Forums » CircuitLab Feature Requests

I absolutely love the aesthetic of CircuitLab compared to most schematic entry programs/simulators, but I find it's lacking in a lot of symbols/graphical tools that would be necessary to produce professional, publishable circuit diagrams. I was hoping to use CircuitLab for the final schematics for a junior design project we're doing (undergraduate EE), but with the current graphical tools, it's not possible to produce schematics that are of the required standard purely in CircuitLab.

It would be nice to have a couple of graphical elements like pins or port connectors (e.g. a circle or perpendicular line at the end of a wire, the outward arrow or inward wedge for male/female connector, etc.—with labels these could easily act as named nodes too) and other common symbols, as well as the ability to draw elements directly (e.g. solid-edged or filled boxes, circles and other polygons, lines) and be able to rotate and position such graphical elements and text arbitrarily (without snapping to the grid or to 90-degree rotations).

Even better would be if users could maintain and possibly share their own library of custom symbols (if not even custom simulation/SPICE models! That's an unrelated feature I'd love to see as well).

At the very least, it'd be great to see tools allowing us to draw arbitrary symbols onto our schematics. Any chance of seeing this at some point?

Regards,

Marc (Laogeodritt)

Thanks!

I'm already familiar with working with SVG/PS/EPS/PDFs in LaTeX at least to some extent, so I'm fine on that front. The overview of the CAD's capabilities is certainly helpful, though. =3

I've come across gEDA before. Too bad it doesn't officially support Windows—cross-platform compatibility is generally a factor for me.

gEDA is immensely powerful but is a bit scattered being a collection of tools that work together rather than an integrated package like Kicad.

You could always run it on a virtual Linux machine on your target platform. VirtualBox, Linux and gEDA will only cost the time to set up and learn. Depends how you cost your time.

I suppose if you've got students then maybe it all gets just too messy ... too many new things to have to learn that whilst they may be useful and interesting, rather detract from the initial objective of draining the swamp.

:)