Archive of the former Yahoo!Groups mailing list: Homebrew PCBs

I'm not very familiar with ladder diagrams, but my impression is that they are used to draw circuits made up mainly of switches, relays and loads, and the coil and contacts of a given relay are spread out on the diagram, rather than being kept together. I think there are several PCB design packages that would work. Eagle provides both the schematic drawing and PCB layout tools. The trick to being able to place the contacts and coil in separate locations on your schematic is to define your own library devices, made up of several symbols (the coil and the contacts), similar to the way you would define an IC device containing several independent gates. As someone else mentioned, just manually draw the wires that connect things together.

Cheers,
- Jan



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