What Kirchhoff Law should I use?

The Electrician

Joined Oct 9, 2007
2,971
What software did you use to produce the schematic?
It is free software - the LibreOffice Draw application running on CentOS Linux. LibreOffice will also run on Windows. For working with the .png file exported from Draw I used GIMP, also free software.
Did you have to produce all the circuit parts, resistors, batteries, etc., or were they available already made?
 

RBR1317

Joined Nov 13, 2010
713
Did you have to produce all the circuit parts, resistors, batteries, etc., or were they available already made?
I created my own symbols and saved them in a separate file that I copy & paste from, but only create symbols as required so it still needs a lot of work. Drawing a symbol is simple enough but the tricky part is aligning snap points with the drawing grid. Each symbol is a group of drawing primitives each with their own snap points, but the symbol group may have different snap points. Symbols need to be drawn so that when the snap point of the group aligns with a grid point, then the intended connection points in the symbol also align with a grid point. Otherwise drawing connection lines using grid snap won't work. And without grid snap you might as well use a paint program to draw schematics. I have attached a copy of my own symbol file which may have some value as a starting point. Yes, I know it is messy and can't explain/remember why I did some things.
 

Attachments

WBahn

Joined Mar 31, 2012
29,979
I created my own symbols and saved them in a separate file that I copy & paste from, but only create symbols as required so it still needs a lot of work. Drawing a symbol is simple enough but the tricky part is aligning snap points with the drawing grid. Each symbol is a group of drawing primitives each with their own snap points, but the symbol group may have different snap points. Symbols need to be drawn so that when the snap point of the group aligns with a grid point, then the intended connection points in the symbol also align with a grid point. Otherwise drawing connection lines using grid snap won't work. And without grid snap you might as well use a paint program to draw schematics. I have attached a copy of my own symbol file which may have some value as a starting point. Yes, I know it is messy and can't explain/remember why I did some things.
A similar situation exists if you use Powerpoint. You can draw shapes using primitives and group them, but the group may not align with the snap grid unless you are very careful. Still, because it is a tool intended for publication-quality graphics, you can make very nice looking schematics.

Digi-Key's free online schematic tool, SchemeIt, produces very nice schematics and has a rich set of pre-built symbols, plus you can create your own. It is pretty easy to use, but has some annoying aspects, too. It's output is pretty much publication-quality -- I don't think there are too many places that would reject them based on presentation quality.

My favorite tool is still the old MicroSim Schematics tool (7.1 is the latest version I had -- maybe I had version 8 at the end) It was very nice, very intuitive to use, and produced very nice looking schematics -- I'd say one step down from publication quality. It was free (the tools that went along with it definitely were not) so you can still find copies of it online even though the company was bought by OrCAD and then bought by Cadence and then ... well, you get the picture. The problem with MicroSim Schematics was that the people that wrote the code were not professional programmers and they were completely unaware of things like buffer overflows, so their code was buggy and tended to crash a lot. But you learned to save the files very frequently and that worked well enough.
 

JoeJester

Joined Apr 26, 2005
4,390
I downloaded LibreOffice because it's one of the few programs that can read visio files. It can not however, read the stencils, .VSS documents. I've tried both 2011 visio VSS stencils and 2003 visio VSS stencils. It does a decent job of reading the VSD (drawing) files. I could take the time and put all the symbols in a multi page file and save it as a VSD.

I use TINA for my schematics and the printout is decent enough.
 
Top