How to Post Diagrams and Schematics?

Allot of people use FRITZING Fritzing Fritzing as this allows you to draw diagrams for breadboards as well as produce a schematic like view for example this:

The site seems to be having a problem with images right now so im simply linking in the URL to them

http://www.element14.com/community/servlet/JiveServlet/downloadImage/38-16055-198231/1168-900/Lesson+4_bb.png

and this

http://www.element14.com/community/servlet/JiveServlet/downloadImage/38-16055-198232/Lesson+4_schem.png

these are both from one of my Arduino Video Tutorials on this forum and created using FRITZING, it is free and great if you do allot of your hobby using breadboards, it will even create a PCB layout if you want to.

and if those views dont work, here is the post with them in

Fast Track to Arduino Programming - Lesson 4a, Ethernet input and response test console

Hope this helps

Thanks Peter, This is the kind of information that will be very helpful. I will start to familiarize myself with Fritzing.

John

Although Fritzing is a great help for breadboarding it does not produce schematics as anyone in the electronics business is used to read. You can't do a simple 'opamp with transistor' schematic that's insightful at first sight, without knowing the pinout of the components. I used Circuitlab in the past when it was free. You can still use it as an editor, but have to pay for saved circuits. It produces schematics you can instantly share as an image like this:

Digikey has a similar tool, and I think it is still free (haven't created an account to test yet), which is http://www.digikey.com/en/resources/scheme-it

I just tried the free 'webtronics' tool, which is a bit clumsy and mostly suited for analog circuits, but completely free. You can save designs to your computer, and generate images:

The amount of whitespace is quite annoying....

Greetings,

Victor

Hi Victor, Thanks for the good suggestions. I will check it out. I have a Digikey account so will look at theirs. By the way I really enjoyed your interview with Element-14 for their anniversary. It is nice to know the story behind the Engineer.

John

there is one other of course which is EAGLE, available from ummmm Element 14 but also direct from here http://www.cadsoftusa.com/download-eagle/

it is free for a limited sized board and double sided (If making boards is wat you end up doing. It is also very good for drawing out schematics and there is a whole load of tutorials, even on E14 community forums.

I looked at the Fritzing and it was very Interessting. I made a simple board layout and then finished the schematic.  I hadn't given any thought to Eagle as my needs are so basic I would be hunting flys with a shotgun. The recent discussion on the forum about licensing also made me believe it was out of my league. If it is availabe for the hobbiest for 2 sided boards for free I will find time to take a look at it.

Thanks Again John

for sure it is free for 2 sided and if it fits basically an arduino sized board which should cover most hobby uses at least in the beginning

Thanks! I also liked the interview, it's a good transcription of what I've said.

By the way, the reason why I looked at online tools is because with Eagle I find myself doing this iteration list that I found on this  (very interesting) discussion(Embedding a schematic editor - Electrical Engineering Meta Stack Exchange):

Quote: RocketMagnet @ Embedding a schematic editor - Electrical Engineering Meta Stack Exchange I think this is an excellent idea. I would certainly love to be able to edit schematics directly in the questions and answers. Maybe it's just me, but my workflow for adding a schematic to an answer goes something like this. Launch Altium - wait New schematic - wait Search through several libraries to find the components I want Draw schematic Carefully edit each component designator, otherwise Altium puts red error wiggles everywhere Screen cap Launch paint program - wait remove all the grey grid if I can be bothered (tedious) Crop image reduce colours to 256 save as PNG back to browser upload image realise I made a mistake in the schematic delete the image from the answer back to Altium Goto step 4 I sometimes find myself going round this loop several times at the expense of about half an hour. I think that certain people are objecting to an in-browser because it's something they don't yet have. I expect that if we already had one, and clabacchio suggested getting rid of it, then those same people would be up in arms, explaining in detail why this was a bad idea.

There was an updated discussion with more alternatives here: Simple online tool to draw circuit diagram / schematics? - Electrical Engineering Meta Stack Exchange

Also, Eagle has a huge part library, which makes drafting schematics sometimes more cumbersome than needed.

found these limitations for Version 7 (jst released), it is freeware given these limitations which for most of use is no limitation at all

Limitations

The following limitations apply to the EAGLE Light Edition in general:

• The useable board area is limited to 100 x 80 mm (4 x 3.2 inches).
• Only two signal layers can be used (Top and Bottom).
• The schematic editor can only create one sheet.

that's the ONLY limitations compared to the PRO version that is paid for

Available from here http://www.cadsoftusa.com/download-eagle/freeware/

Regards

Peter