On Thursday 18 February 2010 01:32:53 pm John E. Perry wrote:
On 02/18/2010 11:54 AM, Mark Goldstein wrote:
On Thu, Feb 18, 2010 at 10:06 PM, Douglas McGarrett
wrote: I am a retired engineer, and an Amateur Radio Operator, and there are times when I would like to draw a schematic or a block diagram for various purposes. including publication .Perhaps I will be better off in Windows--there seem to be a lot more choices there. ProgeCAD seems to be a good ACLt clone.
I'm not experienced in that, but I tried once gEDA system to draw schematics and more. Worked OK on OpenSUSE. I think it is in "science" repository.
gEDA is a bit hard to get into; I recently switched to kicad, which is working more smoothly for me.
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.
The times are gone when you're forced to go to the Evil Empire for any but the most advanced or specialized cad, or (as I am forced to) when your employer or client requires one of the Windows systems.
John Perry
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. You say you need three programs to do all that. --doug -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org