Peter TB Brett wrote: > On Thursday 12 November 2009 19:56:25 Kelvin Gardiner wrote: > >> Having a quick look at a symbol file it seems there is no way to define >> different pin positions and order for different packages. Which is what >> Peter implied in his reply. >> > > Correct. > > >> Is there any plans to work on this feature? >> >> > > Not that I am aware of. Feel free to submit patches though! >
This is a potentially tricky feature, because for example some of the microcontrollers I have worked with have pins that aren't available on certain packages. There are also cases where the pin mapping is just... wierd. Consider even the lowly Atmel ATtiny45, which comes in DIP8 and MLF20. Yep, an 8-pin package and a 20-pin package. Guess which one has a bunch of no-connects? :) IOW, I think that in the general case it isn't possible to pick a symbol independent of its package. True, it works for a lot of devices, but not all of them... Maybe a better way to approach this problem would be to provide for a meta-comment field or attribute in the symbol file that could be used to refer the user to alternative symbols for the part. That would let you have one .sym file per component-footprint, but also provide for a GUI feature to guide the user to the list of available options. Hopefully, older versions of gaf would just ignore that attribute. For symbols that worked properly for all available footprints for the part (DIP8 vs. SOIC8, for example), maybe another attribute would trigger the GUI to let the user pick between those footprint names. Just a thought. b.g. -- Bill Gatliff [email protected] _______________________________________________ geda-user mailing list [email protected] http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-user
