Hi.

I have AutoCAD 2002. Can I draw circuits with it? I haven't found libraries with electrical parts.

Or would anyone suggest any software. It doesn't have to be free. Not too expensive either

Thank you.

I use plain Autocad for all my drawings. I do not do electrical drawings often enough to justify the dedicated software. You get a lot of drawing symbols from the OEM sites. You can slowly build up your own library, that's what I've done.

There is a free download in the download section, should get you started:
http://forums.mrplc.com/index.php?autocom=...mp;showfile=146

The lowest cost route is to just use the symbols/macros that you can get for free and/or build your own.

For a DRAWING system, Autocad Electrical (an add-on from Autodesk) is quite good. There is a bit of a steep learning curve with it, but it makes doing drawings, component lists, and wiring lists very easy since the latter two are automatically generated. If you work with this system what you effectively do is to IGNORE all your standard Autocad tools and use the new menus and tools that Autocad Electrical comes with. Reason being that there's a database buried in the drawing behind ACad Electrical. If you go and change the drawing without updating the database correctly, you end up with just a drawing and lose all the features inherent in ACad Electrical.

The best of breed for true electrical EDA (design-type CAD systems) is EPlan, but as you said, it's expensive. This is essentially a CAD/design system starting from the ground up to support electrical functions. It doesn't have any of the issues that the Autocad Electrical add-on suffers from. About the only major annoying feature is that it is designed specifically for European (IEC) drawing styles and not US (ANSI) ones, so if you can live with all your drawings being in IEC rather than ANSI symbols, it works quite well.

Hi, try ProgeCAD from progeSOFT (www.progesoft.com) with the Electrical Library. It is very cost efective and easy to use.

We use Microsoft Visio - easy to create libraries - good if you just want to make a record of new circuits or circuit modifications.

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