Application for creating wiring diagram?

[Vet Tech]

I've used Google SketchUp for 3-D drawings but does any one know of some other freebie application that is handy for doing wiring diagrams?

VT

[Man at B&Q]

I assume you mean electrical diagrams, rather than circuit diagrams, but you can still use any free electronic CAD tool such as Eagle

and create your own symbols.

MBQ

[Jim]

I've been using Inkscape for this, for want of a better tool.

Disadvantages: - it's difficult to constrain lines to vertical/horizontal so when you tweak things they always end up at a slight angle to true - no electrical symbol library available, AFAIK - no dimensions/measurement tool

I didn't find Sketchup to be much use either, though.

I'd love to see an example electrical plan to crib off.

[Dave Plowman (News)]

I've never found an easy/intuitive one - so continue just using Draw on my Acorn with my own library of symbols. But then I don't do anything like this that is terribly complicated.

Here's an example converted to a jpg - so nowhere near the quality of the original vector diagram.

[Dave Osborne]

If you're designing a printed circuit board, it's usual to use a schematic capture program. However, these can be less than useful if you have a more general requirement to draw (and in particular annotate) a schematic.

I use AutoCad for schematic drawing/wiring diagrams. Obviously, this is expensive, so you have alternatives.

Two are TurboCad and Progecad.

TurboCad is cheap and well liked by many people.

Progecad is kind-of an open-source clone of AutoCad and you can download a free copy of the 2006 version here:

be aware that it's a

48MB download.

HTH

[The Natural Philosopher]

Always use gif for line art. Jpg for photos.

[Dave Osborne]

What sort of electrical plan did you have in mind?

A schematic drawing showing the schema of an installation or an architectural drawing showing layout?

I might be able to dig out some examples.

[Dave Plowman (News)]

Didn't know it accepted gif.

[Jim]

Actually, both would be useful, if it's not too much trouble.

We're trying to spec out a complete rewire for a house and knowing the conventions for showing sockets, light switches, etc and routing of cables would be useful - currently I'm having to make up my own symbology which is hardly a good idea!

[george (dicegeorge)]

it would be better converted to a gif as its only 2 colours it would be a very small filesize

[g]

[george (dicegeorge)]

When i've learnt it i will use blender for 3d

then I use paint (and gimp if necessary) but first i sketch it on squared paper with lots of colours- much easier to see what's what where lines cross and when it's computerised you can select a colour and hey presto!

[g]

[Jules]

It's really unfortunate that development of Inkscape seems to have stalled these last few years - it was looking like an extremely good tool, but then all work seemed to stop; I don't know if the [community of] developers got bored, if there was an alternate tool* that everyone started using, or if the code was just such a mess that nobody could work on it any more.

• if so, I'd like to know what. Inkscape's very good for what it does, but it was just never "quite there yet" feature-wise.

cheers

Jules

[Jim]

If you look at their roadmap they are planning to implement "Tech drawing abilities" in v0.52 but it's a way in the future yet.

[NT]

No-one's mentioned Spice yet, some versions of it are free. Its been a while since I used it, so no promises re how it performs compared to the other options.

NT

[Jules]

things are) for each milestone - if it's a few months or a year away, fair enough. If it's going to take them ten years to get there, I suspect it'll be too late and things will have moved on.

I need to upgrade (I use 0.46 a lot and see that 0.47 is out) - the one things that would be *really* useful is a convenient way of measuring distances, and I suppose there's a chance that some sort of tape measure tool's crept in there already (I know it was on the to-do list, but can't remember when they thought it'd be done).

Of course some way of entering values (rather than relying on the mouse-driven UI) would be extremely helpful, too - but I suspect that's quite a way off (probably with the 0.52 release you reference)

cheers

Jules

[Man at B&Q]

Does photobucket allow .gif uploads?

MBQ

[Steve Firth]

No.

Use PNG if you must use bitmap - it will do both photos and line drawings with minimal artefacts. Or use SVG for vector, or EPSF/PDF if you feel you must.

[Man at B&Q]

It does, actually.

MBQ

[Man at B&Q]

Of those, only PNG is suitable in this case.

MBQ

[Roger Mills]

Some versions of MS Office include Visio - which would almost certainly do it. Not a freebie as such, but if you happen to have access to it . . .