N546RV
Well Known Member
OK, sort of a two-part question. I'm continuing to get rigorous about electrical design, and wanting to put together some nice quality schematics for planning and documentation purposes.
I first tried a few different online generic diagramming tools that offered electrical symbols (draw.io and LucidChart), but I've found them both to be subpar for really serious work. The symbol libraries aren't great (though this can be worked around), but more obnoxiously, they both seem to suck at properly handling connections between components. I end up having to carefully manually place wires/lines between components, and at that point I might as well just be using a generic graphics program.
So I'm now looking into using software specifically designed for this purpose. Some research this morning led me to both Autodesk Eagle and KiCAD. Both of these are designed for PCB layout, and so are a bit overkill for basic schematic design, but I kinda feel like the functionality it useful to me. Eagle is a subscription-based thing, and free is always better. Seems lots of Eagle users defected to KiCAD when the subscription model took over.
At the moment I'm playing with KiCAD, and so far the only downside I see is that all the built-in symbols are things you'd put on a PCB. Mostly not bad, but I'm pretty sure I'll end up making my own symbols before I'm done. It's just stuff like contactors, alternators, etc that are missing. Maybe someone knows of a good add-on library for KiCAD that includes stuff like this? If not, I'm probably going to work up my own library with aviation components and make it public on Github or something.
Finally, before I commit too hard to KiCAD, any other alternative software I ought to be looking at? Options are bit constrained for me since I'm a Mac user. (though I could run stuff on my virtual Windows machine, but that's just painful to use for anything but simple stuff)
I first tried a few different online generic diagramming tools that offered electrical symbols (draw.io and LucidChart), but I've found them both to be subpar for really serious work. The symbol libraries aren't great (though this can be worked around), but more obnoxiously, they both seem to suck at properly handling connections between components. I end up having to carefully manually place wires/lines between components, and at that point I might as well just be using a generic graphics program.
So I'm now looking into using software specifically designed for this purpose. Some research this morning led me to both Autodesk Eagle and KiCAD. Both of these are designed for PCB layout, and so are a bit overkill for basic schematic design, but I kinda feel like the functionality it useful to me. Eagle is a subscription-based thing, and free is always better. Seems lots of Eagle users defected to KiCAD when the subscription model took over.
At the moment I'm playing with KiCAD, and so far the only downside I see is that all the built-in symbols are things you'd put on a PCB. Mostly not bad, but I'm pretty sure I'll end up making my own symbols before I'm done. It's just stuff like contactors, alternators, etc that are missing. Maybe someone knows of a good add-on library for KiCAD that includes stuff like this? If not, I'm probably going to work up my own library with aviation components and make it public on Github or something.
Finally, before I commit too hard to KiCAD, any other alternative software I ought to be looking at? Options are bit constrained for me since I'm a Mac user. (though I could run stuff on my virtual Windows machine, but that's just painful to use for anything but simple stuff)