Re: gEDA-user: paid help?

[Dave N6NZ <n6nz@xxxxxxxx>]

On Apr 6, 2010, at 10:52 AM, Mark Rages wrote:

> On Tue, Apr 6, 2010 at 12:27 PM, Anthony Shanks <yamazakir2@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>> Didn't bother with any kind of scripted footprint generator as I
>> wanted to know exactly what the file format was for footprints. Once I
>> discovered how easy it was I felt it wasn't worth fighting with a
>> script that may or may not do what i needed to do. It's been working
>> fine for me and I haven't had any problems with footprints thus far
>> and I spent very little time making footprints compared with the rest
>> of the layout process.
> 
> For a programmer, it is easier to write a scripted footprint generator
> than to roll a footprint by hand with a calculator and text editor.

Where the script really pays off is when you need to update/tweak the footprint.  Staring at a bunch of numbers 3 weeks (or months) later is hopeless.  So I pretty much use script-generated footprints because then I know how to update and regenerate them.  

In fact, all of my footprint generating tools emit the script command line as a comment embedded in the symbol, along with date stamp and other simple history.  The idea is that I can get the exact same footprint back by cutting/pasting the comment into a command line prompt. Which of course is much less interesting than making some tweak to the command line to generate a slightly different footprint.  Or, in the case where the script contains an error (that never happens..... :) it is easy to regenerate all the effected footprints.

-dave



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