Pneumatics Schematics

[Jetro]

Over the years I have seen many people post schematics for some of their Pneumatics creations. I'm looking into doing something like this myself, but I am looking for a way that is both 'easy' (not too time consuming - some people draw the whole thing by hand) and easily understandable. SO basically I am looking for suggestions on how to do this.

I'm not an engineer and although the drawings don't need to be professional I would also like to make them at least reasonably 'up to standard'.

Additionally, I have seen that some people make schematics that reflect the different steps of a pneumatic loop with an image for each step. Do you think this is necessary/recommendable?

[allanp]

MS paint is quite often overlooked I think when it comes to these things. Its very easy to use. I would start by drawing a complete set of parts (real of schematic) and then saving it. you then have a template with which you can copy and paste your saved parts and then use the line draw or paint brush tool to draw the hoses. It won't look professional but they will be easy to understand. I hope this helps.

[Brickthus]

Over the years I have seen many people post schematics for some of their Pneumatics creations. I'm looking into doing something like this myself, but I am looking for a way that is both 'easy' (not too time consuming - some people draw the whole thing by hand) and easily understandable. SO basically I am looking for suggestions on how to do this.

I'm not an engineer and although the drawings don't need to be professional I would also like to make them at least reasonably 'up to standard'.

Additionally, I have seen that some people make schematics that reflect the different steps of a pneumatic loop with an image for each step. Do you think this is necessary/recommendable?

I did mine in Visio.

I made a template of parts. 90-degree curvy lines for rubbery hoses, thinner straight lines for flex tubing (following the principle of minimising the balloon effect by keeping rubbery hoses just for the corners).

Components have attachment points that sit on grid intersections. It makes drawing a diagram pretty quick.

I have a lot more template parts, such as offset valves.

The important thing is clarity.

In Paint you could make a bitmap of some of these jpegs, make sure the colours are solid for each piece (as jpegs blur the edges) and use those pieces as a parts template, saved as a bitmap file. Then just save as jpegs when you've finished a diagram.

Sketch by hand first to get a good layout.

Mark

[Jetro]

Hadn't thought of using MSPaint, but I see how it might actually be quite easy to use. I'm thinking maybe I can get the parts by making renders of each part individually in LDView and creating a library with those.

@Mark Bellis Didn't even know what Visio was until I looked it up. and it reminded me I was looking for a flowchart app - may have to look for something a bit cheaper though :) I like your drawings and I see you haven't bothered with valve or piston positions. Maybe keeping things really simple is the best way to go.

[allanp]

One thing that might help to explain more complicated circuits could be to have a diagram of each phace of a cycle showing the positions of each switch and pneumatic in each phase. Another thing that might help would be to show which hoses are pressurised in each phase by having them a different colour (red for pressurised, black/grey for non-pressurised). Again I think this is something that would be quite easy to achive in MS paint. This may be time consuming tho so I would probably only do that for very complicated circuits.