Currently building Electric Druid’s Vintage LM13700 VCA. This is the first schematic I’ve done that uses bypass caps, so I did a little reading up on it.
From what I gather, the 47uf polarized caps go as close to the power connector as possible, while the smaller caps go across ± pins of each IC to ground.
In the VCA schematic, there’s only one set of bypass caps despite the two ICs. It seems like a deliberate design choice, so I’m wondering which of the ICs the caps are supposed to go to. On the schematic itself, the caps are closer to the TL072 (TL074 in my case, as I plan to make a dual VCA), but I don’t want to jump to conclusions. Couldn’t find anything about it on the page itself.
The proximity of components to one another in a schematic is of no significance unless explicitely noted! A schematic mainly shows which components are connected to one another, their values and types. There are some customary ways of drawing up a schematic, like most times signal flow is from left to right and positive power supply lines are drawn above negative power supply lines, but basically there are no strict rules. That being said, the customs are very usefull because they make it easier to read a schematic.
The Ciat Lombarde schematics are often very difficult to interpret because they do not follow these customs.
As someone who couldn’t even read a schematic 6 months ago, I recently looked into those design conventions, and I found the opinions in this accepted answer a good starting point to develop good habits:
The general idea is that schematics are much like code—meant to be read by humans first, machines only second.
He recommends placing the decoupling caps close to the corresponding IC, but in the schematic I’m currently drawing, the same op-amp chip is used on multiple pages, so I found it more self-explanatory to put it on the power rail, with a text comment they’re for decoupling.
