Re: gEDA-user: Greetings from Fritzing

[Stuart Brorson <sdb@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi --

> I am one of the developers of Fritzing, a simple FLOSS EDA made for less
> technical (non-engineer) users.  Our project is young but we have been
> posting frequent releases since November.

Yeah, we're aware of the project.  I pestered you guys about a year
ago to get invovled with gEDA.  Welcome, and congratulations on
getting Fritzing off the ground!

> Introductions aside, I was hoping to start a dialogue between our
> groups.  We see our project as fitting into the EDA world in a different
> space from gEDA.  Most of our target audience have limited experience
> with electronics and are interested in realizing small, low-complexity
> prototypes.  However, as our software is limited (intentionally) in
> scope, some users may reach a stage where they need the more advanced
> EDA features of a package like gEDA.

Yeah, the protoboard paradigm for doing a design is very different
from the traditional PCB design flow (which is one thing gEDA tries to
do).  It's an interesting approach for electronics newbies....
Reading your bulletin board, I see many people who like the interface
a lot.  Getting a user interface to be natural and intuitive is very
difficult!  (Particularly in an open-source project....)

One thing.....   Fritzing's close tie-in with Eagle is, ummmmm, out of
tune for an open-source/open-hardware project IMO.  But that's not my
decision to  make, and we're happy to see you guys are contacting us
(a real open-source EDA project).

> Right now, I'm working on a gEDA-PCB footprint import component that
> converts gEDA footprint files to our internal SVG based files.  In the
> long term we would be interested in supporting some sort of export path
> so that users can export Fritzing projects and continue working on them
> in gEDA.

Very cool!  Being able to convert gEDA/PCB footprints <-> Fritzing
footprints (both ways) would be very nice.  A big win would be that
one could use any SVG drawing program to create the footprints, and
then convert to a gEDA/PCB .fp file.

The question here is:  What is the structure of a Fritzing footprint?
That is, a footprint assumes a certain layer structure.  For example,
a through-hole footprint assumes you have top silk, top
mask, paste and metal, some clearance structure for inner layers, and
then bottom silk, mask, paste, and metal.  Also, one might also want
to provide a keepout layer and also other layers which I have probably 
forgotten.

So...  Is the footprint structure documented anywhere?  (I admit I
haven't looked.)

Cheers,

Stuart


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