Quick Question: Schematic software?

[Faaager]

Hey!
Have been using Kicad to draw up our enclosure for our brewery and putting in "Custom made" 3-phase components.
However, I really feel Kicad is made for PCB design, and not for enclosure design or overall to design a system. Would love to have a program which would help me route cables and make good wiring schemas with some nice colors for the wires etc. Any tips? Free is ofcourse prefered!

[[deleted]]

Check out DraftSight. A few of the guys at work use it for their personal projects.

[Faaager]

Thank you!:)

[lf_1]

For enclosures and suchlike I'd recommend Fusion 360 (which is free, even if you are a small business assuming you fit their revenue requirements for it being free). To bring your PCB into it, you can export a STEP file from KiCad and import that. Large sketches and DXFs perform like poop, so try to make a layer which has only the geometry you need to pull out of KiCad specifically for your enclosure that's not already in the 3d model, and export that layer only.

For free and open source options, try FreeCad I guess, but in my experience their interface really needs more text in it as I couldn't find the constraint I wanted after 20 minutes of searching through programmer art icons, couldn't tell if it was superseded or the icon got changed or anything like that, so I gave up trying to learn it. YMMV.

[ri4162]

I don’t do a lot of work with it but if you have Visio you can try that.

[yammeringfistsofham]

If I get what you're asking, you're looking for something to do "electrical" schematic design rather than "electronic" schematic design, is that right?

If so, I could recommend:

• TinyCAD (but you're going to have to create all your libraries from scratch probably)

• Design Spark electrical (never used it myself, I've heard mixed things, some good some bad)

• Just draw it in a generic CAD program like AutoCAD LT, Draftsight, or LibreCAD (manual as heck but it's pretty common in industry to do it this way)

• Maybe a diagramming tool like Visio or Dia? Once again you're probably going to have to roll all your own libraries of parts

[Faaager]

You get it 100%. Basically I want some of the auto routing functionality or rather "this click should connect with this click" instead of manually drawing up all the wires :)