Actions
Forum Thread Details
  • Replies 13 replies
  • Subscribers 537 subscribers
  • Views 1850 views
  • Users 0 members are here
Related

Text-based schematics?

neuromodulator

I frequently end up spending a lot of time trying to make my schematics look nice. There's the whole dilemma of when to wire pins and when to just label them. Then of course, you must also figure out the best way to organize everything, where to position the components and when to hierarchize parts. Also, creating new symbols many times requires much more than drawing a box with pins, and can also consume a fair amount of time. This kinda reminds me of LABview, where lot of time is spent on rearranging nodes and wires, when ideally you would want to focus on the logic itself. It feels like there should be a more efficient way to do all this. Maybe using some standardized language? What do you think?

Parents

  • I think of E-CAD as "word processors" for electronic design and I have my own conventions to make schematics "readable". I can't imagine a text base description language that would be as clear or readable. CAD systems have many tools to minimize the work and show connectivity at a glance and there are a lot of tricks to making the design process quicker and more readable. There are some conventions like making signals flow from left to right and top to bottom, but you are right, to make a schematic into something easily readable takes work. I can't resist cleaning up schematics to minimize corners and crossovers, even though it takes time. I find many techniques used to reduce schematic clutter (such as connections made with labels instead of wires and busses shrunk to a single line) to be confusing and time consuming to decipher, so I only use labels when making connections to a new page. I would actually rather make a bigger page than add more pages.

  • in reply to dougw
    dougw said:
    I can't resist cleaning up schematics to minimize corners and crossovers, even though it takes time.

    It takes self-challenge:
    "Am I doing this because I can't sleep if there are cross-overs that can be avoided" or
    "Is this diagram clear enough that my colleagues (or me in 7 years) will be able to understand it".

    Good Enough is a valid KPI for efficiency improvements.

Reply
  • in reply to dougw
    dougw said:
    I can't resist cleaning up schematics to minimize corners and crossovers, even though it takes time.

    It takes self-challenge:
    "Am I doing this because I can't sleep if there are cross-overs that can be avoided" or
    "Is this diagram clear enough that my colleagues (or me in 7 years) will be able to understand it".

    Good Enough is a valid KPI for efficiency improvements.

Children
  • in reply to Jan Cumps

    Every designer has their preferences and their productivity. I always have a pause before a final check prior to sending a design to be manufactured. During that final check I clean up both inefficiencies and weaknesses in the design, even if they won't likely affect performance. Or I might add in more test points or more intuitive labels. I not sure exactly how important all this is in circuit functionality, but I do catch some errors and the results are high productivity with a high chance of the PCB working. Other designers have different methods and performance, but that doesn't mean they would have better (or worse) performance using my methods..