Schematic Symbols are a very subjective…….subject!
What you told us you wanted –
In our early days we did market surveys (circa 2010) and our international responses (around 3000) told us – as many engineers wanted ‘basic boxes’ as they did functional representation symbols. This surprised us.
Our management team are made up of Engineering guys all with long histories in design or positions with companies such as PADS software, mentors graphics etc. So our company has a lot of experience from interacting with thousands of engineers. We expected the response to be “they must show the functional representation of the part, and while you’re at it they better be beautiful”!
We were told that even within one company two engineers sat next to each other disagree on how the pins should be positioned. Yes, we know there are standards out there but that doesn’t change this point, they’re still subjective!
Summary of this is that what ever we choose to do regarding schematic symbols ‘look & feel’ we will not please everyone!
Our current solution –
We make sure the pin number and pin name are accurate and match the physical pin location. Then we provide a basic ‘box symbol’ initially. HOWEVER, stay with me – we also supply an excel plugin that allows each engineer to manipulate the pin locations to suit their design, free download here: https://componentsearchengine.com/ESE.php
Future Solution –
We are soon to release a web based symbol wizard that will include the ability to:
- Assign industry standard symbols
- Draw your own shaped symbols
- Position pins where ever you wish
- Select other people’s symbols
- Basically every engineer can have the exact symbols they want!
Summary –
It’s a tricky thing to please everyone on this topic but if you tell us – WE WILL CREATE THE SYMBOL EXACTLY HOW YOU WANT IT 🙂 just tell us on info@samacsys.com
At worst we give you an accurate starting point where you haven’t had to manually extract pin info from your datasheet and then spend ages checking it!
We are definitely improving further in this area, stay tuned please 🙂
You can check out our Schematic Symbols here: https://componentsearchengine.com