Stuart Brorson wrote: > Be very careful with the fab houses which offer you "free" design > software -- there's usually a catch of some sort.
Ditto. My very first board spin was through Express PCB, they made the process pretty painless--- and I went their route for the first time because I didn't want to understand very much of what I was doing. I just wanted to "close the loop" on turning a screen drawing into copper and fiberglass and debits to my credit card. Well, their tool was adequate for all of that. :) But I very quickly graduated to the point I needed to do my own footprints, etc. and at some point--- I don't recall when--- I ran up against something that their tool couldn't deal with. Then I switched to gEDA, and haven't looked back. gEDA forces you to understand more of what you are doing, but in exchange you get the ability to send the board to anywhere you like--- and to send it to somewhere different next time, without having to redo the design in a new tool. And if you don't think a footprint or something else is exactly how you want it, you have the option of opening up its data files in emacs. In short, complete control over every step of the design process. I also like the ability to do my configuration management with git, and the possibility to machine-edit designs with a shell script (haven't done that, but might for version stamping). And I haven't gotten the time to make it work yet, but I think the SPICE capabilities might be useful at some point for me, too. A more subtle advantage might be that you can run the output drawings through several different Gerber file viewers, and trust that if they all agree about what the artwork looks like then the board house will probably get what you want as well. Call me a "control freak" if you like, but gEDA seems ok with that. :) (I use 4pcb.com for my boards, they've done a very good job so far. Highly recommended, in particular their automated quoting and design rule checker). b.g. _______________________________________________ geda-user mailing list [email protected] http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-user
