Stuart Brorson wrote: >>> Disclaimer: I am also a gEDA developer too. >>> >> Cool - we got you to de-lurk.... > > *chuckle* > > I've been lurking here for two or three years. Someday, when I have > scads of time, I want to get a mill and fiddle around with EMC. Right > now, however, I have too many other demands on my time.
I know how that goes. It took me about 4 years to get my CNC conversion done, and somehow in that time I became an EMC developer. >> I've looked at gEDA, not so much for board layout (haven't done any >> machining of PCBs yet), but as a tool for doing graphical HAL >> configuration. HAL configs are basically netlists, with some additional >> info. Others, especially tomp, have taken it farther, and actually have >> something working. Knowing that a gEDA developer lurks here might be handy. > > One of gEDA's big strengths is that the netlister, gnetlist, > was architected so that users may write their own back-ends which > translate their designs (expressed graphically) into netlists of their > own choice. Right now, gnetlist supports about 20 different formats, > including gEDA/PCB, SPICE, Pads, Tango, etc. Therefore, writing a > back-end netlister takes a block-diagran (drawn using gschem) into a > textual HAL description is -- in principle -- easy. One just needs to > write some Scheme code. This is a lot easier than it sounds -- just > use one of the existing netlisters as a template. > That's exactly what I had in mind. The real work is as much the HAL library as the netlister itself. Each HAL component needs a shape with the appropriate pins, etc. And then you get to things like HAL parameters - each component would probably want attributes in the schematic that could generate 'setp' commands in the output, etc. Like you I have too many irons in the fire, and that particular one never got very far. I think I've installed gEDA at least twice at various times, but never followed up. My initial impression of the schematic editor kinda turned me off of it, but I can't recall why, nor would it be fair for me to complain about it now since the last time I tried it was at least a year ago, maybe two. Schematic editors are worse than text editors anyway - once you are used to something its hard to change. Over the years I have used Orcad, Tango, PCad, PADs, and soon Mentor Expedition at work. At home I did one board using Eagle and thats about it so far. Every single change to a new system was painful, and I didn't give gEDA enough of a chance to climb the learning curve. Regards, John Kasunich ------------------------------------------------------------------------- This SF.net email is sponsored by: Microsoft Defy all challenges. Microsoft(R) Visual Studio 2008. http://clk.atdmt.com/MRT/go/vse0120000070mrt/direct/01/ _______________________________________________ Emc-users mailing list Emc-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
