Re: gEDA-user: Why use gEDA?

[Peter Baxendale <peter.baxendale@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> And i do a question, is gEDA an proper software to use during the
> formation academical  process? I think yes that, this can be used for
> that.
> 
> What do you think about?

A bit late to reply to this, but ...

We used gEDA in our Engineering course here at Durham University (UK)
School of Engineering for the first time this year. We previously used
Orcad for teaching purposes. Since I don't use Windows myself this
wasn't an option for me personally so I had already been using gEDA.
When it came to buying a load more Orcad licenses to support a new ECAD
course I decided instead to switch to gEDA because (in no particular
order)
1. it seems to give us pretty well everything we need
2. the licensing allows students and staff to have their own copies
3. well documented text file formats are used
4. it's open source
5. it's well supported (eg here)
These all seem to me good reasons for getting students to use it. In
addition, I think the fact that parts of the process involve using a
command line interface makes for a good learning experience for students
who are too used to clicking without thinking.

We set a very simple assignment for our students to get some experience
of the schematic entry/simulation/pcb design process, adapted from the
earlier Orcad exercise. If you're interested to see what we did take a
look at
http://www.dur.ac.uk/peter.baxendale/stuff/gEDA/assignment_desc.pdf .
It's limited because it's a short course, the electronics had to be
simple because of the level these students were at, and it had to use
components I could find spice models for.

I think if you use Linux machines for teaching there's no reason at all
not to use gEDA. Unfortunately, here all our teaching machines currently
run Windows only, so we use a rather old Windows distribution which is
not entirely satisfactory. Also, I found that students wanting to use it
on their own machines were put off by the relatively complicated
installation, including having to install Cygwin first (that is, for the
majority of students who only use Windows). When I get the time I want
to find better solutions. Native Windows versions of gschem and pcb with
an installer would be attractive to the students, but it doesn't seem
easy to build these out of the box. I'd like to encourage more to use
gEDA, and unfortunately that means getting my hands dirty with Windows.

All things considered, it's been pretty successful and I intend to stick
with it for next year.



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