What schematic drawing tool do you use ?

[Michael A. Terrell]

How's the weather up there? I had to turn on the air conditioning,
79°F outside right now ;-)

Jim Thompson

No one cares, except your electric company. It was about 70 today so
I didn't have to turn the air conditioning or the heat on.

--
Service to my country? Been there, Done that, and I've got my DD214 to
prove it.

Michael A. Terrell
Central Florida

 

[Pooh Bear]

Old DOS Orcad SDT is still a viable schematic program, even 10 years
after it has been off the market. Modern video drivers are available.
Check out http://groups.yahoo.com/group/OldDosOrcad/

Funnily enough, due to certain constraints, I've been tempted to consider going
back to SDT 3.21 just recently.

Graham

 

[Joerg]

Hello Jim,

How's the weather up there? I had to turn on the air conditioning,
79°F outside right now ;-)

It was around 60F because we are above the clouds, usually. Inside it
got up to 70F without any heat. The house is built in a passive energy
use fashion so the tile floor catches the heat from the sun and acts as
a natural masonry heater. In the summer you close the blinds until the
sun stops shining into the windows. Then things are kept cool as long as
the nights drop to below 60F and the blinds are opened at night.

Now it's raining and we fired up the wood stove because we'll have
dinner guests tonight.

Sometimes we see the clouds rolling in from the Bay Area. Often they are
about level with our deck and look rather spooky. You can sit in the sun
and then within seconds you are engulfed in mist, can't even see the end
of the deck. When our rottie mix was young he used to growl at the
clouds to make them go away. Worked every single time.

Regards, Joerg

 

[David Brown]

I don't agree with that opinion but then again I'm heavily
biased.

gEDA is a collection of tools that have been successfully
interfaced together. gEDA is certainly not as well integrated
as Kicad, but this is actually a major strength for power users.
It is fairly easy to add/substitute different programs into the
design flow. The various interfaces (symbol, footprint, netlists,
netlisters, etc...) or file formats are fairly well documented, so
it is easy to customize/modify the design flow.

Three more things that gEDA has going for it: a very well
established and stable support and development community,
gEDA interfaces well with other design tools (non-free/commercial),
and it has been proven to work well on fairly complex designs.
Please see:

Are there any lists of the design tools it interfaces with? In
particular, one of the biggest obstacles to changing toolsets is
incompatibility of file formats. Apart from netlists (with are easy to
work with), the only standard formats are output formats like pdf and
gerber. If gEDA has tools for converting back and forth between
different binary formats, then I'd love to hear about it.

 

[Joerg]

Hello Win,

I'm glad you identified the pencil sharpener, I was going to ask.

But it isn't power outage proof. So I use a mechanical one. Most of the
time I just take grandpa's pocket knife and use that. It feels more
manly, almost like making your own LAN cables.

I must confess that I have never seen an electric eraser.

Regards, Joerg

 

[Joerg]

Hello David,

Are there any lists of the design tools it interfaces with? In
particular, one of the biggest obstacles to changing toolsets is
incompatibility of file formats. Apart from netlists (with are easy to
work with), the only standard formats are output formats like pdf and
gerber. If gEDA has tools for converting back and forth between
different binary formats, then I'd love to hear about it.

EDA tools mostly do not interface beyond the netlist format. IMHO this
whole EDIF effort was a joke, many EDA companies seem unwilling to
cooperate. So if they don't release their 'proprietary' formats those
that want to cooperate cannot do so.

Incompatibility was my biggest obstacle when I switched to Cadsoft
Eagle. But to me the price/performance ratio was much better than the
competition and I took the plunge.

Regards, Joerg