gEDA-user: Footprint blues

[Mike Bushroe <mbushroe@xxxxxxxxx>]

I am once again wasting hours of time fighting to find a way to get
custom footprints to be recognized by the software. I keep tweaking
gafrc in .gEDA, and in the project folder, and adding lines to the
project file itself. At one point, I had gsch2pcb report "looking for
element lithium_button_battery", on the next line "found element
lithium_button_battery", and the line after that "no element for
lithium_button_battery found, net element "B1" will not be included on
the layout".

It is easy to find element files, even custom ones, in pcb. I also
realize that PCB is but one destination for gschem schematics. But if
it were possible to add a little interactivity to gsch2pcb, so that
every time it could not find an M4 macro or newlib element file, it
opened up a dialog box and said "can't find element foo for netref
bar, do you want to browse for a file to use?"

     That would first of be able to get past MANY of my frustrations
every time I start using gschem and pcb again after any length of
time. And maybe it might provide some clues why you got close in your
gafrc, but there were too many '/' in the assembled path name, of the
expected file extension was wrong or something.

   I am further limited in my current efforts because I am trying to
teach a course in making pcbs at home, and most of the students do not
have Linux, so we are all running of KNOPPIX 5.2, and I can not add
any permanent files to the built in symbol or footprint lists, and all
exported environment disappear with each new session. So I am trying
to make minimal amounts of extra overhead to add in the custom symbols
and footprints needed for the demo circuits.

     And speaking of trouble with gsch2pcb, every gafrc file I have
writen returns a vague error message "maybe missmatched parenthesis",
but looking at the system gafrc_gschem in /etc/gEDA the command lines
look exactly the same. Here is my ~/.gEDA/gafrc incase you can help me
figure out what I am doing wrong.

(m4-pcbdir /usr/share/pcb/m4)
(component-library ${HOME}/gschem-sym)
(elements-dir ${HOME}/pcb-elements)
(footprint-library ./packages)
(pcbdir ./packages)



Mike


_______________________________________________
geda-user mailing list
geda-user@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-user