Writing Service Manuals!

[Chris55000]

Hi!

Has anyone on this forum reverse-engineered their own Service Manual for a complete piece of equipment?

If so, I'd like to know what are the most useful line-drawing and circuit-diagram software packages for this!

Can anyone point me in the direction of a good downloadable Service Manual containing:-

1) Operating Instructions,
2) Colour pictures/drawings,
3) Assembly drawings,
4) Adjustment info,
5) Circuit and PCB diagrams, and;
6) Parts lists

that I can use as a layout idea? - it doesn't matter what it's for!

Chris Williams

[KeithsTV]

You could look at the Sussex valve tester manual I did last year. Although that was really pulling together all the previously published information.

Most of it was done in Word including several of the drawings. Other drawings including circuits were just taken from the information posted by others who had built the tester and drawn up their own circuits.

Parts lists can be done in Excel, sorted into an appropriate order, then imported into the final Word document.

You have to be very careful with operating and adjustment instructions as it's very easy to miss out a simple step especially if you are familiar with the equipment. Ideally you need to get someone who is not familiar with it to follow any instructions to the letter, follow what they do to see if any steps are missing. One of my school physics teachers used to say when writing up experiments "Assume the person reading or marking it is an idiot who knows nothing about it" and explain every thing in detail.

Keith

[julie_m]

Originally Posted by KeithsTV

You have to be very careful with operating and adjustment instructions as it's very easy to miss out a simple step especially if you are familiar with the equipment. Ideally you need to get someone who is not familiar with it to follow any instructions to the letter, follow what they do to see if any steps are missing.

Seconded.

Whenever I have had to write up a set of instructions, this is exactly what I have done: got a volunteer, completely innocent of the ways of the equipment in question, to attempt to work through them. (The extra pair of eyes also help with any spelling or grammatical errors.)

[Wendymott]

Hi Chris. I used to write "User Manuals" for my previous employer. These were mainly for TV Import products.
However the inscrutable Chinese were not so inscrutable, thus all our manuals were totally "uK fied".

I used Paintshop pro to generate schematics, control layouts, input/output panels.
I used Powerpoint to do all text and picture inserts. Make a PDF and sent to China for printing. This may not be what you want but it's how I got around our problem.

The guy who took over from me uses another desktop publisher but I cannot remember the software version.

In my case I was fortunate that all the products were virtually identical thus templates were made and Copy / Paste was used.
For schematics I use Express Schematic... it's free

[Ed_Dinning]

Hi Chris, using the draw function in Word is pretty powerful once you have got the hang of the many commands, as is the picture insert command.
It is worth learning though.

Ed

[Mike. Watterson]

Inkscape, Gimp, Eagle, Libre Office.
All free.
All Windows or Linux.