About QElectroTech

What it is

QElectroTech, or QET in short, is a libre and open source desktop application to create diagrams and schematics.
The software is primarily intended to create electrical documentation but it can also be used to draw any kinds of diagrams, such as those made in pneumatics, hydraulics, process industries, electronics...
Generally speaking, QET is a CAD/CAE editor focusing on schematics drawing features.

This means that there are no embedded simulating or calculating functionalities and it is not planned to implement them.

The main goal of the developers is to provide a libre, easy to use and effective software for schematics drawing purposes.

Version

The current stable version is 0.61 and was released on 23.08.2018.
Once it has been officialy released, the stable version is always frozen and is no longer developed.

New functionalities, bug and issue fixings are further made in the development version (currently 0.7), which can also be downloaded.

Users who want to test and take benefits from the last software implementations should use the development version. But... use it at your own risk, since things are sometimes broken or only partialy implemented until they are done!

License

The software is licensed under GNU/GPL.
You are free to use, copy, modify and redistribute it under the terms of the license.

Due to this freedom, we encourage you to download QET only from this website.

Like many other open source softwares, QElectroTech is provided as it is, without any warranty.

Development / technical choices

The development follows the classical way of free and open source software: the source code, written by a community of users, is freely accessible.

Here are the technical choices made for the software development:

• Integrated development environment: Qt Framework
• Libraries: Qt 5.x
• Coding language: C++
• GUI translations: Qt Linguist
• Version control: Subversion
• File format for projects, elements and titleblocks: XML
• Main development platform: GNU/Linux
• Targeted platforms: Windows, GNU/Linux, Mac OS X, BSDs

If you wish to be informed of the latest developments, browse the archive of the project mailing list where all commits (changes) are registered. This archive is publicly available, you don't need any account to access it.

Story

The QElectroTech project was founded in 2007 by two french students, Xavier and Benoit.
Xavier developed the base application itself and made all technical choices about the development.
The first version of QET (0.1) was released on 09.03.2008.
However, both Xavier and Benoit do not participate anymore in the project since 2013.

Following this period, new developers and contributors took over the project and kept it alive.
The development and the many translations are actively maintained.
New functionalities and evolutions are planned to make QET ever better.

Nowadays, QET is not only used by many individuals, teachers and students but also by professional electricians and companies all over the world.