On Mon, 2006-10-30 at 13:59 +0000, Peter Baxendale wrote: > Another dumb question. I teach a class of undergraduates about ECAD and > this year abandoned commercial tools in favour of geda. Students being > students, they tend to try things I wouldn't think of doing. Today, a > couple of them decided to be creative and on their schematic used names > like "CONNpower" and "CONNsignal" for refdes values. Whilst I thought it > unconventional and probably inadvisable, I couldn't offhand see why they > shouldn't do that. > > Gsch2pcb happily produced a netlist and pcb file which both looked fine, > as far as I could tell. But when loaded into pcb, optimising the netlist > causes error messages such as "Can't find CONN pin 4 called for in > netlist". > > So does pcb require that all reference designators be in the form of a > string followed by a numerical value? If so, are there any other refdes > restrictions I should know about? Given time, they're bound to find > them... > > Thanks, > PB
Any lower case suffix is ignored. This is so you can, for example, place 4 discrete NAND gates on the schematic called U1a, U1b, U1c and U1d, and they will netlist into a single footprint / component, U1. (The NAND symbols are "slotted", you set the 4 gates to a different slot number - with the "slot" attribute, and they will each netlist to the correct pins in the final package.) So... don't use lowercase suffixes, also: Don't use the hyphen character "-", in the refdes, as it upsets the M4 macro language used to process generating the footprints. (I think "_" is ok. I'm not sure of any other restrictions. Spaces are probably unwise " ", but I've not tested that. Regards -- Peter Clifton Electrical Engineering Division, Engineering Department, University of Cambridge, 9, JJ Thomson Avenue, Cambridge CB3 0FA Tel: +44 (0)7729 980173 _______________________________________________ geda-user mailing list [email protected] http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-user
