Advice on software for schematics

Hey Guys,

I'm building an Arduino project that I'd like to share with the community and part of the sharing is creating a schematic.

Is there a preferred program used to create schematic diagrams for our electronics projects? Something open source out there?

Thanks,
Randal

I'd recommend looking at KiCad. KiCad is a complete EDA software, rather than just a schematic capture program. At a glance, that seems like a poor recommendation, but if you learn to create schematics with KiCad, you'll be that much closer to being able to design your own PCBs when the time comes for you to do that, rather than learning some dedicated schematic software and then needing to start from scratch again with KiCad. KiCad is increasingly becoming the EDA software of choice for the open source hardware/maker world.

I really like the free (but not open source) Express Sketch for making schematics. It is easy to learn and it is easy to make custom components.

I would use KiCad for doing schematics and PC board layout of much complexity.

A lot of the members here like Eagle. I found the learning curve a bit steep fot what I do, though.

Eagle is great because you can take an Arduino design and use it as a starting point. Strip it down, build it up, add to it, etc.

The latest version of KiCad does allow you to import Eagle projects. However, I haven't always had the best results with the Arduino board files I imported. It's not something I've looked into at all, I just thought the board files might have some info to help me answer a forum question, but didn't want it bad enough to install Eagle.