On Wednesday 23 Nov 2005 8:42 pm IST, Stuart Brorson wrote: SB> > I have not fully understood the gEDA package yet but from the features list, SB> > i am impressed. I would however like to read any review of the package if SB> > available as i was unable to find anything worth while. Something in SB> > comparison with EAGLE would be excellent. Is there any? SB> SB> There was an article talking about gEDA in the March 2005 edition of SB> Circuit Cellar. It doesn't do a compare/contrast of gEDA against SB> Eagle, but it does talk about the design flow for gEDA. More articles SB> will be coming out in other paper publications soon. SB> SB> You can also read the docs and wiki available on the gEDA site.
Ill dig out the article and keep my eyes open to catch those upcoming articles. :-) Comparison with EAGLE would be a + but is certainly not a requirement. Thanks for the pointer. SB> > My prime interest, as might be any body else's, is what is the learning SB> > curve? does it provide all the functionality that EAGLE provides? and what SB> > is the performance in comparison with EAGLE? SB> SB> If you mean the free Eagle, then gEDA offers unlimited design sizes, SB> whereas the free Eagle is limited. From your perspective, gEDA is SB> comparable to the payware version of Eagle. Yes. I was refering to the free version but was considering a full version purchase and am glad i have not done that yet. ;-) SB> You will need to do a little more work with gEDA in terms of drawing SB> your own footprints and symbols -- the commercial pacakges tend to SB> have larger parts libraries. OTOH, there are about a thousand (maybe SB> more) symbols and footprints already available. Also, making symbols SB> and footprints isn't hard, and if you don't want to draw them yourself SB> you can surf around you will find lots of people giving away gEDA SB> symbols and footprints (and scripts to build them). I do not mind creating footprints for the components i use and distributing them as well. In fact I had to do that with EAGLE too as footprints were either not available or were not satisfactory. That of course is for the not-so-common or even non-standard-footprint components like certain sensors. I would be happy to create and distribute these footprints if not already available. SB> The schematic capture program is very easy to learn and use. No real SB> learning curve there if you already know how to do schematic capture. SB> SB> GEDA's layout tool, PCB, is very capable and powerful. Some people SB> complain about it's user interface, but those complaints are SB> pertainent to older versions of the program. It's been ported to GTK SB> and now is reasonably easy to use. It does present a little bit of a SB> learning curve, but so does any powerful layout tool. Yes, I see most complaints against it for its user inerface but all of these refer to the non-GTK version. The version i have is however the older non-GTK version. SB> > I use EAGLE's Auto-Router quiet often and hence would like to know the SB> > performance of PCB in this regard. SB> SB> PCB has an autorouter which apparently works well. I don't use it, SB> but others do. It is my practice to manually route all the critical tracks and then auto route the rest. I know there are a lot of people out there who strongly rule out auto routers but i feel that it reduces production time drastically. Routing those dense boards can be such a pain. (Just my point of view ;-)) SB> > I use Kubuntu 5.10 and my installation is hence from the Ubuntu SB> > repositories. SB> SB> You should search through the lists to see what prerequisite packages SB> you need to install in order to use gEDA on Ubuntu. To do an install SB> from the CD you will need to make sure you have the development SB> libraries for a number of packages. The majority of complaints I see SB> about gEDA these days come from people who have consumer-grade distros SB> installed on their machines (SuSE 9.X personal, Fedora desktop, SB> Ubuntu, etc.). The consumer-grade distros often leave off important SB> header files and utilities used when compiling programs such as gEDA. SB> Some even leave off gcc! The gEDA Suite CD installer tries to take SB> care of some dependencies, but these consumer-grade distros are SB> basically crippled when it comes to building software. Therefore, if SB> you can find a pre-compiled version for Ubuntu, you might want to use SB> that. I have the binaries installed so i need not compile it unless i want bleeding edge. I might only consider compiling PCB to have the GTK version. Currently installed versions are: gEDA : 20050313-2 PCB : 1.99j+20050127-2 SB> [1] For example, if you want to do high-speed stuff (GHz), and need SB> to attach routing attributes to nets, then you can't use gEDA. (Nor SB> can you use Eagle.) GEDA also doesn't do hierarchical busses as well SB> as it should. But it works great for flat designs of almost SB> arbitrary size. SB> -- Cheers! Kitts
