[TriEmbed] [Splat Space] Opinion: best schematic drawing software

[Jeremy Davis]

Scott,

Since you are used to drawing by hand, my first thought was actually GIMP
simply because it is solid and has won my respect for many years for image
editing. You could probably make the shapes you need or copy/import them.
You could google "shiny buttons gimp images" for examples and turorials on
how to make some really fancy shapes. You could also load pictures of
actual breadboards and manipulate them infinitely. the line bending tool is
a bit tricky to master but very powerful one you do. You can do many
image layers and you can group the layers or merge them into one. lots of
zoom power.  A main drawback is raster exports instead of SVG and it really
was not specifically designed for the task you have mentioned.

 I am sure you probably saw it already, wikipedia has a nice list:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Electronics/Programs

Looking at Wikipedia list, you could use one of the simple diagram programs
such as Klunky or Xcircut
and then import the diagram into GIMP to dress it up for presentation
with fading color backgrounds etc..




On Tuesday, September 13, 2016, Scott Hall <scottghall1 at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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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>
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-- 
Jeremy Davis
@jeremydavis0_0
www.linkedin.com/in/jeremydavisprofile/
www.trianglecareerdevelopment.com
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