How to Post Diagrams and Schematics?

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

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

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.

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

Regards

Peter

Thank you Peter for all the good information. I will down load the hobbyist version of Eagle and check it out. By the way almost 700 people have viewed this thread since I put it up so your insights have helped many more than just me.

John