Routing

A Routing node is a device: a rack panel with ports along its edges, inputs on the left and outputs on the right. Add a port with the + Input / + Output controls on the node itself, and give it a signal type — Video, Audio, Network, or Power — which sets its wire color on the diagram.

Drag from one port's handle to another to connect them. A connection only carries meaning between compatible signal types — the diagram is meant to be read at a glance, in the same colors an install crew already uses for cable.

Pick the type in the sidebar before dragging — the rule is simple: draw what the connection carries.

• Physical (white) — an actual cable or connection, drawn as itself. The default, and right for most wiring: a USB-C control cable, an HDMI lead, a mounting bracket.
• Signal (blue) — the content path: where video or audio actually travels, e.g. media server → switcher → LED wall.
• Network (green) — Ethernet / IP traffic: anything talking over the LAN, including Art-Net and similar.
• Power (orange) — electricity. This is the one the power-budget check reads: connected draw is summed against the source's max load.
• Logical (purple) — a software or control relationship with no dedicated wire of its own: a show-control app driving a player, MQTT, OSC.

The palette on a project's Routing graph includes both the project's own buying-sheet items and every kit in your Library — pick either. A kit placed on the canvas is a single collapsed node with the ports its recipe defines. The same palette also has a Utilities section for the things that aren't in your catalog at all — see Utility supplies below.

Not everything on a diagram is something you buy. House power, the venue's network, guest Wi-Fi, a satellite uplink, an OSC or WebSocket feed, a lighting data line — the infrastructure real gear plugs into, not a line item on the buying sheet. Add one from the palette's Utilities section instead of picking a project item or a kit; it's grouped the same way the wiring itself is — Power, Network, Wireless, Signals, Media, Lighting, Software.

A utility node comes with whatever ports make sense for what it is — a wall outlet gets an Outlet port with room for two plugs, a network drop gets an RJ45 jack — plus its own fields, editable right on the node: voltage, max load, SSID, address, whatever's relevant. A power utility's max load feeds the same power-budget check as any other power source — see Power budgets below.

Two small fields on a node's sidebar answer two different questions, and only one shows up on any given node. A utility node gets Provided by: what real thing is actually behind it, once you know — the venue's actual panel, a specific network switch. Type a name, or pick from a suggestion pulled from the project's own items.

A real device gets the opposite question: Project role — what this thing IS for the whole show, not what it's called. 'Project Network (Switch)', 'Show Control', 'FOH Rack'. Set it and the role shows right on the node as a badge, so the diagram reads at a glance without opening the sidebar for every box.

Shift-drag a box around several nodes, or Cmd/Ctrl-click them one at a time, to select more than one. Right-click any node — selected or not — for Duplicate, Replace with… (swap what a node points at while keeping its wiring; catalog items and kits only), and Delete node. The Delete or Backspace key removes whatever's currently selected without opening a menu at all.

For a cluster that's gotten hard to read, select the nodes involved and right-click → Create group from selection. It drops a labeled, resizable frame sized to fit exactly what you had selected — drag the frame and everything currently inside it moves together, no separate step to add a node to a group first. Give it a name, an optional description, and a background color from the swatches while it's selected; drag its corner to resize it.

A big diagram often needs the same device's ports to show up somewhere else on the canvas — a rack feeding three separate zones, wired without the whole thing turning into a plate of spaghetti. Right-click a node → Create proxy, and it drops a linked copy nearby with the same ports, ready to wire independently of the original.

Need just one pin, not the whole node? Right-click a single port instead → Create proxy for this pin, and the proxy carries only that one.

A proxy's header carries a Sync button — re-copies the ports from its source, the whole set or just the one pin for a single-pin proxy — and a crosshair button that jumps the canvas straight to the node it proxies.

Add placeholder in the palette drops a dashed "Planned" node — wire it in exactly like a real device before you've picked which one it'll actually be. It works the same way on a project's own Routing tab and inside a kit's wiring diagram.

Selecting it shows Resolve placeholder in the sidebar. Set what it's planned to be — a category like "Cables > XLR" — and Browse the library… opens a full picker: search, drill by category, or create a new item on the spot, all without leaving the diagram. The picker opens already narrowed to what you set, so the parts that actually fit are what you see first.

If a node is a kit with its own wiring diagram, its expand button opens that diagram right there, nested inside the project's graph — the same editor, showing the kit's own internal wiring. Close it to return to the parent diagram.

A subproject can declare what it needs fed in from upstream and what it exposes out — the same idea as a kit's interface ports (see Library & Kits), one level up. Set them from the Project inputs & outputs bar on the subproject's own Routing tab, and they materialize as real, wireable boundary nodes right there on its canvas.

From the parent project's diagram, place that subproject as a node and it shows up with exactly those declared ports — wire the venue's own utilities (house power, the network) straight to what the subproject actually asked for, without opening the subproject at all. Its header carries a button that jumps straight into that subproject's own Routing tab, for when you do need to look inside.

A kit node carries an amber "Kit" tag so it reads apart from a regular device at a glance. Both a kit and a regular item show a small ×N stepper in their header — one node is one wiring pattern, not one physical unit, so 13 identically-wired LED strips are a single node set to 13, not 13 separate nodes.

Routing's quantities and the buying sheet's quantities are two different numbers that don't update each other automatically. The Sync button in the sidebar reconciles them either direction: Routing → Spreadsheet updates the sheet to match what's wired (adding a kit's parts if they aren't on the sheet yet); Spreadsheet → Routing updates a node's quantity to match its buying-sheet row. Any regular item wired at a different quantity than its sheet row shows as a warning in the sidebar right away — a kit's mismatch is only checked at sync time, since it needs the kit's recipe to compare.

Give a power source node a maximum load, and give anything that draws power a power draw value (both are just fields on the item). Routing sums the draw of everything wired to a power node over a Power-type connection and flags it if the total exceeds that node's maximum — before it's a problem on install day, not after.

A regular device node (not a kit) can also hold its own internal diagram — useful for something like a rack you want to show broken down into its own components without turning it into a separate catalog kit.