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Re: gEDA-user: PCB & Gschem

Karel Kulhavy wrote: 
On Fri, Feb 24, 2006 at 09:37:18PM +0000, Marc Price wrote:

Oh Well if a newbie cant work out what footprint you might as well scrap Geda right now
It will be consigned to the grave yard of electronics programs. 


AFAIK gEDA is used for only small amount of projects. Amateurs usually
use Eagle. Professionals Eagle, Protel, Orcad.

gEDA developers value usability low and freedom high. Most users value
it the other way which leads to the low penetration. When someone wanted
to contribute to Ronja, the current usability of gEDA was a huge problem
for him. Even when I am designing, most of the time is spent on things
that gEDA could already solve (I need to draw another DE9 symbol because
the one supplied lacks shielding, I need to make my own footprints for
coils, fprward annotation is slow and prone to user errors etc.) and not
so much time on actual design.

How many other schematic capture and layout tools have you used? To be sure, there is plenty of room for improvement in gschem and pcb, but they are certainly not at the bottom of the pile when compared to commercial tools.

In terms of most of your time spent doing things like drawing more symbols and footprints, again, welcome to the real world of CAD. This is a universal annoyance I've seen with every cad systems I've used and thats a pretty good number. I've also made the mistake of not checking all the dimensions on footprints from a vendor (cadence's allegro in this case) and had to scrap boards because of bad footprints.

-Dan