On Sat, Jun 13, 2009 at 9:00 AM, Chris Smith<[email protected]> wrote:
> We are looking for a new set of EDA tools at work and have investigated > both CadStar and Altium so far. Altium did just finally lower their price to something a normal mortal can afford. At the previous $~4k and up level, from my usage of it in my day job, I thought the cost was so high so they could support so many bugs. Package is bloated (tries to do to much, making anything hard to find), slow (takes over a minute just to start up) and buggy (it has eaten files on occasion). No one in the company has ever gotten the autorouter to work properly, I've given up trying. A fellow new to the company thought he could do it, and after a week gave up on it too. There is also the hidden Tax of the yearly update fee. To that end I've been working with PCB on Windows. The main thing Altium has over PCB right now is Altium will do blind and berried vias. Doing those in PCB has been discussed over the years to no results. If you need to do those, for now you can take PCB off your list. I can't say much about gEDA on Windows as the boss likes his archaic OrCAD v7 package for schematics. I wrote a simple net list converter for that rather than fight the up hill battle of 10+ years of existing documents in OrCAD v7, to move to gEDA. > I have asked my boss to consider gEDA, > on the basis that it probably does 95% of what we need it to and it may > be cheaper to pay for/sponsor development of missing features than the > cost of the alternative tools. > > First, are there any experienced gEDA users around the south coast of > England I'm about 90 miles from Pittsburgh, can't help you there. > Second, are there any developers who would consider taking on paid > development of features? Obviously I don't know what those features may > yet be, however I can say that not all of us use Linux, so at the least > we would need: > > 1. a maintained Windows binary installer; and git clone git://repo.or.cz/minipack.git will build Windows versions. The installer is a bit 'iffy'. The main reason has nothing to do with the code itself, but rather with the half dozen licenses it has to have to install. They keep moving around on the host sites, if you can find them at all. "The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers." - Dick the Butcher http://shakespeare.mit.edu/2henryvi/2henryvi.4.2.html The problem is easy to solve (track down the missing licenses), but time consuming, since I did not need the installer I stopped trying to build it. I'll give it an other shot if you do want to try it out. As to PCB on Windows which I've been using regularly for a few months it has two major issues that need addressed, before PCB can be a production ready product for Windows, that I've been poking at fixing between other projects. 1) The library footprint dialogs are broken, they simply don't work. It has to do with what ends up being a recursion problem with the configuration files under Windows due to differences in the shells and path separators. I have been working around that issue by using NTFS Junction Points that are, a virtually unknown, feature of XP: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/205524 The utility you need is here: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896768.aspx Don't think it would be hard to fix, but didn't try as I had a work around. Shipping hardware out the door still pays the bills, not hacking the tools, for the day job. 2) Printing is broken. I did get PostScript Export to work which does let you get ink on paper, after applying this patch, and using Windows GhostView: http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=detail&aid=2700352&group_id=73743&atid=538813 I've taken a look at what it would take to get proper printing working with the GTK HID the only one supported by Windows right now. I was appalled at how complex printing is compared to the wxWidget framework that I'm I normally use for my Windows development projects. I've been debating on whether if was a better use of my time to figure out the GTK printing mess, or just to a full up port of PCB in to a wxWidget based HID. The latter seems easier to me. Printing proper still needs to work as there are a few limits with the PostScript export. > 2. some simple GUI project/workflow manager -- can't really expect the Windows > users to manually edit project files and use the command line. I understand the issues from having to explain to my colleagues how to set up PCB. If you can convince your boss that this is a paying proposition I'll move working on this Windows stuff to the top of my home project list, rather than in between other projects. -- http://www.wearablesmartsensors.com/ http://www.softwaresafety.net/ http://www.designer-iii.com/ http://www.unusualresearch.com/ _______________________________________________ geda-user mailing list [email protected] http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-user
