Electrical Cad Software Open Source Or Free

If you are making PCBs then kicad or eagle. Otherwise autocad is standard for industrial drafting of electrical systems. As recommended draftsight is a free package that will support the industry as it can use the standard accepted *.dwg extension.
 
I just used gEDA in Linux, pretty nice. Very intuitive and easy saving of drawings to JPEG. Not all schematic editors will do this, or it's a PITA. Also easy to add text to your schematic (absolute PITA with GIMP 2.8, but it's not really a schematic editor) Versions for Linux and Mac OSX , I think Windows too. All basic symbols are there. Then you can use their PCB layout app to design a circuit board.
MS
 
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Maybe this will help? Free DraftSight electrical symbol library:

http://www.solidworks.com/sw/resour...-drawings-form.htm?kui=vm7K06JbuqfGihiFlUlzGw

Ted

Downloaded them. So far they look nice and easy to drop in as blocks in a drawing file. Explode the blocks modify them and save as new blocks as needed.

I had to move them over to my "Blocks" directory for easy retrieval. Not real sure why they have you to download them to the directory they specify. Not the way I use them. Oh well!

Ken
 
So while it looks like this post has been floating around for a while, I thought I would chime in...

I've used a lot of PCB-design software over the last two years, I've largely settled on KICAD, it has a reasonable work-flow, and kinda the big advantage to it is that the symbols are not connected to the actual part. This is a good thing as it allows you to choose a diode in the schematic, but then it can be any of the dozen or more actual physical packages that need a board footprint. There's also a lot of how-to videos on youtube that help you get your feet wet. "Getting to blinky" is kinda the essential set of videos that helped me greatly.
 
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