How do I draw a schematic with a computer?

[Joe C]

Don, any relationship to the Don Lancaster from the 70's and 80's that
appeared in many Popular Electronics and Radio Electronics magazines
that I read as I was growing up?

Joe C.
www.joecool.org

 

[Pat Ford]

I am pretty sure he is the same guy. There is a lot of "famous" people on
this list. I read Don articles in Popular Electronics when I was a kid, and
remember the address.
Pat

 

[AtPCLogic]

Subject: Re: OT Re: How do I draw a schematic with a computer?

From: "Pat Ford" [email protected]
Date: 2/11/04 9:52 AM Eastern Standard Time
Message-id: <[email protected]>

I am pretty sure he is the same guy. There is a lot of "famous" people on
this list. I read Don articles in Popular Electronics when I was a kid, and
remember the address.
Pat

They are one and the same....

Brad
PC Logic

Schematic entry and PCB design software
http://www.pclogic.biz
http://members.aol.com/atpclogic/index.html

 

[jtaylor]

They are one and the same....

Brad
PC Logic

One and ONLY.

 

[Chaos Master]

Ben Bradley called The Usenet Police (tm) of sci.electronics.design and said to
the cops, at Tue, 10 Feb 2004 00:23:30 -0500:

They (orcad who bought pcpice) used to have, as of a year or two
ago, a "student version" of pspice available with which you could draw
a schematic of up to 50 components. I did a cursory look but didn't
see it. Is it not still available? I'm still using it for small
schematics at home, I've always liked Pspice's schematic editor.

Not officially avaliable (the student edition is v9.1 when the latest version is
10.x IIRC) but can be found at many .edu domains.

But I bookmarked 2 links that allowed download.

http://lhw.ufsc.br/pub/PSpice-Student/91pspstu.exe -> slow. use a download manager
if you have no DSL.

http://www.eng.auburn.edu/~troppel/91pspstu.exe -> decent speed.

 

[Chaos Master]

Active8 called The Usenet Police (tm) of sci.electronics.design and said to the
cops, at Tue, 10 Feb 2004 07:37:30 GMT:

EAGLE. www.cadsoft.de -> cheap. excellent program IMHO.

Also see [ http://www.cadsoftusa.com ]. BTW, B2 Spice adds
simulation to Eagle.

So does Spice Opus and it's free.

But Spice Opus' integration is "trickier" to use. B2Spice is slightier easy to
use.
I've used B2 Spice and found it to be a "memory hog"... trying to load a 75MB
database file of components.

 

[Guy Macon]

One thing to keep in mind when selecting a schematic drawing
program is that you will at some point want to lay out a printed
wiring board. To do that, you will need *all* of the components
to be in your library, including that oddball connector and that
new microcontroller. The only answer to this problem is to pick
a schematic drawing program that has a large library, frequent
library updates, and which gives you the ability to easily make
your own custom parts.

 

[Neil]

It may not be wuite what you want, but we use EasyCad from FastCad.com.
Retail is a couple of hundred dollars, after a 2-week free trial. (10-user
license is $136 each...)
There is a free viewer available (which we ask subcontractors to use).
I think it is really intended for mechanical drawings, but we find it's
"cheap and cheerful" and good enough for our circuit diagrams and layouts.
Cut and Paste to clipboard supported, very small file size, fast to load /
use, no registry entries (it installed OK on my 'locked' work machine).
hth
Neil

 

[Mark Fergerson]

I need to retire my old stencil and vellum method of drawing schematics.
I need a simple Windows program that will allow me to draw schematics and
print them out. Nothing fancy - I am looking for simple and easy to learn.
Freeware would be nice, but I am willing to pay up to a couple of hundred
dollars. The ability to make a .png or .jpeg that I can put on a web
page or in a Word document would be a plus, but I can live without it.
I am using Windows 2000.

Does anyone have any suggestions?

If all you want is to _draw_ schematics, without any
other capability, go to:

http://www.filelibrary.com/Contents/Multi-Platform/100/13.html

and DL and install what's inside circutt1.zip. Then open
MSPaint and type the alphabet (in that font) into a text
box. Then cut-and-paste your circuit together, and draw
lines to complete. Save as whatever you like.

Can't get any cheaper.

Mark L. Fergerson

 

[Chaos Master]

called The Usenet Police (tm) of sci.electronics.design and said to the cops, at
Wed, 11 Feb 2004 19:00:46 -0800:

One thing to keep in mind when selecting a schematic drawing
program is that you will at some point want to lay out a printed
wiring board. To do that, you will need *all* of the components
to be in your library, including that oddball connector and that
new microcontroller. The only answer to this problem is to pick
a schematic drawing program that has a large library, frequent
library updates, and which gives you the ability to easily make
your own custom parts.

EAGLE has a lot of libraries. Just access ftp://ftp.cadsoftusa.com/pub and there's
a directory of .lbr files. I used GetRight to download the entire directory.