Looking for simple[ish] drawing program for basic circuit diagrams
I want to put some simple circuit diagrams on web pages (or at least accessible from web pages) so I'm looking for a drawing program that is either easy to add circuit symbols to or has them already. I was going to use dia but whenever I try to actually use it I don't find it's as easy as it should be, I've Google'd a bit and found xcircuit which is quite a nice program but the mouse/keyboard usage is so non-standard it would take me ages to get used to it. Does anyone have any alternative suggestions or ideas? -- Chris Green
Off the top of my head... might be worth looking into Dia. It might include symbols for circuits. Also might be worth looking into Inkscape. Not sure if they do what you want... but worth a look. I know Inkscape is based off SVG, which can be loaded into a web page (IE may cause a concern, though) On Tue, Dec 21, 2010 at 3:28 PM, Chris G <cl@isbd.net> wrote:
I want to put some simple circuit diagrams on web pages (or at least accessible from web pages) so I'm looking for a drawing program that is either easy to add circuit symbols to or has them already.
I was going to use dia but whenever I try to actually use it I don't find it's as easy as it should be, I've Google'd a bit and found xcircuit which is quite a nice program but the mouse/keyboard usage is so non-standard it would take me ages to get used to it.
Does anyone have any alternative suggestions or ideas?
-- Chris Green
_______________________________________________ main@lists.alug.org.uk http://www.alug.org.uk/ http://lists.alug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/main Unsubscribe? See message headers or the web site above!
On 21 December 2010 15:28, Chris G <cl@isbd.net> wrote:
I want to put some simple circuit diagrams on web pages (or at least accessible from web pages) so I'm looking for a drawing program that is either easy to add circuit symbols to or has them already.
Trying to get in before someone else chips in: When you think diagrams, think Dia. http://www.google.co.uk/images?q=dia+circuit+diagram http://live.gnome.org/Dia/ apt-get install dia -Simon
Take a look at eagle (http://www.cadsoft.de/). used it about 10 years ago. On Tuesday 21 December 2010 17:27:13 Simon Elliott wrote:
On 21 December 2010 15:28, Chris G <cl@isbd.net> wrote:
I want to put some simple circuit diagrams on web pages (or at least accessible from web pages) so I'm looking for a drawing program that is either easy to add circuit symbols to or has them already.
Trying to get in before someone else chips in: When you think diagrams, think Dia.
http://www.google.co.uk/images?q=dia+circuit+diagram http://live.gnome.org/Dia/
apt-get install dia
-Simon
_______________________________________________ main@lists.alug.org.uk http://www.alug.org.uk/ http://lists.alug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/main Unsubscribe? See message headers or the web site above!
-- Stuart Bailey BSc (hons) CEng CITP MBCS LinuSoft (Managing Director) Linux Specialist & Software Developer ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Phone: (0845) 658 3563 Direct: +44 (0)1953 878162 Fax: +44 (0) 1603 858583 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ http://www.linusoft.co.uk http://www.bluetoothadvertising.org.uk -- This message has been scanned for viruses and dangerous content by MailScanner, and is believed to be clean.
On Tue, Dec 21, 2010 at 05:36:56PM +0000, Stuart Bailey wrote:
Take a look at eagle (http://www.cadsoft.de/). used it about 10 years ago.
Thanks, that looks a possible too. -- Chris Green
On Tue, Dec 21, 2010 at 05:27:13PM +0000, Simon Elliott wrote:
On 21 December 2010 15:28, Chris G <cl@isbd.net> wrote:
I want to put some simple circuit diagrams on web pages (or at least accessible from web pages) so I'm looking for a drawing program that is either easy to add circuit symbols to or has them already.
Trying to get in before someone else chips in: When you think diagrams, think Dia.
http://www.google.co.uk/images?q=dia+circuit+diagram http://live.gnome.org/Dia/
apt-get install dia
I did mention that I had tried dia (I've had it installed for quite a while) and found that it wasn't really up to the job. So far after briefly playing with Geda, Qucs, Kicad, Oregano, Electric and one other the best seems to be Oregano. One thing that Oregano can do which few of the others can is to export the diagram as a png or postscript file. -- Chris Green
Chris G wrote:
On Tue, Dec 21, 2010 at 05:27:13PM +0000, Simon Elliott wrote:
On 21 December 2010 15:28, Chris G <cl@isbd.net> wrote:
I want to put some simple circuit diagrams on web pages (or at least accessible from web pages) so I'm looking for a drawing program that is either easy to add circuit symbols to or has them already. Trying to get in before someone else chips in: When you think diagrams, think Dia.
http://www.google.co.uk/images?q=dia+circuit+diagram http://live.gnome.org/Dia/
apt-get install dia
I did mention that I had tried dia (I've had it installed for quite a while) and found that it wasn't really up to the job.
So far after briefly playing with Geda, Qucs, Kicad, Oregano, Electric and one other the best seems to be Oregano. One thing that Oregano can do which few of the others can is to export the diagram as a png or postscript file.
Coo! You sitting there waiting for emus? No sooner had Si's one dropped onto my virtual doormat than along comes yours... Happy christmas! -- Tony Anson www.girolle.co.uk/
On 21/12/10 15:28, Chris G wrote:
I want to put some simple circuit diagrams on web pages (or at least accessible from web pages) so I'm looking for a drawing program that is either easy to add circuit symbols to or has them already.
I was going to use dia but whenever I try to actually use it I don't find it's as easy as it should be, I've Google'd a bit and found xcircuit which is quite a nice program but the mouse/keyboard usage is so non-standard it would take me ages to get used to it.
Does anyone have any alternative suggestions or ideas?
I use the Schematic editor from the gEDA suite, it's a bit clunky looking but actually works pretty well once you get the hang of it, it has a selection of standard component forms but not many specific devices so you'll have to manage your own pin maps for the most part. It's not DipTrace which is what I have used professionally, but for the smaller project it does the job pretty well.
On Tue, Dec 21, 2010 at 07:25:26PM +0000, Wayne Stallwood wrote:
On 21/12/10 15:28, Chris G wrote:
I want to put some simple circuit diagrams on web pages (or at least accessible from web pages) so I'm looking for a drawing program that is either easy to add circuit symbols to or has them already.
I was going to use dia but whenever I try to actually use it I don't find it's as easy as it should be, I've Google'd a bit and found xcircuit which is quite a nice program but the mouse/keyboard usage is so non-standard it would take me ages to get used to it.
Does anyone have any alternative suggestions or ideas?
I use the Schematic editor from the gEDA suite, it's a bit clunky looking but actually works pretty well once you get the hang of it, it has a selection of standard component forms but not many specific devices so you'll have to manage your own pin maps for the most part.
I really don't want specific devices because I want to have circuit diagrams to wire from rather than analyse the circuit's operation. I have gEDA installled and it's one of my possibles. -- Chris Green
On 22-Dec-10 12:55:14, Chris G wrote:
On Tue, Dec 21, 2010 at 07:25:26PM +0000, Wayne Stallwood wrote:
[snip]
I really don't want specific devices because I want to have circuit diagrams to wire from rather than analyse the circuit's operation.
I have gEDA installled and it's one of my possibles. -- Chris Green
If it's just a schematic, then for diagrams of any such kind I would first think of using 'pic', one of the "preprocessor" programms in the groff [ = GNU troff ] suite. The the 'troff' program itself is a generic document-formatting program, driven by in-line "markup" tags (just as TeX and HTML are markup languages). In principle you can place arbitrary marks at arbitray positions on the page. The 'pic' program allows the user to type in a "plain English" diagram description, which is fairly strightforward to learn to use. Then 'pic' itself translates this into troff markup, which is then piped into troff which in turn produces a renderable output of the page (by default in PostScript). For something like a circuit diagram, which may contain several instances of a particular symbol (for several such symbols), you can define a macro once and for all for each symbol which can be given parameters as needed for position, size, shape, ... For such a purpose, to make your circuit diagram look "kosher", you would need a repertoire of standard symbols for particular types of circuit element. When you first posted about this, I had a quick poke around on the web and found a few sources. In particular see: http://www.ece.uwaterloo.ca/~aplevich/Circuit_macros which is the README page from http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/graphics/circuit_macros As can be seen, these macros are 'pic' macros, even though the ultimate intention is to feed them to TeX for the final formatting. However, as 'pic' macros they can simply be used in 'pic' and the results fed to 'troff' as God and Nature intended! However, if you don't need really kosher-looking circuit element symbols, you could probably create your own (or I could, if I knew what you wanted them to look like). So, if you could post a URL to an image of the sort of circuit diagram you want to draw, I would be happy to have a go at creating in it 'pic | troff'. Back on March 29 of this year, Srdjan Todorovic asked a similar question about using Linux to create a "TCP-header" table: "Lets say I'm documenting a low-level protocol or file format and want to produce a picture such as the TCP header (etc) table (http://izecksohn.com/pedro/pub/tcp_header.jpg), what's the best program to use for that? Another example: http://www.wtcs.org/snmp4tpc/images/TCP-Header.jpg I have tried Openoffice drawing tool in Writer, and it does not align well. Inkscape might be good as I can snap to grid. I could use a spreadsheet and then export to picture. Is there a special purpose application for this that anyone has used and would reccommend? I need to be able to insert text into the cells or perhaps refer to the cells in some markup way - also the cells should be fixed width as each cell would represent one byte." See the thread starting at http://lists.alug.org.uk/pipermail/main/2010-March/027163.html my response at http://lists.alug.org.uk/pipermail/main/2010-March/027165.html and my follow-up at http://lists.alug.org.uk/pipermail/main/2010-March/027167.html Using his "Another example" above, I was able, using fairly simple 'pic' with 'troff' to produce a nice version of it. For the result, go to http://www.zen89632.zen.co.uk/Misc and look at the file tcpheader.pdf (or tcpheader.ps ), and compare it with the original example at http://www.wtcs.org/snmp4tpc/images/TCP-Header.jpg The troff input (which includes the 'pic' code) of it all is in the file tcpheader.tr in that web page; and the explanatory "howto" is in the file tcpheader_howto.pdf To come back to your specific query, I have really almost no experience of drawing circuit diagrams as such. However, if you would supply a pointer to a typical picture of the sort of thing you want to do, I'll have a go at emulating it (in the same spirit as I did for Srdjan). Once you get the hang of it, doing this sort of thing this way is fairly straightforward, and produces very high quality output. Ted. -------------------------------------------------------------------- E-Mail: (Ted Harding) <ted.harding@wlandres.net> Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 094 0861 Date: 22-Dec-10 Time: 21:18:48 ------------------------------ XFMail ------------------------------
Qcad is what comes to mind. Someone else has posted a similar query on another group i belong to. So i've cut&pasted responses below. james electric geda sience-electronics Not sure what you find difficult about Dia - it's pretty much drag & drop. You can get documentation here: http://live.gnome.org/Dia http://live.gnome.org/Dia/Documentation and additional shapes here: http://dia-installer.de/shapes.html You can look at any of the additional shapes by clicking on the "more" link next to the shape info. hint: download: diashapes_0.2.2-1_i386.deb or diashapes_0.2.2-1_amd64.deb from the links here: http://dia-installer.de/diashapes/index.html.en install & then: Applications|Graphics|Diashapes that will add the additional shapes for you. You can also create rather complex circuit diagrams in OpenOffice.org Draw, and then export the page to html. You'll have to hunt around a little for templates/gallery items, but there are plenty around. Here are a few for starters: <http://csserver.evansville.edu/~richardson/projects/openoffice/html/electronic_template_usage.html> <http://csserver.evansville.edu/~richardson/projects/openoffice/> <http://dsciences.free.fr/> (use google translator) http://extensions.services.openoffice.org/en/ (search on 'electronic' or 'circuit') <http://www.oooforum.org/forum/viewtopic.phtml?t=10160> (old, but a good start - check the forum for other similar) Or, you could try this simple link: http://lmgtfy.com/?q=electric+circuit+drawing+linux for drawing circuit diagrams in the past, I've usually either used Dia, but as you've already tried that, the only other program i use is oregano (available from synaptic). oregano is supposed to also have some simulation capabilities as well, but they've never really worked right for me... but for simple circuits its easy to build them up in oregano, then screenshot them and save it that way. Did that for notes in class all the time. Hope that helps! you could also look at http://fritzing.org/welcome/ Xfig(1) at http://www.xfig.org/ is simple, (maybe too simple for you,) and has schematic symbols, etc., and you can apt-get(8) it from the Ubuntu/Debian archives. Has a jpeg export for web page images. The only one I've ever used is Vutrax. Nobody here has suggested Eagle CAD. There is a free version available on the repository. Apparently it's used to design the Arduino boards. On 22 December 2010 21:18, Ted Harding <ted.harding@wlandres.net> wrote:
On 22-Dec-10 12:55:14, Chris G wrote:
On Tue, Dec 21, 2010 at 07:25:26PM +0000, Wayne Stallwood wrote:
[snip]
I really don't want specific devices because I want to have circuit diagrams to wire from rather than analyse the circuit's operation.
I have gEDA installled and it's one of my possibles. -- Chris Green
If it's just a schematic, then for diagrams of any such kind I would first think of using 'pic', one of the "preprocessor" programms in the groff [ = GNU troff ] suite. The the 'troff' program itself is a generic document-formatting program, driven by in-line "markup" tags (just as TeX and HTML are markup languages). In principle you can place arbitrary marks at arbitray positions on the page.
The 'pic' program allows the user to type in a "plain English" diagram description, which is fairly strightforward to learn to use.
Then 'pic' itself translates this into troff markup, which is then piped into troff which in turn produces a renderable output of the page (by default in PostScript).
For something like a circuit diagram, which may contain several instances of a particular symbol (for several such symbols), you can define a macro once and for all for each symbol which can be given parameters as needed for position, size, shape, ...
For such a purpose, to make your circuit diagram look "kosher", you would need a repertoire of standard symbols for particular types of circuit element. When you first posted about this, I had a quick poke around on the web and found a few sources. In particular see:
http://www.ece.uwaterloo.ca/~aplevich/Circuit_macros
which is the README page from
http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/graphics/circuit_macros
As can be seen, these macros are 'pic' macros, even though the ultimate intention is to feed them to TeX for the final formatting. However, as 'pic' macros they can simply be used in 'pic' and the results fed to 'troff' as God and Nature intended!
However, if you don't need really kosher-looking circuit element symbols, you could probably create your own (or I could, if I knew what you wanted them to look like). So, if you could post a URL to an image of the sort of circuit diagram you want to draw, I would be happy to have a go at creating in it 'pic | troff'.
Back on March 29 of this year, Srdjan Todorovic asked a similar question about using Linux to create a "TCP-header" table:
"Lets say I'm documenting a low-level protocol or file format and want to produce a picture such as the TCP header (etc) table (http://izecksohn.com/pedro/pub/tcp_header.jpg), what's the best program to use for that?
Another example: http://www.wtcs.org/snmp4tpc/images/TCP-Header.jpg
I have tried Openoffice drawing tool in Writer, and it does not align well. Inkscape might be good as I can snap to grid.
I could use a spreadsheet and then export to picture.
Is there a special purpose application for this that anyone has used and would reccommend?
I need to be able to insert text into the cells or perhaps refer to the cells in some markup way - also the cells should be fixed width as each cell would represent one byte."
See the thread starting at http://lists.alug.org.uk/pipermail/main/2010-March/027163.html my response at http://lists.alug.org.uk/pipermail/main/2010-March/027165.html and my follow-up at http://lists.alug.org.uk/pipermail/main/2010-March/027167.html
Using his "Another example" above, I was able, using fairly simple 'pic' with 'troff' to produce a nice version of it. For the result, go to
http://www.zen89632.zen.co.uk/Misc
and look at the file tcpheader.pdf (or tcpheader.ps ), and compare it with the original example at http://www.wtcs.org/snmp4tpc/images/TCP-Header.jpg
The troff input (which includes the 'pic' code) of it all is in the file tcpheader.tr in that web page; and the explanatory "howto" is in the file tcpheader_howto.pdf
To come back to your specific query, I have really almost no experience of drawing circuit diagrams as such.
However, if you would supply a pointer to a typical picture of the sort of thing you want to do, I'll have a go at emulating it (in the same spirit as I did for Srdjan). Once you get the hang of it, doing this sort of thing this way is fairly straightforward, and produces very high quality output.
Ted.
-------------------------------------------------------------------- E-Mail: (Ted Harding) <ted.harding@wlandres.net> Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 094 0861 Date: 22-Dec-10 Time: 21:18:48 ------------------------------ XFMail ------------------------------
_______________________________________________ main@lists.alug.org.uk http://www.alug.org.uk/ http://lists.alug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/main Unsubscribe? See message headers or the web site above!
On Wed, Dec 22, 2010 at 09:55:29PM +0000, James Freer wrote:
sience-electronics
Not sure what you find difficult about Dia - it's pretty much drag & drop. You can get documentation here: http://live.gnome.org/Dia http://live.gnome.org/Dia/Documentation and additional shapes here: http://dia-installer.de/shapes.html You can look at any of the additional shapes by clicking on the "more" link next to the shape info.
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).
You can also create rather complex circuit diagrams in OpenOffice.org Draw, and then export the page to html. You'll have to hunt around a little for templates/gallery items, but there are plenty around. Here are a few for starters: <http://csserver.evansville.edu/~richardson/projects/openoffice/html/electronic_template_usage.html> <http://csserver.evansville.edu/~richardson/projects/openoffice/> <http://dsciences.free.fr/> (use google translator)
Why? The french is hardly difficult to follow! :-)
http://extensions.services.openoffice.org/en/ (search on 'electronic' or 'circuit') <http://www.oooforum.org/forum/viewtopic.phtml?t=10160> (old, but a good start - check the forum for other similar)
These Open Office extensions look interesting too, I'd missed them first time around. I'm off to have a play with them. -- Chris Green
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. 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. 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.
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. -- Chris Green
On 22/12/10 21:55, James Freer wrote:
oregano is supposed to also have some simulation capabilities as well, but they've never really worked right for me... but for simple circuits its easy to build them up in oregano, then screenshot them and save it that way. Did that for notes in class all the time.
Oh when you have a circuit that breaks the simulation but works anyway you know you are onto something special :) BTW you can export from Oregano using the erm..Export function and selecting a variety of image formats, Screenshots are not required.
On Wed, Dec 22, 2010 at 09:18:53PM -0000, Ted Harding wrote:
On 22-Dec-10 12:55:14, Chris G wrote:
On Tue, Dec 21, 2010 at 07:25:26PM +0000, Wayne Stallwood wrote:
[snip]
I really don't want specific devices because I want to have circuit diagrams to wire from rather than analyse the circuit's operation.
I have gEDA installled and it's one of my possibles. -- Chris Green
If it's just a schematic, then for diagrams of any such kind I would first think of using 'pic', one of the "preprocessor" programms in the groff [ = GNU troff ] suite. The the 'troff' program itself is a generic document-formatting program, driven by in-line "markup" tags (just as TeX and HTML are markup languages). In principle you can place arbitrary marks at arbitray positions on the page.
Yes, I know nroff/troff, I used to be the only person at work who could maintain old documentation written in nroff format. [snip about pic]
However, if you don't need really kosher-looking circuit element symbols, you could probably create your own (or I could, if I knew what you wanted them to look like). So, if you could post a URL to an image of the sort of circuit diagram you want to draw, I would be happy to have a go at creating in it 'pic | troff'.
That's not *quite* where I want to be. I want to be able to draw out a circuit, think about it, realise it's not correct (or that there are better ways of doing things) and then change it accordingly. It's one of the few areas (similarly with forms design) where I think a GUI is actually the best way of doing it. Moving an element from one corner of the diagram to another is trivial with a GUI, especially one that 'fixes' the wires onto the elements. Doing the same with pic would be much more difficult I think. Yes, I know the *initial* circuit drawing wants to pencil and paper, that's even better than a GUI but after that I want to make a more permanent record that I can refer to easily. As the boat is several hours away keeping that permanent record on a computer I can access from anywhere is an ideal solution. You don't end up with a scruffy piece of paper with fingerprints all over it either. -- Chris Green
participants (8)
-
Anthony Anson -
Chris G -
James Freer -
Martyn Smith -
Simon Elliott -
Stuart Bailey -
ted.harding＠wlandres.net -
Wayne Stallwood