Drawing a circuit diagram

Gosh., Its a lot more intuitive than autocad..

The beauty of Acorn Draw is it was written for kids. And even the first version is pretty powerful. Many later ones with different gizmos - but still basically the same.

Oh - Coral Draw costs the thick end of 400 quid.

Heh heh - reminds me of making up some logos using a very basic DTP package. Nothing like improvising.

snipped-for-privacy@v25g2000yqk.googlegroups.com...

DoubleCad XT (free version!) looks and works very similar to AutoCAD LT. I like the "free" bit too... :-)

Possibly OpenOffice with schematic symbols?

Even younger 9 years ago :-)

NT

What no-ones mentioned yet is that whatever format its in needs to be usable in 50 years time. Probably almost none of today's data formats will be in use then, or will have been for a couple of decades.

The one with the best chance of staying in use is plain text, .txt. And simple circuits in ascii are easy to do. But personally I'd be sure to print a copy too. Perhaps even stick it somewhere permanentishly in the garage.

NT

Ohh, do you really think so?

Bill

I bought an out of date revision for 3 quid at a computor show, registered it, and upgraded it for a song.

Derek

Persuade her to upload them to the web and mail you a link. I think automatic thumbnail creation is a feature of some sites, so you would know what was on the pics, and you could download them (or not) as desired.

On Thu, 15 Oct 2009 07:42:40 -0700 (PDT), jgharston had this to say:

Exactly. In these few days discussing this one could have readily drawn out the 'circuit' with a biro on a bit of copier paper - with or without a ruler!

Don't schools teach engineering/technical drawing/sketching these days?

It seems a bit(?) overkill to learn a CAD system just to draw out a few subcircuits.

In fact, if you label your CUs, sockets, lights etc suitably in a tree formation there should be very little need for extra documentation. It may be appropriate to write a document describing your choice of, say, cable sizes and calculated/measured earth impedances. The actual circuits are probably trivial.

For screenshots, embedded into a word doc works quite well if you're not competent enough to generate a png. Word compresses them enough to make them not painful, and people can cope with "prt sc, then paste into a new word document" if you want eg a picture of an error screen.

So really then, it's everybody. You're like me.

Bill

That must be some version of Word than I've never used. IME Word

The other problem, for photos rather than screen shots, is that all the tags (e.g. when taken) are lost.

But doing so to Excel is better. I keep getting sent Word screenshots that are awkward to view - as they are so scaled down to fit within the margins. And this is getting worse as people generally have larger and larger screens. (Is Alt+PrtSc too complicated? Most of the time it is a window they need to report.) The odd person sends an Excel spreadsheet - I can open the application full screen and see a reasonable screenshot straight away.

And yes - the bundled picture tools are unbelievably awkward and slow. I'd drop a copy of IrfanView on every PC...

I do that on every PC I build or work on. Takes about 20s to turn a 20MB JPG in to 50kB of acceptable quality for a snap of somebody's little cat/brat.

Yes, but with one *big* disadvantage, you can't correct or change it easily.

They never did except for people going towards technical careers did they?

Probably true for house wiring though I would like to record some of the *routing* of my ring circuits becaus (for 'historical' reasons) some are far from obvious.

DXF format is virtually ASCII for vectors. PLT format is even cruder for line drawings. EPS is similar, and has bitmap capabilities. All of these are yonks old and still going strong.

Well I took Technical Drawing at CSE (got Grade 1 but that wasn't difficult it being a CSE). I think all the boys took it whilst the girls did cookery. I also did woodwork, though I miss not being taught basic metal bashing (welding brazing etc) and some basic cookery would have been good as well but at they time you weren't given the choice. Boys did the techy stuff, girls the domestic and you and your parents had to really fight if you didn't want to fit into that.

Not like that now though, it all comes under "Design & Technology". I can't decide if that is spreading things too thin or not so you don't get enough of anything or if the broader base of knowledge is better.