On Thursday 08 July 2010, joshua wojnas wrote: > anyone import into pcb a kicad netlist? I have kicad > schematics and modules for all my parts but want to use the > topo autorouter in pcb
Not that I know of, for now, but I want to take the opportunity to ask for help on a project that could provide this functionality. The project is language plugins for gnucap. A language plugin can read and write one format. I would like to recruit someone, maybe four people, to write four such plugins. They are: 1: gEDA/gschem 2: gEDA/PCB 3: Kicad schematic 4: Kicad layout There are existing plugins for Spice, Spectre, and Verilog, which gnucap uses. The Verilog format is sufficiently rich as to be able to convey all relevant information to and from any of the formats, so it could be used as a neutral interchange format. There's also a moth-balled, 95% complete, unreleased one for IBIS (version 3), which I will revive if someone else makes either #2 or #4 as listed above. These plugins interface to a library function that manages internal storage of the info. Gnucap is now using that library function. It is trivial to write a driver program that would use it to simply read one format and write another. This will be available in the next snapshot, and could be distributed separately to make a standalone translator. The basis of all of this is that it is translating circuit descriptions. Schematics and layouts are renderings of circuits, so the circuit description is augmented with rendering attributes. So, if we can get someone to write these four plugins, that will provide a migration path between Kicad and gEDA, both ways. It will also provide a path to simulation for both Kicad and gEDA, both from schematic and layout (enabling post-layout simulation). Providing any of the four is a valuable contribution in the sense that even one gives us functionality we don't already have that is known to be needed. gEDA currently provides a means of generating a Spice netlist, a fairly small subset of the spice language, but none of the other functionality mentioned here. So ... any volunteers? _______________________________________________ geda-user mailing list [email protected] http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-user
