Software for Simple Electrical Diagrams

[mgedit]

I am in the process of gathering information about various TR electrical fixes and upgrades from members of our local club, and plan to post these technical articles on our OVTC.net website. Can anyone point me in the direction of software to create simple electrical diagrams with appropriate symbols. I have CorelDraw, Visio (2000 but not Technical), and Illustrator so plugins for any of these would be great. Other option is something public domain that would do the job. Simple and cheap (or free) definitely preferred. Cheers, Mike

 

[CJD]

Your Coreldraw can do a good job of it. Any symbol you can download off the internet can be cropped and inserted. These old cars do not have many symbols, so you could even draw and save your own symbols to insert in later drawings.

That said, I have owned my Corel program for 6 years, and can't even get a simple drawing out of it. I've watched guys that know what they are doing work it fast and easily...but I always get bogged down on simple issues and go back to my Autocad. Although I can really recommend the Autocad for what you are doing, it doesn't come close to the "cheap and easy" criteria.

 

[mgedit]

Thanks John. I could use Corel and create the symbols. Just seemed that they may exist already elsewhere pre-made. Visio is very good for org charts and such, but my copy is so old it has no "technical" add-ons, which I understand the newer versions do. Cheers, Mike

 

[dklawson]

Can Corel or other readily available programs generate dual-color lines? For example, if you want to make a wiring diagram with headlight wiring you would need blue, blue/white, and blue/red. I have handled this in a very inconvenient way with AutoCad (old R14) by making two equally spaced dashed lines of different colors and positioning them over each other. It is a real pain because of the line spacing and the need to manually put one line on top of another. I'd like to find some software that lets me draw the 2-colored lines directly.

 

[martx-5]

I use a program at work that I downloaded for free, and it works pretty good and has a ton of electrical/electronic symbols. It's called TinyCad. here's a download link...

https://www.softpedia.com/get/Science-CAD/TinyCAD.shtml

Here's some more info on TinyCAD...

https://veecad.com/tinycadguide.html

 

[alanjohnturner]

The diagrams in my article on the BCF home page were done with a package called Eagle. The symbols were more or less all in the library.

This is an overkill just for diagrams really because its really for full circuit-card layouts.

This is great to use, powerful and bug-free.

Al.

 

[mgedit]

Thanks for the hints. I found that there is a Corel font called Electronics that has some electrical symbols that can be used. Still a fairly laborious process, but doable. Sounds like TinyCAD would be worth checking out. In Corel making double colours for wires would require same sort of line drawing far as I know. Cheers, Mike

 

[tlthorne]

Here is a simple and free schematic program, more for old radios(yes I'm into those too), but usable for most schematics. tt
https://dhost.info/jschem/

 

[danmas]

I am in the process of gathering information about various TR electrical fixes and upgrades from members of our local club, and plan to post these technical articles on our OVTC.net website. Can anyone point me in the direction of software to create simple electrical diagrams with appropriate symbols. I have CorelDraw, Visio (2000 but not Technical), and Illustrator so plugins for any of these would be great. Other option is something public domain that would do the job. Simple and cheap (or free) definitely preferred. Cheers, Mike

I made these using CorelDraw: https://www.advanceautowire.com/tr2506.pdf and then converted them into PDF with CorelDraw. May not be the easiest way to do it, but I was familiar with CorelDraw and none of the others so it worked for me. By the time I got through with these and the MGB diagrams, I got real good at making two-color wiring.

I created my own symbols, and then just cut & pasted them whenever I needed them.

 

[mgedit]

Thanks for the additional suggestions. I'm more familiar with Corel as well, and think I may just stick with it for now. Cheers, Mike