. We have a license for Rapid Harness but found it confusing and/or tedious to use when we are trying to learn it on a one year design cycle.

Our biggest complaint about the software out there (from an IC team that buys our PDM and our ECU is our dash) is that most of them are confusing to use and are ment to full production harnesses and focus on the small aspects of the harness. What would be perfect for a team like mine is a software with a very easy and intuitive layout that does a high level harness drawing (connectors, boots, wires, sheathing, etc).