On Thu, Dec 23, 2010 at 01:06:41PM +0000, Wayne Stallwood wrote:
On 23/12/10 11:51, Chris G wrote:
I've actually come back to dia now after playing with many of the others. I think the big advantage of dia is that it's a*drawing* program so it's philosophy is to make drawing things as easy as possible whereas many of the other programs have other priorities and thus their drawing abilities are second best.
After a bit of pain I have collected all the dia circuit, electrical and electronic symbols into one 'sheet' and I have made the default line have no arrow on it. I have also used it to create a special symbol I wanted. It's growing on me as a reasonably practical solution and, of course, I can use it for drawing other things (such as the layout of the instrument panel for which the circuit diagrams are for).
Maybe for this instance it is approachable but it is very much not the right tool for the job for general electronic schematic work.
Foremost it won't write out a file in any format a PCB autorouter will understand so you have to redo your circuit when it comes to doing a PCB layout. This adds the possibility to introduce errors and of course doubles up the work.
But I explicitly *don't* want a PCB design or anything like that, it's a boat instrument panel, one off, wires from the back of instrument A to instrument B to a switch, etc.
Secondly it cannot produce netlists for SPICE so if you want to do any simulation work on your design you have to again..redo what you have already done in Dia.
It's got no active devices (except inside the little DVMs maybe), there's nothing to analyse.
Maybe for this particular project that doesn't affect you, but I'd say if you are going to do further projects then settling on a dedicated bit of software that writes out industry standard files and learning it now will reap rewards later.
If I was designing circuits in the way you mean I'd agree.