Re: gEDA-user: wishful UI

[Andrew Poelstra <asp11@xxxxxx>]

On Sat, Aug 14, 2010 at 10:28:09PM +0200, Armin Faltl wrote:
> 
> >Well, as you suggest below, Groups are essentially a way of tagging
> >different parts, so they would be completely independent of the physical
> >layers - and the connectivity checker.
> >
> >>** Confusingly, PCB already has "layer groups", which consist of
> >>multiple "layers". A layer group is what ends up physically as a plane
> >>of copper in your produced board. Your terminology reverses the meaning,
> >>with a "layer group" consisting of logically grouped parts spanning
> >>multiple physical layers.
> >>
> >>I presume you intend to get rid of PCB's existing layer group
> >>functionality (good riddance IMO), however it would be less confusing to
> >>pick a new name. Perhaps "logical group".
> >>
> >
> >Yes, absolutely! But I cannot think of a good name :) "logical group"
> >is too long and ambiguous. Right now I am using "Group", but that's
> >even less useful.
> First I thought "functional group" would be good, but what you
> describe - a construct
> of functional interdependence spread on several layers in mechanical
> CAD is in many
> cases called a "block" or "module".
> The concepts of layers + layer groups (hierarchical layers in
> mech-CAD) is orthogonal
> to blocks. E.g. you can turn visibility on and off for each independently.
> For the sake of visual collision detection in the case of EDA 3
> levels of visibilty
> as suggested may be in order: coloured/saturated, greyed out and invisible.
> Esp. useful I envision the possibility to grey out blocks one does
> not work on
> while they stay visible.
> Being able to reuse a block independently of the layout it was
> created it, like in
> mechanical CAD would be very welcome here as well (did I miss something?)
>

Thank you! Unless someone objects, I will run with "block". Your idea of
saving blocks independently is interesting - I was planning this, sort of.
My idea was to make components and blocks convertable between each other,
so that editing and saving components would be more intuitive.

Another idea would be for PCB to recognize identical blocks - so that if
you selected a group of components for a GPIO, say, it would recognize
other GPIOs and offer to create more blocks and link them such that any
re-arrangements of one would be reflected in the others.

There a lot of things we could do if we could structure PCBs as groups of
blocks. For now I am working out what such a structure would look like -
as well as learning the PCB source.


Andrew




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