Wikipedia:WikiProject Electronics

The aim of this project is to better organise information in articles related to electronics. This page contains only suggestions, with the hope to help other Wikipedians writing high-quality articles with the minimum effort.

This WikiProject aims to provide a standard style for writing articles about electronics. The field of electronics is the study and use of electronic devices that operate by controlling the flow of electrons or other electrically charged particles in devices such as thermionic valves and semiconductors. Many subjects are closely related to electronics: telecommunications, biomedical, design and construction of electric and electronic circuits, hardware design, etc.

All these subjects are considered to be related to this project. In the future we may restrict the scope if the project grows too large, and sister projects about these other subjects may be split off.

• Assessment — Information on assessing the quality of articles within the project.
• Categories — List of project categories.
• Members — The list of project participants.
• Programs — Information on programs used to draw electronics-related figures.
• Standard symbols — Symbols that should be used in project figures.
• Task list of all the tasks the members are currently working on. Here is the place to suggest the modification/creation of a new article, to propose merging two articles, etc.

When writing about electronic devices and related topics, some questions to consider are the usual

• Who?
• What?
• When?
• Where?
• Why?
• How?

questions (not necessarily in that order). For example,

• Who made the first one/invented it?
• Who were the rivals in the development phase?
• Who wants/uses it?

• What is it?
• What did we use before it was invented?
• What is/was the social effect of it?
• What seems likely to succeed it?

• When was it developed/thought of?
• When was the first one made?

• Where did it come from?
• Where was the work done?

• Why was it necessary?
• Why did it take so long?
• Why was it not discovered/made/invented earlier?

• How does it work?
• How was it developed?
• How big/small/powerful/costly is it?
• How does/did it affect the environment?

Once these questions are answered, you will find that you have a baby article!

One of the main parts when writing an article about electronics might be drawing of a circuit. At the moment, there are several pictures showing electronic components around wikipedia, most of them from Commons. Anyway, paying attention to them, it will be clear that anybody used a different programme to draw them, getting different quality. Moreover, a lot of them did not use a specialised programme, so they had to draw all the components from scratch, starting from simple lines and circles. Normally in these cases the output quality is very high, but the time to make them must have been very long.

Because of these reasons, this project has to propose a standard to be used to draw circuits, suggesting tips or whatever, in order to get the best possible quality with the minimum effort. First of all, let us start from a sort of "wish list", with the list of all the feature this programme should have:

1. It must be free and open source: this is the way wikipedia is, and so must be any programme wikipedia suggests.
2. It must be multi-platform: in order to be proposed as a standard, anybody must be able to use it. The programme has to run on Windows, Linux and Mac OS.
3. It has to be able to export in SVG: the SVG is the format that was proposed by wikipedia for diagrams. It provides the best quality at the minimum space.
4. It has to have a big standard collection of electric/electronic components, with optionally an extensible library: this way it will not be necessary to draw components from scratch, and, just in case, it will be necessary to do it just once.
5. It has to help the schematic drawing by a grid or something like this: if it does not give the possibility to "hang" the components to a grid, it will be hard to make a precise drawing
6. Connections should be better than just lines. They should attach to components, default to right angles, move when the components are moved, autoroute around objects, and so on.
7. It should be part of a complete, easy to use, drawing package, not just for circuit diagrams (though a 'circuit mode' might be good). Vector drawing has long been a weak area on PC's (British Acorn computers had 'Draw' in ROM which was excellent, leading Acorn users to draw a lot more because it so was easy and they didn't have to decide which program would be best to use).
8. It should have Bezier curves to allow the creation of good audio curves, since most weighting curves are specified by points, not by an equation or circuit model.

At the moment, as far as we know, there is no programme satisfying all these points. Anyway the members of the project made a list with several programs that have been used for drawing circuits on Wikipedia. Any program has a short comment and an example of its output; this list is in its on page: programs for drawing circuits. The only way to get a circuit in SVG format without drawing everything from scratch is using Xcircuit; for more info see How to draw SVG circuits using Xcircuit.

[edit] Using vector editor and prepared components

electrical_symbols_library.svg

An example of a schematic drawn using this library

There is an image on commons specially intended to help drawing SVG circuits simple, fast and flexible. Just open this image in any common vector editor (e.g. Inkscape), copy, place and join the components as you wish. This technique produces nice and small SVG images. Except for 6th it achieves all the wishes mentioned above.

When drawing, it is recommended to

• use grid snapping (the components are designed to be snapped to a 1 mm grid or 2 mm grid)
• make all connection lines 1,0 mm thick
• properly mark the joints with the dot (to distinguish them from cross-overs)
• to be unambiguous join only 3 wires together at any point, as a 4-way can look like an accidentally dotted cross-over
• use the font "12 pt sans-serif" (or similar). An alternative is to use "24pt Times New Roman Italic" for big letters, "18pt Times New Roman Normal" for sub letters, as done in this image.

Feel free to extend the component list and to upload a new version.

In order to keep a consistent layout layout between different articles related to this project, we created some tables with a list of standard symbols. Here is the first (and most important) of those tables. You can find the others on their own page. Please use them.

Symbol	Meaning	SI Units of Measure
	frequency	hertz (cycles/second)
	angular frequency	radians per second
	wave number	radians per meter
	wavelength	meters per cycle
	period	seconds per cycle
	refractive index	dimensionless
	speed of light in vacuum	meters per second
	speed of propagation	meters per second

More...