On 02/18/2010 10:49 PM, Douglas McGarrett wrote:
On Thursday 18 February 2010 01:32:53 pm John E. Perry wrote:
Why on earth would anyone want to use a general-purpose drawing program like dia, or a mechanical drawing program like Autocad or Qcad, for electronics? At home and for consulting I use kicad for electronics and Qcad for mechanical drawing, and oodraw or dia for things like block diagrams or flowcharts.
To give you a simple answer, I used AutoCAD Lt at work for about 15 years, and I'm used to it. Once you have built a few items, like IC's, transistors, etc., you can use them again and again. It makes nice square boxes for block diagrams, and the ortho mode makes nice square-cornered lines on schematics. It's nice for circuit-board traces, with its programmable line widths, and it makes nice microwave circuits with the pline command, as well as making large microwave objects and filling them in with solid.
And, of course, in kicad you can build your own IC's, etc. and reuse them, too. But with an electronic cad program, you get persistent connection (i. e., you can move items without losing connections), automatic connections between layers, autorouting if you like it, design rule checking, connectivity checking, consistency checking between schematic and board, etc., etc. Autocad gives some crippled mimics of these features with expensive add-ons but I've found it much harder to use (I work part-time for an employer who insists on Autocad).
You say you need three programs to do all that.
Nope. I make it easy on myself by using three appropriate tools for the job. kicad (or Eagle, or geda) makes electronic design easy. Qcad (or Autocad) makes mechanical drawing easy. dia (or inkscape) makes general artwork easy. Using kicad for either of the other two is probably possible, but would tough. Using Qcad (or Autocad) for either of the other two would definitely be possible, but would be tough. Using dia (or inkscape) would be possible, but would be tough. I use the appropriate free package for the job, and save myself a lot of grief. jp -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org