Re: gEDA-user: interesting links

[Peter Clifton <pcjc2@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Thu, 2007-08-30 at 02:58 +0000, Ales Hvezda wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I was referer log surfing and came across these links:
> 
> www.fritzing.org
> and more specifically:
> www.fritzing.org/development/market-overview
> 
> Here's what this group is apparently planning (wrt KiCad):
> 
> tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/kicad-devel/message/482
> 
> In some of the threads there are some mentions of gEDA too:
> 
> tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/kicad-devel/message/483
> 
> More specifically (from somebody named Dick Hollenbeck):
> 
> ...
> "The design of Kicad is actually quite good, and I think it has
> potential to truly be excellent. I played with the gEda package for
> about 1/2 year. If I remember it is written in C, and I think so out
> of religious grounds. Being religiously opposed to C++ is silly at
> this point. Being religiously opposed to the use of the more exotic
> parts of C++ might make sense. Kicad is not over using C++.
> wxWidgets is a decent cross platform gui. It is good enough."x
> ...
> 
> Not because of "religious grounds", but rather back when the code base
> was first written, the C++ compiler was simply not up to snuff and the C++
> binding for GTK+ were non-existant or quite poor. 

It makes interesting reading, however I'm not sure I fully understand
the design flow they're trying to achieve with the project.

My assumption is that they're looking at a UI which appears like a
bread-board, so the schematic capture and PCB layout is more about
copying what the user already made on breadboard, onto a PCB.

If you're using EDA tools, I don't see much point in taking the
bread-board metaphor all the way through layout though - that would
constrain the routing WAY too much and you'd loose all point of making a
custom PCB.

In the robot design project at CUED, students can start from example
schematics and partially complete PCB boards with their IO connectors
already placed. They can then lay out their custom bits of robot
circuitry.

In the past, students have assembled designs directly onto custom strip
board (again with the IO connectors already present), which is (I guess)
a more permanent way of bread-boarding.


I'm mildly amused to see Eagle considered as suitable for novices - I
can't imagine how much UI they can make with Eagle's scripting
language(s), nor Cadsoft giving them source-code to re-write it as they
appear to want.

It sounds to me like they will be best off writing their simple EDA from
scratch. I don't think libgeda is really useful to a non-gEDA tool yet
(for starters, its not ABI stable between releases), and I'm not sure
KiCad will meet what their after either.


Peter C.




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