Howard, unfortunately I can't provide any news on this - I don't have any direct connection to DS or SW VAR's, nor influence upon the package provided in the EAA membership benefit. I can give my humble opinion on why I suspect you won't see the SW Electrical Schematics package included in the benefit any time soon (I sincerely hope I'm wrongOriginally Posted by hplevyak
):
From the point of view of DS, the whole purpose of the student package is to get us used to using SW in our designs so that when the time comes for us to need CAD software professionally, we will choose SW instead of competing products. One of the conditions of the benefit is that the users need to be self-supporting i.e. no effort from SW or the VAR. And when such time comes, the vast majority of commercial licences will not include the costly SW Electrical option. So why give it away for free, when, as a commercial user who needs the functionality, you will buy it anyway?
This is a perfectly legitimate way of doing business and promoting a product, and I certainly don't have any objection to it.
Philosophy aside, I do have a sort of work-around - viz, precisely what you (Howard) have done - use a non-integrated external software package to support the majority of your electrical needs - there is no shortage of such software. A case in point is a cute open source freeware program called TinyCAD (https://sourceforge.net/projects/tinycad/).
The software seems to be quite easy to learn, it's intuitive, it has quite a comprehensive library of symbols, and it can export wire lists, data for PCB layout, and even SPICE electronic simulation. You can add user defined meta-data to each symbol such as your favorite brand of shampoo or even a link to the location of an associated SolidWorks part/assembly file.
I haven't used TinyCAD in any serious way so I can't comment on how useful it actually is, but I'm quite confidant it will meet a substantial part of our amateur needs.
Jeffrey
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