I still draw schematics on paper. I used d-size vellum since about the civil war, but it's got expensive and hard to find. The blueprint machine is retired and the vellum doesn't photograph well.
This is great:
And here was I thinking that he scored them into wet clay tablets, then fired them to get an archivable record.
Worked for the Babylonians.
Computer aided design on a screen works too. It's not that way that I worked in the 1960's but when we got processors that made it work well - 68000-based as it happens - in the mid-1980's, I found that it worked rather better.
Plugging exactly what I'd drawn into a simulation package caught the occasional drop-off a lot more easily and cheaply than finding it after it had been turned into almost working hardware.
The sheets are 27x34 inches. Bigger than D size, but I can get used to that.
I'll get used to the 1" grid too.
I include hand-drawn diagrams, paper or whiteboard photos, in emails and proposals to customers, and nobody seems to mind. I hate PowerPoint cartoons.
I can do schematic design on paper 10x faster than CAD. If a library part has to be created, that ratio could be 1000:1.
Just curious, have you tried one of the newer e-Ink tablets? Though I think, not as large (yet) as D size, but that does minimize waste & postage ;-) = RS
No. I like my drafting table and my electric pencil sharpener and my electric eraser. I draw facing a giant window with a view over the street and some trees and birds and things. It's nice to get up and move around and not sit and click a mouse all day.
The drawings will be around for decades, long after the electronic gadgets are all dead.
But the new paper won't fit into the drawer on my old wooden drafting table. Crisis. I'm cutting the sheets down to 22x34.
You can print them out. If they can be exported in SVG format one could probably rig up a pen-plotter to draw them out all nice on high-quality archival paper
I love a good old drafting table, too, but the wife, not so much I sketch on paper but also convert schematics in electronic form once the rough has become less rough. I guess you have a well- paid jr engineer to convert all your gems.
True, paper is surprisingly durable. Though, in your case a decade may not matter... It may be difficult for your future office holder to figure out what a HMC347 is, much less source one!
This paper photographs nicely with my cell phone. It's a Samsung, kinda junky but it has a fabulous camera.
The final design will be CAD'ded by someone else, which will involve creating some new library parts. That is a pretty serious process.
We are right now interviwing candidates for the PCB layout position. The other engineers CAD their own schematics, but I prefer to hand off the paper so someone else.
???
That applies to all parts lately.
Sorry, that was vague. I meant everything is rapidly becoming "digital"; we feel the pressure--via peer or manager--to move to the "new" ways.
Welcome to Amazon, where fact-checking is random and the "wisdom of the crowd" is supposed to make everything "just fine".
I switched from designing on paper to using a (my own) graphics editor happened around 1985. The ability to edit, move portions etc. was a huge game changer for me. But I was never really good at editing on paper, though I used a "thinking" pencil to clear some design ideas until about 20 years ago. Just sketching and thinking, not producing a usable schematic. I knew a guy - an excellent design engineer, I have learned things from him back in the 80-s - who preferred paper back then. He said he used the time needed to erase a portion and redraw it thus freeing some space to insert something (this was about designing entire MPU systems with various peripheries) to think of the design. I still happen to rethink parts of a design while routing the PCB, probably most of us do.
Some new things are wonderful. Some are silly.
Whiteboards and phone cameras are great, but it's still drawing.
Spice and PCB cad and SolidWorks are wonderful. Terabyte hard drives and Gbit web links too. PowerPoint is net destructive.
B-size Clearprint fade-out vellum and Staedtler 2H leads in holders for yours truly.
Cheers
Phil Hobbs
We do everything official as B size. Old printed schematics make excellent place mats for lunch.
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