On Jul 3, 2007, at 1:52 AM, Duncan Drennan wrote: > I decided to give gEDA a go as my design tool for a project (I've > previously used PCAD and ORCAD), but now that I'm about to put pen to > paper I'm questioning whether using gEDA is a good long term solution. > I'm an electronic engineer and currently contract out my skills, so > the solution needs to satisfy my commercial needs.
Sounds similar to my situation. gEDA is certainly meeting *my* commercial needs. > > The most important thing to me is how long it will take me to learn > gEDA, and whether learning it is a good choice in the long term. One > of my worries is that at some point I'll need functions and > interoperability that gEDA can't provide, and then I'll have to move > to a commercial tool. My experience is that it works the other way: when the commercial tools need functions and interoperability they don't have, you're stuck. On the other hand, gEDA is radically flexible, and the development team is radically responsive. > > My other concern is interacting with other professionals. I prefer to > only do the schematic capture, and then pass the PCB layout onto > someone else (as it is time consuming, and there are more productive > things for me to do). I'm concerned that gEDA may make this process > more difficult. I usually work in this mode. I've now used gschem to feed three different PCB layout flows, and also for VLSI. > > Reading comments like, "This document and gnetlist in general are > pretty ALPHA, so keep that in mind as you use it to generate > netlists." (http://www.geda.seul.org/wiki/geda:gnetlist_ug) don't help > to ease ones mind when making an important design decision. Ales likes to undersell. For my money, the gEDA docs are far better than the commercial EDA docs I've suffered through. > > So what do you think? If you were in a situation of choosing a design > flow solution that you plan to use for a couple of years, what would > you choose? I chose gEDA as the foundation for the EE part of my consulting business three years ago. It proved to be an excellent decision. John Doty Noqsi Aerospace, Ltd. http://www.noqsi.com/ [EMAIL PROTECTED] _______________________________________________ geda-user mailing list [email protected] http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-user
