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hangover with Visio
Sunday, September 11 2005
I had a mild though uncomfortable hangover today. It wasn't as bad as one I had yesterday but it was hard on my intestines and psychologically unpleasant; I was anxious about what would happen when I would finally be able to communicate with the building inspector on Monday morning.
In preparation for that big day, I thought it important to prepare some documentation for my solar heating system so as to create a firm justification for the rooftop deck.
In an ideal world there would be good freeware allowing one to design plumbing and electrical system schematics, but that doesn't appear to be the case. At one time I remember a very good freeware digital logic designer for Macintosh, and I know about PSPICE, the classic PC circuit designer. But I didn't have time to learn how these things worked; I just wanted results. Happily, Microsoft Visio is an amazingly flexible program even if it is plagued with annoying quirks, some seemingly designed to befuddle people familiar with Adobe software. But I was able to rapidly generate crisp-looking diagrams of both the solar plumbing and electrical circuitry and even succeeded at creating convincing DPDT relay icons which I could then endlessly reproduce wherever needed. (There's a fair amount of decision making encoded in the circuitry, but it's all handled by strictly 19th Century computational technology: four thermostat switches, two four position rotary switches, one SPST switch, and three DPDT relays.)
Have a look at the resulting diagrams here (click to enlarge):
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