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I am writing a question regarding a specific electrical circuit, and which would be significantly clearer if I can include a diagram of the circuit.

  • What software tools can I use to quickly, simply and efficiently create and add a circuit diagram?

Ideally, such tools should (i) be completely free, (ii) not require registration or other major barriers to entry, (iii) generate their output as images, ideally in a way that's simple to load onto the SE imgur service, but nevertheless (iv) remain easy to edit after the fact.

The Electrical Engineering Stack Exchange site has a good built-in plugin for this, but insofar as it's not (yet?) enabled here, similar equivalent solutions are desirable.

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    $\begingroup$ yeah this is a great question. $\endgroup$
    – SuperCiocia Mod
    Oct 14, 2021 at 17:15
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    $\begingroup$ I hoped it would be clear from the phrasing, but it seems I missed the mark. I would strongly encourage answers to take the form of readable tutorials that can be used by newcomers with little experience and low technical background. Simple pointers to potential resources are useful, but it's only by writing out a full tutorial that one finds out if all of the desired functionality is available. $\endgroup$
    – Emilio Pisanty
    Oct 14, 2021 at 23:22

3 Answers 3

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A simple and easy to use schematic editor is FidoCadJ. It easily exports in various graphic formats, and it's used embedded in an Italian forum (I've used it extensively there). It's not a simulator.

A great advantage of this editor is that a schematic can also be shared in a compact text format, e.g. in a code block, so that others can easily modify it.

Here's an example circuit

An example circuit

with the code generating it, which can be directly copied and pasted into FidoCadJ:

[FIDOCAD]
MC 50 55 0 0 480
MC 50 75 0 0 045
LI 50 55 75 55 0
LI 75 35 75 75 0
SA 75 55 0
MC 80 35 0 0 170
MC 95 60 1 0 170
MC 95 40 1 0 080
MC 80 75 0 0 080
LI 75 35 80 35 0
LI 90 35 110 35 0
LI 75 75 80 75 0
LI 90 75 110 75 0
LI 95 50 95 60 0
LI 95 40 95 35 0
LI 95 70 95 75 0
SA 95 55 0
SA 95 35 0
SA 95 75 0
MC 110 55 0 0 045
LI 95 55 110 55 0
TY 110 35 4 3 0 1 0 * V1
TY 110 75 4 3 0 1 0 * V2
TY 40 50 4 3 0 1 0 * Vi
TY 85 25 4 3 0 1 0 * C1
TY 100 45 4 3 0 1 0 * R1
TY 85 80 4 3 0 1 0 * C2
TY 100 65 4 3 0 1 0 * R2
TY 45 55 4 3 0 1 0 * +

Disclaimer: I know the author.

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I'm partial to CircuiTikZ. It's a LaTeX package so there's a bit of a learning curve, but it works well to quickly make circuit diagrams once you get used to it.

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  • $\begingroup$ Please see my comment under the question. $\endgroup$
    – Emilio Pisanty
    Oct 14, 2021 at 23:22
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An obvious answer would be to go to EE.SE and use their plug-in to generate the circuit, and then copy the Imgur URL here.

I checked their site and I found people were also using https://www.circuitlab.com/, which seems a reasonable tool too.

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  • $\begingroup$ I believe that EE is using circuitlab as their tool, just making it easy to use on EE. $\endgroup$
    – Jon Custer
    Oct 14, 2021 at 21:18
  • $\begingroup$ Please see my comment under the question. $\endgroup$
    – Emilio Pisanty
    Oct 14, 2021 at 23:22

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