Hello all! Have not been on this list for quite some time -- some oldtimers might remember my guide to compiling Octtools on Linux from very early nineties, I have been using Cadence DFII for the last 10 years though.
Now joined a small start-up (small enough not to have extra money for Cadence lincenses ;-) ) and decided to look at gEDA again -- actually I was quite surprized at the progress and how neat gschem user interface feels! And having the source makes so many more things possible! But, of course, some things might be polished a little bit more, and I am all ready to do my part, I hope that some of the modifications will be useful enogh to get accepted to the main branch. Thus, before jumping to coding, I want to hear some opinions on what I will try to do and to learn what people are working on now. If some of the things I'd like to see are available (just not from CVS) or almost available and I can help an existing effort rather than start on my own. And maybe some opinions of this newcomer to the project might be of interest if we want to attract more people to use gEDA. ;-) I am using gschem -> gnetlist -g spice-sdb -> wrspice (http://www.wrcad.com/wrspice.html) route for superconductor analog circuit simulations. For that I needed to add two symbols, a Josephson Junction (useful maybe only to us), and K -- coupling factor (I was surprized that it was not there!) + add some lines to gnet-spice-sdb to netlist them correctly. I know how I can submit symbols, but should I contact Stuart directly to submit a patch or just post it to the developers list? One of the things that were not immediately comfortable to me was the fact that it took some trial and error to find an inductor/coil symbol which worked with spice-sdb netlister. Would it make more sense to keep a library of analog spice-netlistable parts as a separate library (like Cadence analog lib which did not come with, e.g., symbols for batteries, but for voltage sources which sure as hell could be netlisted to spice, spectre and hspice)? Is there a way to get access to guile interpreter from within the main gschem window? (I know that I can run gnetlist with -i flag). Besides the fact that having a scheme interpreter in a separate window is convenient even to run as a calculator, hopefully more scripts will be written if interactive session becomes available. Those who've used DFII/Skill will know what I mean... ;-) Also, how hard would it be to add buttons to the toolbar from guile, with attached callbacks to run guile scripts (e.g., some (or (system "gnetlist") (system "spice")) , you know...). Hierarchical netlisting support... I understand that gschem is mostly used for board-level design (where there are only two levels of hierarchy: package and board); Stuart's example of a "transistor with parasitics" is on the other end of the spectrum, but still spans only two levels. For anything more hierarchical that this, two things are essential, IMHO: easy automatic generation of symbols starting with pins on the schematic view and allowing gnetlist recursively netlist subcircuits encountered in the top-level schematic. I'm wondering if anybody is working on it, I'm eager to help. Finally, as good as user interface is (love the keyboard shortcuts!), is there a way to map keyboard arrows to panning actions? ;-) Sincerely, Paul Bunyk
