- May 16, 2019
- 2,040
- 1,703
- 2,688
- 38
- If you're a qualified, trainee, or retired electrician - Which country is it that your work will be / is / was aimed at?
- United Kingdom
- What type of forum member are you?
- Trainee Electrician
- Business Name
- PNX ELECTRICAL
A little protip for my fellow students/trainees; When you get your design project and the absolutely gorgeous (no really) A3 drawings for the project(s) - DO NOT DRAW ON THE A3 ORIGINAL.
Think about it, you have anywhere from 5-10+ circuits to draw in, each with its own path, possibly sharing containment and routes for part, some or all of its run.
Remember back to school when you were mixing paints and almost always ended up with Mud? Sure you mixed orange, green and purple in seperate parts of the paint tray, but Dave* the clumsy clown didn't rinse his brush before dabbing another colour and the end result is Mud - Try fitting all your circuits onto 1 piece of A3 and you will almost always end up with some part of your drawing covered in MUD.
To get around this woefully horrific problem; look back to your school days and the precursor to 'Death by PowerPoint' - Death by OHP (Overhead Projector for all the young 'uns that won't have a clue what I'm on about.
An OHP sheet is effectively just a piece of clear plastic/acetate that light would shine through and the areas where it couldn't were the various words/pictures etc that you were meant to see.
A benefit to this was of course that you could overlay several sheets and do some funky stuff with them, and this is where they come into thier own.
If you're familiar with Photoshop or GIMP (the program, not the mask, but if you Photoshop or GIMP in a Gimp mask, I pass no judgement), you'll be familiar with layers
Can you see where this is going?
1 circuit per sheet, layered nicely over one another and with crystal clear clarity as if was the only thing on the drawing.
Without employing such a technique then you'll end up with eraser marks,? smudges, scribbles and enough screwed up paper for an office snowball fight.
They say the proof is in the pudding (I'm no Picasso by the way) but a picture speaks a thousand words....even if those thousand words consist of profanities.
Think about it, you have anywhere from 5-10+ circuits to draw in, each with its own path, possibly sharing containment and routes for part, some or all of its run.
Remember back to school when you were mixing paints and almost always ended up with Mud? Sure you mixed orange, green and purple in seperate parts of the paint tray, but Dave* the clumsy clown didn't rinse his brush before dabbing another colour and the end result is Mud - Try fitting all your circuits onto 1 piece of A3 and you will almost always end up with some part of your drawing covered in MUD.
To get around this woefully horrific problem; look back to your school days and the precursor to 'Death by PowerPoint' - Death by OHP (Overhead Projector for all the young 'uns that won't have a clue what I'm on about.
An OHP sheet is effectively just a piece of clear plastic/acetate that light would shine through and the areas where it couldn't were the various words/pictures etc that you were meant to see.
A benefit to this was of course that you could overlay several sheets and do some funky stuff with them, and this is where they come into thier own.
If you're familiar with Photoshop or GIMP (the program, not the mask, but if you Photoshop or GIMP in a Gimp mask, I pass no judgement), you'll be familiar with layers
Can you see where this is going?
1 circuit per sheet, layered nicely over one another and with crystal clear clarity as if was the only thing on the drawing.
Without employing such a technique then you'll end up with eraser marks,? smudges, scribbles and enough screwed up paper for an office snowball fight.
They say the proof is in the pudding (I'm no Picasso by the way) but a picture speaks a thousand words....even if those thousand words consist of profanities.
- TL;DR
- OHP sheets for layering circuits on your design project
