[TriEmbed] Opinion: best schematic drawing software

[Scott Hall]

I am doing some research, and thought I would fetch opinions on what
software you feel is best for drawing electronic circuit schematics.

Background: I grew up drawing my schematics by pencil and plastic shape
templates and standard drafting tools -- even through my college classes in
Electronics Engineering.  Since then, up to this point I have been doing my
drawing with a application called RFFlow from RFF Electronics
(https://www.rff.com/) <https://www.rff.com/> that I have followed the
author back in the 1980's when it was written in Turbo Pascal.  He wrote it
originally to draw ham-radio and RF circuit schematics, and later evolved
the software to draw flow charts, block diagrams, floor plans, UML design
diagrams -- much like Microsoft's Visio.

Other schematic software I have explored recently include those discussed
in this group: KiCad, Eagle and TinyCad.  There are a few others I have
looked at: FlowCode, Fritzing, Scheme-It (at Digikey), CircuitLab, LTSpice
(not free), SmartDraw (not free), XCircuit.

Some of the features to consider:

1) schematic drawing;

2) simulate the circuit using a spice analysis, plotting voltages or
currents statically or over time;

3) automatically generate breadboard, stripboard, or perfboard layout for
prototyping and testing;

4) automatically route PC board layouts -- usually with the ability to edit
the result due to criteria not in the component models;

Now I don't need all these features, I am just looking for the drawing
portion.  What do you think?

-- 
Scott G. Hall
Raleigh, NC, USA
scottghall1 at gmail.com
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