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ELEKTOR - Schematics and PCB layouts

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Does anybody know what CAD program is used to generate the schematics (and possibly the PCB layouts) for the circuits published by Elektor magazine?

One of the members here (Veteran) has schematics on his website that closely resemble the Elektor ones, but I was never able to get from him any answers on the subject.

I thank you in advance for any clues. :D
 
Upon analysis of some of the newer (2007 onwards) PDF issues of their magazine, and based on an article they wrote in a 2009 issue, here are the facts:

1. PCB layouts used to be done in some other CAD package, they never used Tango AFAIK

2. These days they use Altium Designer. They said so. The schematic produced in Altium is however post-processed by an artist, I forget his name but it is mentioned in the magazine in one of the 2009 issues. They said so themselves, and they said the library is not for sale.

3. By ripping the PDF, I have found that the symbols are nothing more than PostScript drawing objects. Many of my tools (Adobe Illustrator, Corel Draw) recognize them as symbols and by this means it becomes trivial to snarf a copy of all the symbols in a schematic. With some effort it is not difficult to build your own drawing library and then use that in Corel Draw. Indeed I have found that the symbols indeed have pin entities i.e. short lines. Any good drawing software allows you to "snap" to those pins and draw lines.

I also determined that in most cases, the natural scale of the items are usually 1:1 on very small schematics, but its compressed down on larger schematics, obviously to fit the page.

4. Most, if not all CAD packages support the US style symbols, for some obscure reason.

5. The Elektor symbols are based on IEC617. If you Google images for IEC617 you will see Rotring and others produced stencils for this, and the symbols there are REMARKABLY Elektor-like. Obviously, for a Dutch magazine, produced in the heart of Europe, this is most likely why. Most other magazines hail from the UK or the US where the Imperial system and standards still exist.

6. In South Africa we briefly had a magazine in 1987-1988. I managed to find old copies of it at book dealers recently, and there again, it has a striking resemblence to Elektor, by virtue of IEC617
 
At any rate, with a bit of patience you can do it.
Using Corel Draw X5, I am able to make a library, and place the parts, just as they "claim" to do it internally at Elektor HQ. Again, I would not be surprised if they recently moved the whole lot from Quark/whatever-was-used-in-the-80's to Adobe Illustrator.

As I have mentioned these are IEC symbols, so I feel I can use them:

symbols_1_zps0pjtirfm.jpg


And here is me, placing them, in a blank sheet in Corel Draw:

symbols_2_zpsbo7fkj3p.jpg
 
Elektor diagrams and board patterns

Last year I inherited a complete set of elektor magazines from the start
(about 1970, german edition) and after looking through one can say that
diagram style and board patterns changed from time to time.

In the beginning they had the "minimum etching" style of circuit boards
with plenty of copper, nicely curved, without separate solder "eyes" for
components and no solder mask, later the "cut and paste" style with
individual component patterns and straight hand routed connections.
These have been done by hand for decades in 5:1 scale or even larger
by a true artist on a light layout table as far as I can see.

They stayed away from double sided boards for a long time, self-etching
was encouraged. Do not know when they switched to CAD, but not early,
because this man was very experienced and simply better and quicker
than early programmes.

The style of circuit drawing also changed, always having some "corporate
look", not always good in terms of readability.

The old issues are educational and interesting reading and I may want to
give these away except the "Halbleiterhefte", a double issue of every year
with 100 mixed circuits.
 
I have remembered who did these, its Mart Schroijden, works for them at their HQ.

My current Altium Designer library has similar (but not quite) symbols like these because in '08 I put the effort in to creating some like these for my Protel 99SE libraries.

As to why I created this library in Corel Draw (which by the way can be installed and is then omnipresent and available when we create new documents) its because I am now going to draw some schematics for print/e-book applications.

If you are interested in this, and can work with Corel Draw X5 and newer, I suppose I can place a copy of this library into my GitHub and it can be checked out from there at your leisure. Note that when you do that, it becomes read-only to you, but I can push updates from Corel by creating replacement files. This is a limitation of Corel Draw, not the actual file.

I also don't care much for Elektor these days, the reason being that they have become like a fraternal society, the magazine is not for sale in print anymore, and they expect me to fork out a considerable amount of wages for "membership" to get access to the magazine. I actually wrote to their current editor, Jan Buiting about this, his response was "Try it" Well sir, I live in a 3rd rate country where its 16 bucks to 1 USD.. you do the math.. a membership to your site costs more than my rent...
 
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Elektor magazine

In Europe it is still in print, about 125 Euro in Germany, 10 issues a year, pdf only is about
90 E. per year (called "green", regular is called "gold"). It is membership and subscription
at the same time.

In my Linux system there is a "Libre Office Corel Draw" installed, but no experience with
this. Perhaps you want to show us some of the symbols. Drawing good diagrams can be
seen as an art form and is somehow neglected even in books and other publications.
 
AX tech editor
Joined 2002
Paid Member
I think the Elektor schematics symbols are easily to create for whatever schematic drawing suite you use. Most designers do it all the time -you often need a part for which there is not yet a symbol in your package, especially for newer parts. So that's a nobrainer, you just have to invest some time, start with R and C and go as you need them.

That is by far the best way because it automatically takes care of the requirements of your package for part interconnections and pin numbers etc. And if you use the schematic to generate a netlist for the PCB layout there's no other way really.

Jan
 
For the most part, my current Altium library has Elektor-style parts in it. I say "for the most part" because the library comes from a previous edition of the software, called Protel 99 SE, which made it incredibly difficult to implement a lot of the graphical attributes of Elektor's symbol style. To be honest I haven't really bothered further, because when I publish schematics, I redraw them using Corel Draw. I don't usually print out or publish raw Altium schematics, for reasons of protecting my IP, and for other reasons.

Getting back to what I was doing...
I have fixed up some issues, and this is about as close as it will get to Elektor's schematics. The snapping works properly in Corel X5, and the line widths, as well as some important details have been determined such as the font size, and the font used.
schema_libs_final_zps0pdivxxa.jpg
 
Disabled Account
Joined 2016
Mystery solved?

I remember asking the same question as the OP did, a couple of years ago. At that time I mailed the Swedish branch of Elector, "Allt om Elektronik", and its editor replied to me that the software used for schematics was sPlan from Abacom. I looked at sPlan briefly, but continued using Eagle at that time.

Now I have a different need, where clarity and readability has top priority. So this time I bought sPlan, and maybe it isn't as automated as modern EDA software, but it produces beautiful schematics. Mind though that the default symbol set needs a bit of tweaking before it mimics the Elektor set.

If anyone is interested, maybe we could collaborate on a "Elector symbol set for sPlan"? (sPlan of course supports custom symbol sets.)
 

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At that time I mailed the Swedish branch of Elector, "Allt om Elektronik", and its editor replied to me that the software used for schematics was sPlan from Abacom.
...

I purchased this software way back then since the schematics were very close to the ones produced by Elektor.
I did not use it much since the version I have does not allow me to export to Eagle or any other software.

Thanks for sharing your findings!

:hohoho:
 
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