Electronic CAD - Schematic Drawing...?

Question

I was wondering if anyone had any recommendations for good circuit diagram drawing. I've tried KiCad, ExpressPCB, EasyPCB and Smartdraw, but they either don't have the features I'm looking for, or I just don't find them easy to use.

I've heard some good things about OrCAD, but I was wondering if there was an accepted, industry standard program for electronic CAD?

Mostly it will be used for small circuit drawings, but being able to make them presentable is important (for reports etc, something the other software failed at).


Any feedback would be appreciated. Thanks!

Answer 1

I use AutoTRAX EDA. It's a reasonably-priced package which is under active development.For your purposes, I'd think that OrCAD would be huge overkill and massively expensive.



I'm a group moderator of the very active Yahoo AutoTRAX users group.

Answer 2

OrCAD is about as close to an industry standard as there is.



Personally I hate it but then I've yet to come across a CAD package that I actually like using.



To be honest getting real world schematics to look nice and presentable is a loosing battle most of the time. Make the schematic as neat as the tool allows and then draw a simplified version in a presentation type tool if you need it to look nice.

Answer 3

It depends on the purpose of your circuit diagrams:



- If you need schematics for circuit board development or simulation, I would recommend OrCAD followed by Eagle.



- If you need circuit diagrams for presentations and illustrations, I would highly recommend Microsoft Visio (Technical edition for older versions). I have both SmartDraw and Visio. SmartDraw claims that they have bigger user base. That’s probably true, however most of the SmartDraw users are not engineers.



Which features were you missing in which packages that you’ve tried?