Project:WikiProject Electronics

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Drawing circuits

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One of the main parts when writing an article about electronics might be drawing of a circuit. At the moment, there are several pictures showing electronic components around Wikipedia, most of them from [http://commons.wikimedia.org Commons]. Anyway, paying attention to them, it will be clear that everybody has used a different program to draw them, getting different quality. Moreover, a lot of the authors did not use a specialised program, so they had to draw all the components from scratch, starting from simple lines and circles. Normally in these cases the output quality is very high, but the time to make them must have been very long.

For these reasons, this project has to propose a standard to be used to draw circuits, suggesting tips or whatever, in order to get the best possible quality with the minimum effort. First of all, let us start from a sort of "wish list", with the list of all the feature this program should have:

1. It must be free and open source: this is the way Wikipedia is, and so must be any program Wikipedia suggests.
2. It must be multi-platform: in order to be proposed as a standard, anybody must be able to use it. The program has to run on Windows, Linux and macOS.
3. It has to be able to export in SVG: the SVG is the format that was proposed by Wikipedia for diagrams. It provides the best quality at the minimum space.
4. It has to have a big standard collection of electric/electronic components, with optionally an extensible library: this way it will not be necessary to draw components from scratch, and, just in case, it will be necessary to do it just once.
5. It has to help the schematic drawing by a grid or something like this: if it does not give the possibility to "hang" the components to a grid, it will be hard to make a precise drawing
6. ''Connections should be better than just lines. They should attach to components, default to right angles, move when the components are moved, autoroute around objects, and so on.
7. It should be part of a complete, easy to use, drawing package, not just for circuit diagrams (though a 'circuit mode' might be good). Vector drawing has long been a weak area on PCs (British Acorn computers had 'Draw' in ROM which was excellent, leading Acorn users to draw a lot more because it so was easy and they did not have to decide which program would be best to use).
8. It should have Bezier curves to allow the creation of good audio curves, since most weighting curves are specified by points, not by an equation or circuit model.

At the moment, as far as we know, there is no program satisfying all these points.

Anyway the members of the project made a list with several programs that have been used for drawing circuits on Wikipedia. Each program has a short comment and an example of its output; this list is at programs for drawing circuits. The only way to get a circuit in SVG format without drawing everything from scratch is using Xcircuit; for more info see How to draw SVG circuits using Xcircuit.

Image:electrical_symbols_library.svg

Image:Sine_sqare_triangle_generator_blocks.svg

There is an [http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Electrical_symbols_library.svg image on commons] specially intended to help drawing SVG circuits simple, fast and flexible. Just open this image in any common vector editor (e.g. Inkscape), copy, place and join the components as you wish. This technique produces nice and small SVG images. Except for 6th it achieves all the wishes mentioned above.

When drawing, it is recommended to

• use grid snapping (the components are designed to be snapped to a 1 mm grid or 2 mm grid)
• make all connection lines 1.0 mm thick
• properly mark the joints with the dot (to distinguish them from cross-overs)
• to be unambiguous join only 3 wires together at any point, as a 4-way can look like an accidentally dotted cross-over
• use the font "12 pt sans-serif" (or similar). An alternative is to use "24 pt Times New Roman Italic" for big letters and "18 pt Times New Roman Normal" for sub letters, as done in this image.

Feel free to extend the component list and to upload a new version.

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