I am trying to find a program for our electronics crew to sketch the electronics before the robot is complete, but everything i find is insanely expansive. Does someone have a reccomandation for an inexpansive, reliable program, preferably free?
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You can try out the TKO Circuit Simulator:
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What kind of CAD are you trying to do? General layout in the robot? PCB design? Basic wiring diagrams?
Following. For simple wiring diagrams at work the EE’s use powerpoint, which seems ridiculous to me. There has to be a better way.
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I keep hearing about Fritzing for this. Seems cool! Several teams have made FRC parts for it.
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Fritzing is the software I would recommend for making wiring diagrams. If you want to make pictures like this that are specific to your robot, Fritzing is the way to go.
I can share some of our electrical documentation from this year. These are all part of a bigger doc which has robot pictures, so I can’t share the whole thing. The goal of the doc at large is to be the place to go for any wiring related questions, and to be useful while debugging, so logical diagrams are a big deal.
It includes:
A simple table which shows which high power PDH channels each motor connects to
The same kind of table for low power connections from the MPM and low power PDH channels
A diagram to go along with the low power table
Diagrams and tables for CAN bus
We also have drawings with connections overlayed onto screenshots of robot CAD to go with most of these.
We used excalidraw to create these drawings. We choose to use excalidraw because of how easy and intuitive it is to create really pretty pictures, but it is lacking in collaboration - you basically just have to share the files around, which is pretty annoying. You could achieve similar results with google drawings or similar.
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We use AutoCAD LT for electrical schematics. You can get free education seats as part of an FRC team. We like introducing the students to software that they might find in the bigger world. Its pretty intuitive and there are lots of online resources. I have tried to attach some examples from 2023, we typically go with smaller subsection drawings that link together to make an overall larger picture.
2023 - EBD - 000 - Block Diagram - R2.pdf (108.3 KB)
2023 - ED - 100 - PDP - R1.pdf (105.6 KB)
2023 - ED - 310 - Claw - R0.pdf (98.8 KB)
do you know if their is a similar app like TKO Circuit Simulator but having the rev pdh and rev parts because my teams use them and is a bit dificalt to design on the ctr system and using the rev system