Topic: Transitioning to QElectroTech from KiCAD - Newbie Questions
Hello QET Community,
First of all – a massive thank you to everyone involved in developing QET over the years - Bravo et merci à tous! 
I have a little in-depth experience using KiCAD – for creating electronic schematics and PCBs (of course) – and more recently for creating wiring diagrams for light aircraft. After discovering all of KiCAD's shortcomings for wiring diagraming, I went hunting and discovered QET.
After the last four days learning and playing, there's a lot to like about QET that makes me want to persevere, support and promote it within the general aviation wiring and avionics community, yet I can't help feeling a little torn between QET and KiCAD – and not just because 'the latter is what I'm most familiar with'.
I've attached a few files to show the kind of diagramming I want to achieve with QET, along with my first attempt at creating a multi-connector, multi-pin (multi-terminal) QET element. I hope they collectively help better understand the somewhat industry specific requirements – and help explain how best I can use QET's features more efficiently, ultimately to generate BOMs (and netlists). If I need to use python to create elements outside of the built-in element editor, for example to convert CSV to QET .elmt format, I'm happy to give that a try too.
I really appreciate the quality of diagrams QET is able to produce for industrial and domestic diagraming requirements and hope that I might just need to rethink my approach so far, so here's a brief summary of my initial experience with QET vs KiCAD:
The single biggest advantage I saw in using QET over KiCAD was in its ability to add data to wires. To do that in KiCAD requires inserting a pseudo-component; it works, but moving wires around a diagram then becomes hugely time-consuming – and every wire becomes two connections in a netlist.
Having created the attached gtx328_transponder.elmt (a light aircraft transponder) I can't help thinking I'm either missing something about QET terminal interconnect philosophy, or there's a lot of potentially error-prone double data entry required in order to name terminals and then separately describe their function in another, otherwise disassociated text box. The other aspect of creating an element in QET (0.100-dev) that I found time consuming is text alignment: the reference point of each text block (x,y) position doesn't appear to update to reflect a change to the 'Alignment' option; the text box location remains referenced by its upper left corner, irrespective of its assigned Alignment option.
There's plenty more to discuss, but I hope the above is a constructive starting point in beginning to understand and adapt my thinking.
Many thanks in advance for any advice, suggestions or questions,
Hamish
Ledbury, UK
gtx328_transponder.elmt 24.68 kb, 130 downloads since 2023-06-17
Light Aircraft Radio Wiring Diagram - KiCAD Example (mono).pdf 55.21 kb, 191 downloads since 2023-06-17
Light Aircraft Transponder Wiring Diagram - manufacturers example.pdf 271.69 kb, 182 downloads since 2023-06-17
Light Aircraft Wiring Diagram - KiCAD Example (colour).pdf 121.31 kb, 167 downloads since 2023-06-17
