Flowcharts and diagrams

OpenOffice has a good drawing tool ("Drawing"). You can even export directly to several image formats, PDF and SWF (Flash).

Cheers.

Never used, but heard of Dia:

EG

Open office and dia are the best of the free, but you will spend many days to get the first "nice looking picture" out of the printer.

Unless you have a paying audience for your artwork, consider sketching the block diagram in your notebook and spend the time you save cleaning up your source code/schematic and simulation testbench.

-- Mike Treseler

If you have linux/unix -- Xfig is the tool..I have never used any other tool after trying it. You have to spend an hr or so learning it.

Thanks, I'll give it a try.

BTW, I found an ancient Win95/NT program (Flow!) in the office that was just collecting dust.

Thanks for your input! Reinier

I haven't tried it yet, but I gather that Open Office 2 (solid beta available) has better flowcharting functionality.

Here is how to use it on windows:

cygwin is available at:

or alternatively you can try WinFig at:

EG.

I have released a program called Circuit Scribe that is designed to produce decent looking circuit/schematic drawings, as well as netlisting (downloadable from

You could create a custom library of your building blocks, with pins defined for the inputs/outputs to suit your flow chart requirements. Then if you want to rearrange the blocks, the interconnections will be rubber-banded. Drawing programs that don't do this are a real pain.

Colin Seymour