On Fri, 2008-04-18 at 19:22 +0000, Kai-Martin Knaak wrote: > During placement it is essential to identify groups of neighbored > components. At this point I usually have a thorough understanding of the > corresponding schematic.
> It would be extremely useful to select a group of parts in gschem > and transfer the selection to pcb. Agreed! [...] > this feature could be achieved with the help of the find function. Which version of PCB do you use? I'm looking at the GTK HID, and can't "find" a find window ;) > A special gschem tool could identify the refdeses of all parts > the current selection contains. Subsequently, it would write a > pcb search string to the copy-paste buffer of X11. Unfortunately, in the general case, a refdes=... in gschem doesn't necessarily correspond to the final PCB refdes. (Certainly not in the case of hierarchical designs). We'll need some way for the migration between the tools to take into account the broader context in which you're running gnetlist. In the case of a repeated sub-circuit, your gschem selection could even map onto multiple PCB refdes, what should happen in that case? [...] > This would significantly improve the placement work flow. Agreed. I'm not saying we can't do it for the simple case where we have gschem refdes= matching PCB's refdes, but I'd be interested to hear your thoughts on how the more complicated cases might be made to work in the future. BTW.. I started implementing code to expose an API to gschem via DBus. As a start, we should be able to hunt down all running gschem instances and ask them what files they have open. API for querying attributes attached to currently selected objects could come soon after, we just need an interface app to poke PCB's DBus action interface with the appropriate string: "Select(ElementByName, ...)" Doing this would probably be easiest in the context of the project manager (or xgsch2pcb), since these should know what schematic files relate to what PCB. Do you use xgsch2pcb? (Would that be a good place to prototype and demo the functionality with you?) Peter C. _______________________________________________ geda-dev mailing list [email protected] http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-dev
