I am working on a bipolar power supply for hobby and educational purposes.
Concerning the schematic, is it possible/good practice to place devices that don't go on the PCB in the schematic?
Specifically, I have chassis mounted connectors, TRS and XLR, along with a chassis mounted transformer. Should/Can these be shown on the schematic without generating nets for their connections? The transformer primary, power inlet connector, and fuse are all point-to-point wired, with only the transformer secondary entering the PCB. Should these point to point connections be shown?
If its of any importance, I'm using Proteus 8.
Best Answer
I am not a professional PCB designer.
My rule is: put all the connected electronics on the schematic.
The chassis-mounted parts need nets for their connections, otherwise what will they connect to? The simplest way to achieve this is put the chassis-mounted parts on the schematic.
The chassis-mount parts will need a PCB footprint for the connecting wires. So I design that footprint (set of holes) for the PCB, and it is self-consistent; the PCB is constrained to support the schematic.
Further, the PCB footprint can have a silkscreen label, showing how to wire it to the chassis-mount parts.
Also, I can generate an assembly guide from similar information.
I can derive the Bill-of-Material from the schematic, and I have less chance of forgetting something. I don't need to look in two places to know what the circuit will be.