Speaker Diagrams with Visio

One of the most difficult parts of describing a speaker that you built is creating diagrams for the things that require one. While there are a number of computer programs that can aid with things like diagramming the crossover design (Speaker Builder magazine uses OrCAD), and occasionally you can find programs to help with the board cutouts, I've only found one that is equally adept at all these things: Shapeware's Visio. For about $100 for the entry level version (there's a more expensive "technical" version that adds more built-in shapes), you get a sophisticated page layout program that is even programmable.

What really separates Visio from the flowchart and diagramming competition (like ABC Flowchart and Corel Flow) is that, with the provided low-level drawing tools, you can create your own shapes to add to the built-in library that are just as powerful as the ones included with the package. If you design them right, shapes you've created can put put into one of their libraries and be indistinguishable from the ones that Shapeware created.

So when I was working on the diagrams for an article to submit to Speaker Builder, I made a number of these custom shapes and grouped them into a library. Based on the Electrical Engineering library that comes with the program, I extended the collection of resistors, capacitors, etc. to include things like a non-polarized capacitor and some speaker drivers. While I'm certainly no artist, I feel these look pretty good, and they mimic most of the things you can do with the built-in shapes.

To keep everyone else from reinventing this wheel, this collection is available freely for you to download. The ZIP file contains the Visio stencil library and a template you can use. These were created with the regular edition of Visio 3.0, and include all the useful items from the standard Electrical Engineering library for speaker design (obviously, those shapes are all copyrighted by Visio, but since they are included with the program and you can't use them without it I don't think my redistribution of them is a problem).

What I do to create diagrams of things like cutting layouts is first go to the Visio page setup to set the scale so that I can work in the real units. So if my speaker is, say, 24" wide, I set a custom scale of 3:1 or 4:1 so that I can fit everything onto the virtual page. Next, I drag the appropriate piece onto the work space (or, in the case of a simple board, just use the rectangle tool to draw one). Instead of laboriously moving everything around to try and get the sizes right, choose the "size and position" menu item. In the dialog box, just directly type the real size of the object, and the program will make sure everything comes out to scale for you. Also very handy to verify the layouts is the dimension line shape; you can resize this to any actual size, and make it into a sort of ruler. Dimension lines can also be attached to any two points, and display the size of the attached object as it is resized.

If you find these helpful, or maybe even create your own extensions to my library, I'd appreciate having getting the extensions back from you or just getting some feedback.