On Fri, 2008-01-11 at 15:51 -0500, Timothy Hanson wrote: > Hi gEDA, > > I'm a part-time developer of kicad and a part-time pcb designer.
Hello, welcome.. > My most recent project has a lot of duplicated circuitry in a > three-level hierarchy, something which kicad does not support very > well. Kicad allows a hierarchy, but it does not allow different > component references on different instances of the same schematic. > e.g. the hierarchy is something like this > A > B B > C C C C > where each of the different C sheets originates from the same file > etc. I think we're in a similar position actually, if you want truly different refdes (like R100, R200 etc..) gEDA hierarchy support allows named pins on symbols from a higher level schematic to link to annotated "io" type symbols with a matching refdes= attribute in lower level schematics. At netlisting time (for PCB at least), the hierarchy is flattened to names like "M1/R1" and "M2/R1" (where M1 and M2 are named instantiations of your sub-circuit, and R1 might be a component within that. > I've spent the last two weeks trying to add this feature, but it is > not easy :( does g-EDA already have this feature? Arbitrary attribute over-rides are probably what we'd use to add this feature, attaching somewhere in the instantiation information which re-maps the refdes naming for the system. We're not there yet though, and you're right.. its not an easy feature to implement. > I'll convert my schematics, if so. I also like that there is more > developer chatter on the gEDA list as opposed to the kicad list - > gives me more confidence. I got the feeling that gEDA development may be more open to contribution than KiCad, but having never actually worked on KiCad, I can't say for sure. > Kicad is easier to use, though, and builds on windows... I wish that > we could combine forces :) gEDA builds on windows too, but we don't have a NSIS installer made for it. PCB does have a script for building on windows, and an NSIS installer. We deliberately shy away from shipping Windows binaries at this point, since there aren't so many developers who would be ready to support a huge number of new users. There is also the concern that in the past, the tools have relied on Unix "power features" like command line processing steps, Makefiles etc.. these give GREAT flexibility to Unix users, but are alien to Windows. xgsch2pcb attempts to provide a simple GUI gschem -> PCB workflow, but I've not yet braved trying to get it working on Windows. I do believe we have somewhat common goals, promoting free software in electronics being one. I'd quite happily advocate converters between gEDA and KiCad file formats.. it seems sensible to do given they are both open formats. Vendor lockin is bad, no matter who the vendor is! Best wishes, -- Peter Clifton Electrical Engineering Division, Engineering Department, University of Cambridge, 9, JJ Thomson Avenue, Cambridge CB3 0FA Tel: +44 (0)7729 980173 - (No signal in the lab!) _______________________________________________ geda-dev mailing list [email protected] http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-dev
