Visio Guy 
Audio Visual Components Shapes
Posted by Visio Guy on December 15th, 2006 9767 views
Through the VGOBN (Visio Good Ol' Boys Network) I recently received a finely-crafted set of Audio-Visual Shapes that you can use to layout your home theater wiring projects. The set is comprised of various terminal connectors, such as RCA Audio and RCA Video terminals, as well as various shapes for the back-plate and functional groups.
Many thanks to Tom Underhill for these shapes. Tom is a very smart engineer who used to work for Visio Corporation, and now does incredible things for Microsoft. You are welcome to send Tom praise and comments at "t-under-hill@g-mail.com" but remove all three of the hyphens first.
Here's a list of the shapes included in the document stencil of the Visio drawing:
- Back Plate
- Coaxial
- Component
- Component 2
- Mini Headphone
- Optical
- Patch
- Dual Patch
- Triple Patch
- RCA Video
- RCA Audio
- RCA AV
- RCA Digital
- Speaker Terminal
- S-VIDEO
- Terminal Block
And a screenshot of the stencil to give you a better idea of what they look like:
Not satisfied to leave well-enough alone, I threw in a Smart Back Plate shape that allows you to quickly reposition a text label by right-clicking:
This functionality is probably easy enough to do using Visio's text editing toolbar buttons, but hey, this is a site for Visio Developers so I just had to customize something!
Hope you enjoy Tom's AV Components Visio shapes!
More Info
Below is a list of resources for shapes, stencils and drawings that relate to AV diagrams. Some products are for sale, others are free to download.
- If you do a lot of AV work, and just love Visio, then you might be intersted in products from d-Tools. Check out the d-Tools product page and find out what they have to offer for Professional System Integrators.
- If you work with Bosch Security Systems, there are a bunch of free Visio stencils and shapesat this address.
- John Marshall's Visio Download Sites has a huge list of Visio resources, some of which contain content relating to this post.
- NetZoom produces accurate representations of thousands of pieces of network equipment. They also appear to have sets of AV Equipment shapes. Have a look!
December 15th, 2006 at 7:08 pm
Awesome, Chris, if you want to increase functionality put a connection point at the end of each patch cable. Also if you have some extra dev cycles create a label generator that asks on drop what the label of each component should be and where is should go like the back panel reposition text. Then add some functionality that links the label text to a database so you can add/edit labels easier. Then create functionality that tags each port with a Label, Signal type and Terminal type so you can produce detailed reports of what is hooked up to what.
Awww, fuck it, just buy D-Tools SI at that point
Adam
September 7th, 2007 at 6:46 pm
Thanks so much for your awesome abilities…you truly are a visio craftsman, not many like you out there…Appreciate your sharing with us. I just happen to come across your website from checking out a blog on Visio World. I’m glad to find someone who knows how visio works and can make it dance…Have a great week, Gary
September 18th, 2007 at 8:16 am
Hi All
I am more of an IT Visio user than an AV user. I am after some free stencils for Plasma’s, Video conderencing etc.
Would really appreciate it.
Thanks
Capeiron
January 10th, 2008 at 3:36 pm
Thanks for the connectors for Visio. This will make life much easier. The only things I can see missing (and would like to see) are a VGA, DVI, and Serial port.
Again Thanks.
March 22nd, 2008 at 8:30 pm
Hello everybody, my name is Damion, and I’m glad to join your conmunity,
and wish to assit as far as possible.
March 26th, 2008 at 2:30 pm
This is great and I’m going to use this to lay my connection out for my new home. I just wish there was an HMDI (for display/receiver etc)and “game” type port (for my Wii).
Great work and looking forward to seeing updates, when you have time.
FYI - I have back plate images from my manuals etc that I will use to super impose these shapes on top of, then delete the back plat image for a clean look.
June 30th, 2008 at 2:37 am
I had the same problem, so I made an HDMI shape…
E-mail me for it: “ryan eight six one three at comcast dot net”
Ryan
August 6th, 2008 at 4:00 am
Rticer!
Could you email me a copy of that HDMI shape? (And any other shaped you have for A/V use?)
timhoutman [at] verizon [dot] net