Things to be Considered in Drawing Symbols and Diagrams

Drawing circuit diagrams is not a hard task but it will take some practice to make a neat, clear and quality diagrams. This is a useful skill for a would-be electronic draftsman like you. You will surely need to draw electronic diagrams if you plan to design your own circuits in the future. Below are some things that you should consider when constructing diagrams.

Types of Diagrams

There are several diagrams used in electronics, the most commonly used are the block diagram, schematic diagram and the component layout. Block diagrams are used to give you the overall view of the circuits by breaking them down into smaller sections or blocks. Each block or section performs a particular function and the block diagram shows how they are connected together. As you can see on the illustration below, it does not show the components used within a block, only the inputs and outputs are shown.

Reference ID

Most schematic symbols are accompanied by labels. This “labels” maybe a combination of the following; reference ID, part number and value.

Reference ID is an identifier, such as “R1”, “C4” or “Q4”. The letter represents the type of component. The commonly used letters are R for resistor, C for capacitor, L for inductor, D for diode, Q for transistor and IC for integrated circuit. If there are several components of the same type in a circuit, the numeral suffix (as an example R2) is added to identify the particular component.