Mailinglist Archive: opensuse (1581 mails)

["John E. Perry" <j.e.perry@xxxxxxx>]

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
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