Free Schematic Drawing Software for Posting on PF: Recommendations and Tips

[Phrak]

What is a half decent schematic drawing s/w suitable for posting on PF? --and costs nothing?

 

[MATLABdude]

Eagle light edition?
http://www.cadsoftusa.com/

There's a free open-source program called gEDA but I've never used it:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GEDA

 

[Averagesupernova]

I use Eagle and like the free version of it. The schematic to PC board capture has limitations but it is free so I don't complain. I found it easy to learn.

 

[Phrak]

It would just be for drawing pretty pictures, so the capture option is a don't-care.

But I failed to mention that the output would have to be compatable with PF, or acceptable to something like Excel for pasting into a cell.

 

[Proton Soup]

you can always printscreen, paste into a freebie image editor like irfanview, crop, save as jpg/gif, and upload to tinypic/imageshack/photobucket.

 

[MATLABdude]

you can always printscreen, paste into a freebie image editor like irfanview, crop, save as jpg/gif, and upload to tinypic/imageshack/photobucket.

But CAM-processed stuff is so much nicer! I also recall being able to copy and paste PSPICE student edition stuff directly from the program and into Word for lab reports. Speaking of old undergrad days, I had a prof who just drew his diagrams (for problem sets and what not) in Adobe Illustrator from a set of template parts (resistors, BJTs, etc.) that he had made. I believe you can also do something similar in AutoCAD.

 

[Proton Soup]

But CAM-processed stuff is so much nicer! I also recall being able to copy and paste PSPICE student edition stuff directly from the program and into Word for lab reports. Speaking of old undergrad days, I had a prof who just drew his diagrams (for problem sets and what not) in Adobe Illustrator from a set of template parts (resistors, BJTs, etc.) that he had made. I believe you can also do something similar in AutoCAD.

you could probably do that with a lot of programs, like maybe Vizio or something similar. keep all your drawing primitives on a grid and you could just snap things together.

 

[Phrak]

you can always printscreen, paste into a freebie image editor like irfanview, crop, save as jpg/gif, and upload to tinypic/imageshack/photobucket.

Printscreen never occurred to me. But you are right. I've a host of image editors to choose to get a gif format.

I've been balking at using autoCad. Everytime I use it I need retraining. But I need something --electronics is very pictorial in the context of communicating here.

 

[Redbelly98]

If you're willing to go the PrintScreen route, there's also LTSpice
http://www.linear.com/designtools/software/ltspice.jsp

Here's an example drawing: