So my lab has an EE who uses his own software to work out his own circuit boards, and I have nothing to draw out all the external interface and control systems I design and build. A decision was made to find a single software that he could use for circuit design and analysis, and for which we could use outside the circuit board. I also do a lot of control panels and so on for a variety of projects, and have been told by a friend that Visio Pro works for diagrams, but few that I've talked to have liked it (I'm also having serious difficulty making it work for me) and it can't interface with the analysis software. Any good all around suggestions for software or combinations of software that will work for us? I'm sure I'm not the only one who has this issue.
They may not be the right answer for you, but I had good results with Viewlogic for circuit design and simulation coupled into PADS for PC layout and mechanical drawing. I was making microwave radios and comm lasers with optics and the enclosures I drew with PADS were quite complex.
PADS now includes schematic capture and simulation but I've only tried the free demo version of it and don't know how well it would handle a complex circuit. It also has the transmission line analysis functions we had to do by hand. It is NOT an easy program to learn.
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Viewdraw is actually a capable drafting program itself; I've used it to draw the physical interconnects for an IC layout on top of the electrical schematic.
Why? Would this be preferable to two programs that each does it's task efficiently and well? You need only pay for software once, but you pay for inefficiency and difficulty of use every day.
Well, that's got a couple answers. First off, I haven't found any software that does the job for me well enough to make it worth my while. The EE already has his software, and usually does PCB123 for his circuit boards and Orcad PSpice for diagrams and evaluation. Nothing that he has been able to find works very well outside the confines of the circuit board, and we have a lot of oddball things far away from the circuit boards. He'd like to be able to test my wiring and systems off the board and I need a good solution for the non- electronic stuff I do. I have no issue with two different systems, but the time I spend doing drawings with a pencil that doesn't fit on a server is no helpful for any of us, and we have no good system for managing any of our electrical and electronic systems. Turns out that we have very few wiring diagrams of our systems on the server, due in main part to there not being a good method for developing and testing those systems.
I do a fair amount of packaging electronics for our research work - sometimes more MacGyver than Maytag, but we make sure our stuff is safe, and some of it is pretty slick (thanks in large part to help from this group!). If your EE is using anything like what I am envisioning, I would not expect it to solve what I imagine your task to be: physical integration of gizmos on panels and elsewhere in a box to a populated board with circuit analysis and physical layout spit out by the EE's software. Am I at all warm??
I typically work with either purchased boards such as screw terminal boards, packaged transducers, PC/104 computer components, etc., or very simple home-grown perf boards with soldered jumpers (don't laugh - they work). From a physical design standpoint, they become plates with known hole locations and (when space is tight) varying thickness. I use QCad to draw all relevant parts of an assembly, and create dimension layers that guide my milling. It is not "easy" but it works. I create one layer per view per component - systematic naming is critical to sanity. To that, add one or two (maybe three) dimension layers per component. My biggest complaint is that QCad does not anticipate the range in sizes, which can vary by a factor of ten or more. A reasonable text size for a 0.5x0.5x3.0" inch bracket is much too small for labeling a drawing of a 1x2x3 ft "box" for the instrument. I get around the hassles. I have not used AutoCAD in a long time; it stuck me as bloated then, but a good 3D system could have some advantages.
On the other extreme, I sometimes use Squeak
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Smalltalk to create 3D models using its Alice clone. I used it to create a *VERY* crude way to "fly" around a model of a shelved cart with discrete boxes. I was solving a political problem more than a scientific/engineering one, and needed to be damn sure some things would fit on a particular cart. I had not yet discovered QCad, and frankly, the visualization was helpful. I have used the same trick a few more times. Squeak is free and I will gladly set you up with a framework and some examples, but there is just so much I can do to teach programming. If you have some programming experience, you might want to take a look. A more mainstream alternative would be POV-Ray
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or perhaps Blender. All three are (AFAIK) limited to visualization. CAD (of course) offers the opportunity to create layers with dimensions and machining instructions. QCad will not offer the fly-around views, but what do you expect for $35? I find it worth every penny BTW.
Very much a MacGyver sort of operation, but as my name is McIver, I have to remind folks that I'm much smarter and better looking than that guy when they mispronounce my name. :) I support a handful of physicists, doctors, and engineers. One physicist brings a vague set of requirements and lets me run with it. I actually like that the best, because I get to deliver a system my way, quickly, simply, and modifiable. The EE comes up with a circuit board, has me assemble it, and then spends days trying to make it work, grumbling that I must have screwed up something, when rarely it's the case. He has specific expectations but doesn't tell me what they are. Another program manager tells me the overall program goals with a task and lets me go to town, which I also like.
My challenge when it comes to diagrams is that I need an electronic way to create and store my diagrams that anyone can read and modify, a way to interface those diagrams with the EE, who needs to run analysis on some of the odd designs. In R&D, we play in the outer limits of just about everything, working with extremely high and low currents and frequency, high vacuum, cryogenics, magnetic fields, radiation, blah, blah, blah, and I have to work with microelectronics, motor controls, basic and complex control circuits, and all sorts of off the shelf and homemade sensors, and these items can be in all the above environments. These designs need to be able to be pasted into reports, modified easily by those with a minimum of training, and analyzed. It strikes me as odd that there is no software for folks who need to do something other than power distribution and circuit boards. Trying to do wiring between boxes just doesn't seem to exist, which boggles my mind. I need to go find out what software the commercial aircraft division of my employer uses for their wiring, as I know they have the same issues I do.
Many CAD packages enable one to capture graphics and schematics. I use AutoCAD simply because I'm familiar with it and can "sketch" or draw in ACAD faster than I can with a pencil -- and then share, maintain and archive my drawings electronically. Other than quick scribbles, I haven't made a drawing with a pencil for well over a decade. Every drawing I've made, and there are certainly hundreds and possibly thousands, is chronologically archived in folders on this computer and in a backup archive. If I know about when I made it and something about its purpose, I can find it in a couple of minutes. I use programs similar to those used by your EE for circuit simulations and circuitboards. I use ACAD when I just want a schematic (no simulation), and/or to make drawings of mechanical parts and devices. If I were an ME I would want something like SolidWorks. I'd like it anyway, but it's way beyond this pensioner's budget.
Many or most PWB (printed wiring board) programs make a netlist from a schematic. If you enter a wiring diagram as a schematic, you can get a netlist listing every "net" (set of things connected together) and the nodes (terminals on devices) that are connected to each other. It needn't be a single board, could easily be a panel or an entire machine.
Electrical verification of wiring is easily done with any of the various SPICE programs. They can "test" anything that can be represented with a schematic. If you could check the real thing with an ohmmeter or continuity tester, SPICE can certainly ohm out the schematic. They also enable easy schematic capture, and they are certainly not limited to circuit boards. They're of no use at all for physical drawings of panels, wiring harnesses, etc, though. The CAD packages do that, with a wide variety of capability, ease of learning, ease of use and price.
Oh, there certainly are programs if you can pry loose the funding.
Viewlogic will break up a design into a hierarchy with each module's schematic appearing as a connected block at the next higher level. I could design a Xilinx FPGA and simulate its schematic while also placing it on the board as a component, the board was a block on the backplane schematic, and the backplane was a block on the master schematic. Each board level schematic was exported to PADS for the board artworks. The interconnect cabling could come from the master schematic if everyone was careful to put all I/O on each block. There is enough drafting capability that I could create an isometric view as the symbol for strange experimental devices with unlabelled terminals.
It helped significantly that I ran both the CAD room and the electronics lab and could make sure everything worked together.
I think both packages will output PDFs that can be pasted into Word.
My computer is littered with a number of lousy software, and I think I may have found something that might do the job. Has anyone used Designworks by Capilano? I've spent a few moments working on a diagram I currently have in pencil, and so far it seems to be doing the job. Any other experience out there?
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