Electrical schematics on Linux?

Ignoramus8285 wrote in news:Vo6dnQnSPJkUXk_UnZ2dnUVZ snipped-for-privacy@giganews.com:

Maybe one of these ?

If your not doing it professionally, I'm sure one will do.

Yes, I think one is named Gimp. I played with it a little, although I have had a lot of practice with hack/spitMS Paint, which does a fairly good job at drawing simple schematics or wiring diagrams (and/or mehanical parts).

If Gimp is any easier to get used to using, it should be relatively easy. I don't suppose that there is any standard library of symbols for Gimp.

As I used Paint over the years, I ended up with a lot of saved symbols such as inductors, xfmrs, diodes, transistors, resistors, etc.

There is a very flexible, but (IMHO) very hard to use, tool called xcircuit which should be available for ubuntu (it is available for debian). As the name implies, it's intended for exactly this task.

I use Eagle

OMG, you're kidding. Using a bitmap editor for electrical or mechanical CAD? Just about _any_ of the vector based drawing tools would be worlds better than a "paint" program.

The mind wobbles.

have not used any of these tools, so I cant speak to the usability of them.

Good Luck, BobH

I note that you have this cross-posted to three newsgroups, and was tempted to put a "Followup-To: " in there, but wasn't sure which of the three shown would be the best. I'm reading and following-up in rec.crafts.metalworking, FWIW.

For the most likely to already be there -- look for xfig. It will do it -- though some of it may be a bit clumsy.

Also -- consider two CAD programs -- oscad and jDraft.

The former comes in source form, was written on linux (IIRC) and compiles nicely on Sun's Solaris 10 and OpenBSD as well.

The latter is written in Java (so it requires Sun's jdk to be present. It does have one problem which hits Solaris but probably not most linux variants. It starts with the typical #!/bin/sh, but it actually requires bash. Most linux distributions install bash as /bin/sh IIRC, so they have no problems, but Suns require you to edit the file (and you need something which will happily edit a file which is part binary, which leaves jove out of the game, but emacs works fine. I haven't tried "vi" or the various work-alikes for this, so you are on your own.

You'll probably want a faster CPU for jDraft, while oscad works fine on almost any system running any flavor of unix and X11.

Enjoy, DoN.

I've used the previously mentioned gEDA for digital circuit diagrams.

I also tend to use Dia for some things like this too. (Though it's more of a simple layout program than a schematic program.)

Grant. . . .

Gimp is a high-end photo processing program. It does have some drawing capability, but it will take you a while to find that buried in all the other features.

As a photo processing program? I don't think so. And it has a steep learning curve. I presume that there is some way to save symbols and load them back in -- but I don't know it (yet). For drawing, I use xfig, jdraft or oscad -- drawing programs instead of photo processing programs.

There was a commercial cad program for linux which I bought several years ago, which had a collection of packaged symbols for schematics, as well as for mechanical drawing (bolts, nuts, bearings, etc.) Now -- what was it called? Vari-cad I think.

That could be useful.

Enjoy, DoN.

[ ... ]

That looks interesting. I've just downloaded it, and am compiling it (for Solaris) as I type.

Thanks, DoN.

Of all things, so far I like Geda the most and it is available in my distribution. It seems to have the symbols that I need and actually works.

Here's the schematic:

bash filename

is all that's necessary, but if you're a glutton for punishment use:

sed -e 's|/bin/sh|/usr/bin/env bash|' filename > newfile chmod +x newfile; ./newfile

On Wed, 01 Apr 2009 02:57:38 +0000, DoN. Nichols wrote: ...

...

I verified that the following changes the first line of jDraft-Linux from #!/bin/sh to #!/bin/bash, without changing any of the binary megabytes of the file:

sed '1c #!/bin/bash' jDraft-Linux > t mv t jDraft-Linux

Probably the most-commonly-used gnu software for drawing schematics is geda gschem.

've used gschem + pcb for several homemade pc boards, like

kicad eeschema, also free, is a strong competitor. It supports a hierarchy of sheets.

Besides those, I have xcircuit and LTspice installed on my linux system,

and . I've run the latter under wine and in MS-W2K on an innotek virtualbox virtual machine on my linux Fedora system.

If you plan to produce any boards, either of gschem or eeschema will produce gerbers suitable for sending to pcb companies. For schematics only, I think LTspice is easiest to use, but it has the severe drawback of being a MS-Windows program.

On Wed, 01 Apr 2009 03:58:26 +0000, DoN. Nichols wrote: ...

...

has a link to VariCAD homepage, and has a link to QCad homepage. The latter has a free version (QCAD Community Edition) near end of also trial versions near the front of that page, or you can buy an MS-Windows, Mac, Linux, Solaris, or FreeBSD "professional version" for ?24.00 (24 euros ~ $31.81) I've used qcad for a lot of 2D drawings and a few 3D oblique projections. I downloaded brl-cad (88MB from free, available for BSD, IRIX, Linux, Mac, Solaris, MS-Windows) and expect it to work much better for 3D drawings, after taxes are done.

Quite a few. Geda seems to be one of the most comprehensive systems. But if you just type schematic into ubuntu's package search, it comes up with at least half a dozen others.

QCAd is in the Ubuntu repository.

Cheers

Ian

I am not sure that sed will work with binary files. Example: if a text file does not end with a newline, sed never sees the last line. So unless the binary file ends with a newline, sed may munge it.

Ah. Kind of you to verify this. Never mind my concerns....

"DoN. Nichols" fired this volley in news: snipped-for-privacy@Katana.d-and-d.com:

Oh... not so steep, Don. GIMP is the t*ts, and with appropriate plug- ins, will do everything PhotoShop will. But it's a LOT easier to learn. About the only thing a MSPain(t) user needs to spend some effort on is layers.

But you're certainly correct that it's no schematic editor.

LLoyd