On Fri, 2008-01-11 at 17:15 -0500, Timothy Hanson wrote: > Hi everybody, > > Thanks for all the comments! Yes, I've thought of doing the same > thing with makefiles or perl scripts, but then i figure if I just > buckled down and implemented this, everybody would benefit, and it > would (hopefully) be more elegant. However, my dreams of elegance > were somewhat dashed when I began to look very closely at the source > of kicad - naming conventions are inconsistent, as are the location of > class methods and global methods within files. (I spend a lot of time > with kdevelop's good grep tools just finding out where things are...) > I guess this is the nature of software that has been written over a > long time by many different people -- it works fine, but it is > decidedly *biological* when you look at the underlying code. I wish > that it was written in something higher-level than C++ ... what is > gEDA written in?
Mostly C, with some scheme thrown in for good measure. I suspect that you'd find similar or worse in gEDA. Getting into free software is like an adventure, grepping, chasing functions etc. In general, and when the coders have avoided global variables, I find C easier to trace than C++. (Only so many places something can come from). xgsch2pcb is written in Python. > Yes, I do use Kicad for both schematic capture and PCB layout. The > PCB tool in kicad does not have good via control (eg not obvious how > to have multiple via types with different drill sizes, as well as > blind vias, and not sure how to output the drill files to manufacture > boards with blind vias), and it's zone support is under development > (but possibly not too bad at this point). Otherwise, I can't complain > too much. Translating terminology, I think you have zones, PCB has "polygons". These aren't associated with a particular net, but you can hook them up as you want. PCB doesn't do blind vias yet, although DJ Delorie did home-make a 4 layer board with blind vias! As one of the PCB developers, he might have some interest to implement them now ;) > As for the path/to/component idea, gEDA is seemingly more advanced on > this front (I've tried to do the same in kicad). The principle > difficulty is managing multiple references to one schematic as the > hierarchy is manipulated & changed. Kicad references things by 32-bit > unique id, so that you can change the name of things without confusing > the PCB tool. Does gEDA allow you to move back & forth between > schematic & pcb? e.g. develop both at once? (I tend to do this with > power supply bypassing capacitors, as well as stupid bugs that I may > have introduced to the schematic, bugs which become apparent in the > geometry of the board) There is a good point actually.. unique ID stops being unique with net-listing from a hierarchy with multiple instantiated circuit instances. Thank you... this gives me something more to think about on that topic. (One of the gEDA developers has been looking at some changes which required adding unique IDs for tracking links between objects within the schematic). gEDA and PCB are not as tightly coupled as the KiCad tools. The gsch2pcb program will let you forward changes from schematic into PCB, deleting removed parts, and pushing in new ones. Back annotation from PCB is not possible. (Make edits in the schematic, then go to PCB). I deleted the example xgsch2pcb video I had online as I'd run out of web space, but I have a screenshot here: http://www2.eng.cam.ac.uk/~pcjc2/geda/screenshots/gEDA1.jpg The small window is xgsch2pcb, and attempts to provide a simple GUI "project" interface to gsch2pcb, and the update process. -- 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
