Wikipedia:WikiProject Electronics

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Welcome

Shortcut: WP:ELEC

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.

Electronics portal

1 Scope
2 Subpages
- 2.1 Complete list of WikiProject Electronics Subpages
3 Guidelines for articles in Project Electronics
4 Drawing circuits
- 4.1 Using vector editor and prepared components
5 Tables of standard symbols
6 Featured article nominations
7 Joining
8 Templates
9 Sister Projects
10 Pages needing attention
11 Engineering

Scope

Project Scope
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.

Subpages

Project Subpages
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.

Complete list of WikiProject Electronics Subpages

WikiProject Electronics	WikiProject Electronics/Articles	WikiProject Electronics/Assessment
WikiProject Electronics/Categories	WikiProject Electronics/Collaboration	WikiProject Electronics/How to draw SVG circuits using Xcircuit
WikiProject Electronics/Members	WikiProject Electronics/Programs	WikiProject Electronics/Ps2svg.sh
WikiProject Electronics/Standard symbols	WikiProject Electronics/Task list	WikiProject Electronics:Circuits Design

Guidelines for articles in Project Electronics

Project Guidelines
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!

Drawing circuits

Drawing circuits
Main article: /Programs#Programs_for_drawing_circuits 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: It must be free and open source: this is the way wikipedia is, and so must be any programme wikipedia suggests. 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. 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. 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. 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 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. 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). 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. 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-sections) 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.

Tables of standard symbols

Standard symbols

Main article: /Standard symbols

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
$\ f \$	frequency	hertz (cycles/second)
$\ \omega \$	angular frequency	radians per second
$\ k \$	wave number	radians per meter
$\ \lambda \$	wavelength	meters per cycle
$\ T \$	period	seconds per cycle
$\ n \$	refractive index	dimensionless
$\ c_0 \$	speed of light in vacuum	meters per second
$\ c \$	speed of propagation	meters per second

More...

Joining

In order to join us, just add your signature to the bottom of the Members subpage. Joining will not affect your status on Wikipedia. It's just a way for us to know each other, to know other people that are interested and are working in the same topics as you. If you have questions to ask, guidelines to propose, or whatever else that might be related to the topic of this project you are welcome to discuss it on the project page; if you join us we will know you are concerned about it.

After you have joined the project, if you edit any article please follow the guidelines we have already chosen and add the right template on the talk page. You don't have to: nobody will ever check whether you are actually doing it, but, since we have been working on it, it makes sense to use it now!

Please don't forget to make new members welcome by leaving a message on their talk page.

Templates

What to type What it makes What it's for

{{Electron-stub}}
Talk

This electronics-related article is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it.

The official electronics stub for circuit-related articles.

{{Electron}}
Talk

The WikiProject banner below should be moved to this page's talk page.
If this is a demonstration of the template, please set the parameter |category=no to prevent this page being miscategorised.

WikiProject Electronics

	This article is part of WikiProject Electronics, an attempt to provide a standard approach to writing articles about electronics on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, you can choose to edit the article attached to this page, or visit the project page, where you can join the project and see a list of open tasks.
???	This article has not yet received a rating on the quality scale.
???	This article has not yet received a rating on the importance scale.

The project notice, designed to be placed in the talk page of any article that has been edited as part of this WikiProject. Useage:

{{Electron
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|attention=
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{{Electron-project-member}}
Talk

This user is a member of WikiProject Electronics, an attempt to provide a standard approach to writing articles about electronics on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, visit the project page, where you can join the project and see a list of open tasks.

To be used in your user page, to show you joined the project.

{{User WikiProject Electronics}}
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