Frequently Asked Questions

Although you can if you wish create your board directly as a PCB design without a schematic, there are benefits to starting with a schematic.

    The schematic design is used to capture the design logic before creation of the physical PCB design. It is generally accepted that the logical circuit of the Schematic is easier to draw out. However, your intended use for the schematic drawing will affect how ‘pretty’ you want it to look.
    If the schematic is for a book, engineer or other formal process, it should be created to a standard or kept logical and structured.
    If the schematic is purely as a concept capture tool as the front-end to the PCB, you can make it look as rough as you like, provided you can still understand it. All the shortcuts and time-saving features available to you in Easy-PC can be utilised, such as fully implied connections etc.
    The schematic can be used as a check at the end of the PCB design stage, to ensure that you haven't accidentally altered the 'netlist' by connecting or disconnecting pins while routing the board.
   If the design is complex, using a project with multiple schematics allows for the compartmentalisation of functional blocks, which can help both with design and troubleshooting.

If you still decide to go ahead with just the PCB design, but later decide you should have used a schematic, you can still uuse Reverse Engineer from the Tools menu.  The resulting schematic will be truly 'rough and ready' but all the interconnections will be accurate.  There are a few points to note.  PCB only components clearly won't appear in the schematic, though the report will advise of any of these.  There are two generai types of net class, 'Signal' and 'Power'.  Any nets using a signal net class will appear in the schematic.  Any using a power net class will only appear as a net name next to the appropriate pin to minimise clutter caused by lots of power connections.