Wikipedia:Modular electronics schematics

This is abandoned.

See Wikipedia:WikiProject_Electronics/Programs#Programs_for_drawing_circuits for a variety of methods of drawing circuits for Wikipedia.

I've been using a web program called klunky schematic editor to draw electronics diagrams for the WP. It just puts a bunch of components in square blocks together into a table. Sometimes I edit the screenshots afterwards for prettiness, but often just leave them the way they are and add text. A while ago I thought "we could just upload the individual blocks to the wikipedia commons itself and then make tables on the fly", but my initial experiment didn't work.

1. Duh. I just had extra whitespace in it. It works fine:

		R1
V1		R2

(That's not a single image:)

		R1
V1		R2

2. I just got the official word from the author a few days ago that he considers the program public domain, so there is definitely no problem with this.

3. The examples above previously used .png files; these have been replaced by .svg files. Only the symbols required for the examples are available in this vector collection, which is not an attempt to produce a comprehensive library.

Pros and cons

• Advantages
  • Modularity - easily fixed and changed and created
  • Could be used by other diagrams, like chess boards. (I saw a chess diagram and thought "Hey! How did they get it to work???" leading to the current revelation of having stupid whitespace in it.)
  • Can use the individual circuit elements in each individual article.
  • Of course Platform independent & OS independent. No Installation is necessary.
• Disadvantages
  • Some diagrams don't fit the square block mentality that well, either wasting space or being completely "un-blockable", but we can always just revert to hand-drawn diagrams for those.
  • Marking up images can become complicated. Not sure if things like → are sufficiently cross-browser compatible.

Questions

1. Should we even do this?
2. Should we use the default images? (See my page for info about a slightly expanded version I created)
   • Should we use the default image size or make bigger ones? They are slightly on the small size on my high-res screen, but not bad at all.
   • Anti-aliased?
3. Should we port the editor to the wikipedia as well?
4. Images should be renamed. All should have the same, short prefix to keep them from cluttering up the image space and should follow a logical pattern for "port" numbering.

This won't work if browsers have their fonts set on "huge", but maybe some css can set fixed font pt sizes? But it might have its uses. Yet another reason to have a separate table namespace... - Omegatron 02:03, Mar 2, 2005 (UTC)

My naming convention

(This stuff is just to prevent two versions of the same part from being uploaded, confusion, etc.):

prefix (to keep organized and not conflict with other images): ES for electronics schematics? name of part: wire, NPN, diode, Vsource, ... orientation determined by edges Originally this was done with numbers. I think N E S W are easier to follow and remember.

• single terminal parts will just be labeled with whichever edge they connect on.
  • Example: ES_term_S.png:

  

• For polar two-terminal parts, the edge it starts at followed by the edge it ends at ("starting at" I guess equals "where current starts at", which is still ambiguous, but whatever.).
  • Example: ES_diode_NS.png:

  

• For more than two terminals, I'm not sure yet. I guess pick a pin ordering (positive leads first?) and label them. So if the NPN ordering is CBE, and E is S, B is W, C is N, you get "NWS"

• For non-polar parts, um, start at the top and go clockwise? So it will be EW, not WE, and NS, not SN.
  • Example: ES_wire_NSW.png:

  

So some symbol names would be ES_wire_EW.png, ES_NPN_NWS.png, etc.

The first eight will be renamed after this is more definite:

		R1
V1		R2

Should have a category for the images so we can keep track of them all. It would be nice if the category page could automagically generate a gallery... (It does! How beautiful! Gold star to whoever put that in...)

If you have a better idea for labeling, please post it.

Good examples

			C
			αiE
B
	iE ↓		Is/α
			E

B						C
	iB ↓				βiB
				E

Ok. I'm not going to do anything else with this until I get some comments, to avoid creating a huge mess and having someone come along and say "you know, it would have been much easier and better if you had just done this..."

So please comment. Can you think of any way this idea can be improved? Labeling? Text markup?

Yet another reason to have a separate table namespace...

Discussion

I like this idea. There was an electronic experiment set made by the Japanese company Gakken (学研) in the late 1970s that used this idea. That toy was a board with dozens of bricks each contains a electronic component (resistor, transistor, capicitor ...) with metal pins on two or more sides of the brick. When you insert the bricks to the board it forms a working circuit. The board contains batteries and an IC amplifier. That toy was fun. -- Toytoy 03:35, Mar 2, 2005 (UTC)

The Gakken toy: http://www.ipv6style.jp/jp/apps/20031029/images/1.jpg . This set has been modified. You can see 7 original dark green bricks on top (jump wires, switch, jump wires and a diode). For more information: http://www.ipv6style.jp/en/apps/20031029/index.shtml . A patent lasts only 17 years then, so we can safely implement it on the Internet. -- Toytoy 03:42, Mar 2, 2005 (UTC)

They are still selling it! http://shop.gakken.co.jp/otonanokagaku/block.html Using bricks to create simple circuit diagrams is really a great idea. I suggest that we imitate the design of Gakken. -- Toytoy 03:47, Mar 2, 2005 (UTC)

This is to make schematic diagrams, not block toys. The blocks already exist; we just have to decide if we want to use them. - Omegatron 04:16, Mar 2, 2005 (UTC)

Hey this is pretty cool. I saw this same concept earlier on Template:Football kit. This would be very useful for making simple circuits that don't warrant the effort of making an actual diagram. —Josh Lee 01:52, Mar 6, 2005 (UTC)

On the other hand, there are currently about 300 images that would need to be uploaded (and renamed consistently).  :-) Not exactly simple. So we should do it only if it will be worth it. - Omegatron 05:44, Mar 6, 2005 (UTC)

I think we need to come up with some solution for schematics. This one is probably easier to implement than a full blown SVG rendering engine. It's also readily extensible. There are too many cases where I've been too lazy to create a schematic. I would definitely use it if it was available and it's not too painful. We can collaborate on naming... Madhu 20:06, 6 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Check out Wikipedia:Modular electronics diagrams for my current naming scheme idea.

If we ported the editor it would not be painful, but typing in tables by hand sort of is. - Omegatron 20:56, Mar 6, 2005 (UTC)

I agree that we need to come up with a way to make editable schematics. On some of my pages I tried to upload the .dia source to the images, but Dia sucks in a lot of ways. Then Wikipedia stopped letting me do these uploads. I was going to object that this Klunky tool would generate really bulky schematics, with little to no ability to name components.... but then I saw your examples. They're pretty good! I'm amazed you can do things like surround portions of the design with colored boxes.

You can't. Everything I've made up until now is screenshots that I manipulated afterwards. Only the three examples above use the new idea. We could probably use table borders to do something similar with the modular ones, though. - Omegatron

I would still prefer something like an SVG renderer in Wikipedia. Many technical things require line drawings that are not circuit diagrams. I wonder how many Wikipedia pages would actually be helped by this tool. Also, this Klunky tool would need some standardized way to add to the tile set. If I don't have the font you used, or if my drawing tool antialiases a different way, how do I make my tiles compatible with yours?

Yes, SVG rendering with electronic component templates would definitely be better.

This method uses whatever font is in your browser. All text is editable by anyone. No antialiasing to worry about. We are just taking pre-made images and putting them in a table. (And making new ones when we need something that doesn't already exist.) - Omegatron

But it looks like SVG image support is in the far-off future, though... - Omegatron 02:31, Mar 11, 2005 (UTC)

But it looks cool. Do you even need Wikipedia to change anything to use it? It would appear you could just take the table Klunky generates and drop it into a wikipedia page. Maybe stick a note on it telling later editors how to stuff it back into Klunky for editing. Iain McClatchie 08:22, 7 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Yes, we would just have to upload the images according to a standardized naming scheme (see above) and start making tables. An intuitive editor would be nicer, but maybe we could make the klunky program into a wikicode outputter, so you could download it only if you want and then copy and paste? This would also fit in well with a separate table namespace. - Omegatron 23:36, Mar 7, 2005 (UTC)

Not bad, but the image components need to be transparent. Dysprosia 04:04, 9 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Yeah. Good point. I've noticed diagrams with transparent backgrounds look bad in frames, though. - Omegatron 04:50, Mar 9, 2005 (UTC)

I have never used Klunky but the diagrams [1] look good, especially the one for the 741 op amp with the colour dotted rectangles. So Klunky would get my vote, just so long as it does not become mandatory on Wiki and other graphics progs can still be used. One fear about Klunky, being block oriented, is lack of flexibilty which can make it difficult to keep schematics in 'data flow'. Some graphics packages like Word Draw, Visio and AutoCad (lite) give more flexibility and resolution which is useful, for example when you need circuit symbols and general drawing on the same image. Also, there are many archive schematics around in Protel and it is good for doing complex circuits. - CPES 21:56, 10 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Well my diagrams so far are 90% klunky and 10% post-processing. The "coloured" dotted rectangles were added in afterwards, for instance. The schematic drawing packages are fine also for making "rasterized" images, but this is about uploading each block individually so we can edit them on the fly from within wikipedia. - Omegatron 02:31, Mar 11, 2005 (UTC)

Informal voting

Just to get an idea of how many like/dislike it. Please include reasons why you voted.

Don't use the modular diagrams - let's wait for SVG rendering support

• I've tried doing some diagrams with this, and, although it works, it's a lot of work and not really worth it for mediocre diagrams. I am going to make my diagrams more modular (see BJT and Transistor#Types for examples of modular diagrams), and maybe I will start uploading source files like GIMP XCF files? But I don't think this complete modularity is worth it. - Omegatron 16:09, Mar 21, 2005 (UTC)

Don't use the modular diagrams we don't need them

• I'm not voting yet... How many electronic diagrams do we have / want in Wikipedia? Are we trying to include basic circuits for physics principles? For electrical / electronic tutorials? For logic diagrams? Would we want to include a pair of cross coupled transistors / nand gates? Without knowing what we want to draw it seems OTT. If we want to draw a lot then it may not be enough, so ... -- SGBailey 15:57, 2005 Mar 21 (UTC)