Electronics > Projects, Designs, and Technical Stuff
What's the "it" software for circuit diagrams
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kelemvor:
Greetings, earthlings!

I'm working on translating a product manual from Chinese to English.  It's a hobby thing, I'm no pro. It's for a power inverter board.  Well, I'm mostly done with the text of the manual and now I come to the five different schematics included in the manual.  The existing stuff seems to be a schematic for wires and symbols.  However, all text (component values, descriptions etc) are just oddly placed/spaced text in ms word which has the schematic image pasted on top.

At first I started merely translating the pieces of text, tediously working on placing the text where its supposed to be on the schematic.  Which works ok until the margins or font above get changed.. then everything is out of whack.

I spent a good 8 hours doing the main translation (google translate, I don't read Chinese).  So I thought I'd like to do something better than just text with a superimposed graphic.  I'd like to draw the schematics in a program, then paste the schematic into the document. Perhaps even embed the schematic file its-self.

All of that leading up to my actual question....drum roll....

What program should I use to create the schematic?  I first tried Sam Fischer's circuit diagram but it randomly crashes so it's out.  I drew one of the diagrams up in digikey's scheme it.  It seems to be fair.  I can't seem to draw a wire that doesn't connect to anything (in order to duplicate the original schematic).  Kicad? EasyEDA?  Scheme-it?  Circuit Diagram?  Something else?

Free is important.  I started working on this because I'm going to build the inverter.  In the translation of the manual I think I've gleaned enough that I can complete the build.  There seems to be folks looking online for English versions of the manual so I thought maybe I'd finish the job and help others out.

Oh, and it's an EGP1000W with an EGS002 driver from Electronic Giant Micro (lol).  Should make a 3kva pure sine power inverter.  Not that THAT should matter with regards to software choice.
oPossum:
KiCad and EAGLE are probably the most popular. Also take a look at Fritzing.
kelemvor:

--- Quote from: oPossum on September 16, 2019, 05:59:34 pm ---KiCad and EAGLE are probably the most popular. Also take a look at Fritzing.

--- End quote ---

Thanks for the suggestions!  I drew it up in kicad. Although it appears extremely capable, it also seems very kludgy to use.  Not sure I want to use it long term.  I guess I'll give Eagle a shot next.
james_s:
Forget Eagle, it was once very popular with hobbyists but then it went subscription-only, KiCAD is the path forward. ALL professional EDA tools are kludgy, it's just the nature of the beast. Once you learn it it's no big deal.

Forget Fritzing too, it is a cancer, I'm so tired of seeing stupid breadboard drawings with a rat's nest of colored wires instead of a proper schematic. Learning a tool like Fritzing just gives you a crutch that will soon be holding you back. Just bite the bullet and learn to use a real EDA in the first place.
MarkF:
Forget all those.

My goto tool is DipTrace.

More intuitive in my opinion.
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