On Thu, 2009-11-12 at 15:09 +0900, Torsten Wagner wrote: > Dear gEDA community,
> Furthermore, can I do all the stuff I was used to do in eagle with gEDA and > pcb > ? > Are there any shortcuts or limitations ? > How mature and stable are the suite yet ? > Can it be really considered for serious work ? Not knowing the limitations of Eagle, I'm not sure I can really answer your first question. What are your requirements? Are you designing simple 2 layer boards, or multi-layer? I've seen PCB used successfully from 1 through to 8 layer complex designs (Not to say it can't do _more_ than 8 layers!) PCB has complex real-time polygon support, better than some packages I've used in the past. (I've no idea how Eagle does planes / polygons). Simple 1 layer design of mine (PCB "photo" output): http://www2.eng.cam.ac.uk/~pcjc2/terminator.png Simple 2 layer design of mine (PCB "photo" output): http://www2.eng.cam.ac.uk/~pcjc2/tower-board.png Or, you can get serious - and do designs with amazing complexity, such as these by John Bass: http://www2.eng.cam.ac.uk/~pcjc2/geda/pcb+gl_3d/pcb+gl_3d-6.png http://www2.eng.cam.ac.uk/~pcjc2/geda/pcb+gl_3d/pcb+gl_3d-7.png Please excuse the 3D rendering in those screen-shots.. that is something of an experiment I'm working on. If you are working on designs that complex, the trick is to put the power planes down last - which keeps the speed up. Interactive speed on the experimental OpenGL branch is also pretty good. > As for me I have no problem to get my hand dirty and crawl around in config- > files and text-files. I even will love to see that maybe one or another task > can > be done by simply writing some text-files in emacs (or vi to avoid a war). All possible with gEDA and PCB. > For Eagle, I liked the little command line at the bottom of the window, which > allowed me to type in comments rather then clicking and searching around in > GUI-settings. If there is something like this in gschem or pcb I would be > happy to use it. PCB has "actions", so for example, you can select a load of things, then type: :setsize(selectedlines,50,mil) Again, I'm not familiar with what Eagle offers. > I know to ask all this questions here is a bit silly, since you all are > somehow biased (otherwise you would not read this list ;) ). > So, please try to give me a very objective idea about the status of the > project. :) Very biased.. I'm a gEDA and PCB developer ;) Both projects are alive, but sometimes they move slowly because the developers are all busy people. That said.. when the tool set does what you need - continual churn and development isn't always necessary. People using EDA tools very often value stability and maturity in their tool-kits. gEDA and PCB are pretty mature in some respects - and youthful in others. (Hopefully we have a good balance). gEDA typically tries to get out a new major version every 6 months to a year, with bug-fix releases on its stable branches as needed. Some distributions might be shipping old versions due to their release cycles. Debian and Ubuntu spring to mind (Debian feeds packages into Ubuntu). > Just don't want to ride a dead horse and notice later that the projects > freeze > and I spend all the fun to learn it without further be able to use it. Part of the value of open-source software - is that in the strictest sense, you never cease to be able to use the software. I'll grant that some continual maintenance is important to keep pace with the rest of the libraries on an up to date desktop. We try our best at that! Best regards, Peter C. _______________________________________________ geda-user mailing list [email protected] http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-user
