On Sun, 28 Sep 2008 07:06:57 -0400, Ales Hvezda wrote: >>IMHO, if such a program is supposed to do its job without manual >>interaction, it is no better than a heavy symbol lib. They both need to >>be maintained locally to fit the local requirements. > > > Let me make sure I understand your above statement. You do > _not_ want whatever program/mechanism to automatically do things.
Yes and no. I want the program to automatically make default choices. These default choices should be configured according to my local needs. But I have to be able to override these choices on a per instance level. There usually is a small subset of sensible values, that cover almost all cases. So there are three cases with very different abundance: 1) 95% --> the default applies 2) 4.9% --> the desired value is one of a small set 3) 0.1% --> some exotic value that may be specific to this project only Consider a resistor. The vast majority of resistors in my designs are 0805. But some are wired, or in a TO247 housing. With a HV project there might be a special resistor. On schematic level these exceptions are represented by the same graphics as the default. It is logical to use the same gschem symbol for every resistor. Currently, I can do a heavy symbol with 0805 footprint attribute, which is promoted and visible in the schematics. This covers case 1). In the gschem GUI, I can manually type in the footprint attribute to any value. This is appropriate for the rare case 3). However, it is a bit awkward for the more common case 2). Given the sometimes not so catchy names of footprints, I constantly need to look-up names in the footprint libs. IMHO, the altium programmers found a good way to deal with this situation: In protel95SE is possible to select from a short list of footprints in the schematic editor. Yes, this means an extra heavy symbol. But the benefit is, I only need to make sure once that footprint is a correct choice for a given symbol. > You > want to choose the footprint yourself (which would then apply the > correct pin mapping etc...). I tend to regard the pin mapping as a fixed property of a symbol. With my projects only few components come with different pinouts. From the top of my head only offset compensation of opamps and laser diodes seem to fit. In these cases I am content with an extra symbol for the other pinout. No need to add file format complexity for these rare cases. ---<(kaimartin)>--- -- Kai-Martin Knaak http://lilalaser.de/blog _______________________________________________ geda-dev mailing list [email protected] http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-dev
