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?
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. 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) cheers, Tim On Jan 11, 2008 4:48 PM, Peter Clifton <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > On Fri, 2008-01-11 at 21:13 +0000, Peter Clifton wrote: > > 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. > > What package are you designing your boards in.. KiCad as well? > > gEDA has netlisting backends for quite a few different layout tools. > KiCad isn't one of those at the moment, but if you wanted to mix gEDA > schematics with KiCad board design, adding a gnetlist backend to output > a KiCad compatible netlist of your schematic probably wouldn't be that > hard. > > On the more directly gEDA compatible front, PCB is a really good tool > which I use for all my research work when it involves building circuits. > > > > -- > 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 > _______________________________________________ geda-dev mailing list [email protected] http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-dev
