Re: gEDA-user: gnetlist errors

[joeft <joeft@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Stuart Brorson wrote:

> > Stuart,
> >
> > I've reviewed the tutorial and am following that flow - partially.
> > What I'm really doing is porting a bunch of layout and schematics
> > from another CAD tool into gschem.  I'm not actually drawing
> > schematics at this time (but I soon will).  
> >    
>
> Hmmm. . .  Can you tell us which tool you are leaving, and how you are
> doing the import?  Is is sarlacc?  I'm curious to know how easy this
> is.  Thanks. 
>
>  
>
> > After putting everything in a clean directory and correcting a typo
> > pointed at by a previous post (Thanks!) I now have a usable
> > netlist. 
> >    
>
> Great!  
>
> Stuart
>
>
>  
Stuart,

I'm not familiar with sarlacc...

We formerly used tools from Ivex.  Windraft was their schematic editor 
and Winboard their layout editor.  After receiving decreasing levels of 
support (next to nothing actually), we began looking for other 
solutions.  Ivex eventually closed up shop altogether.  The tools still 
work since the licenses were not time limited.  We first ported the 
layouts to PCB and now are moving the whole design flow from schematics 
on down to gEDA/PCB.

My first step was to build a perl script that translated netlist output 
from Ivex into something PCB would read.  Of the dozen or so formats 
Ivex supported I used "P-Cad NLT" since it looked like the easiest 
translation.

The schematic translation was quite a bit more work.  I used their 
"decompiled" schematic and library format, which is ASCII and looks like 
EDIF, although I'm not sure it is 100% compliant.  In any case, there 
are two parts to the porting process.  One perl script translates the 
library, outputting a gschem compatible symbol file for each Ivex part 
definition it finds.  The second script translates the actual schematic 
page.  To reduce the number of possible errors in the end result I 
wanted to insure that very little manual cleanup would be required.   So 
far, that goal has been met.

Altogether we needed to port about 100 schematic symbols, and a dozen 
moderately dense schematic pages.  PC footprints were either built or 
leveraged from existing elements already in the PCB libraries.  We 
employ some not-so-common parts so I don't make any use of m4-generated 
footprints.

This involved more time than I would have liked, primarily because I'm a 
very novice perl programmer.  I'm sure that someone who knew what they 
were doing would have written much more elegant/efficient perl code and 
done it in much less time. Using yacc to do the schematic translation 
might be another option.

Does this answer your question?

Joe T