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gEDA-user: Newby experiences with the pcb layout tool
My felicitations, that is a great tool! Here are a couple of
observations which might be interesting to other users.
1. Installation:
Platform : Mandriva-Linux 2008.1
Additional rpm-packages required: byacc, libgtk+2.0_0-devel, gd-utils,
libgd-devel. With these packages installed, installation went smoothly,
none of the tarballs suggested in the documentation was required.
Library hack: To get access to the library (and the default font), I had
to add a link /home/<myhome>/../share -> /usr/local/share
2. Usage notes, stability
Problems:
- I had quite frequent problems adding points to a polygon - but no
serious problem, saving and re-starting pcb always helped
- There is no way to have non-copper holes (even adding 0x08 to the
flags does not help) - forget it
- Silkscreen text: this is the only problem I really regret. The text
generated is so fat and clumsy, that it becomes more or less unreadable
in small fonts. On the quit small pcb I made, I ended up refraining from
using text.
- Library configuration: I tried to use File->Preferences->Library to
add my own libraries - did not succeed, needed to import via buffer-import.
3. Wishes
- Be able to export directly to Gerber - I presently export the .pcb
files to a windows system and use the GC-Preview tool from ... I have
seen that an alfa release of a Gerber previewer exists at Sourceforge,
but that does not allow to import .pcb files - would be nice to have in
order to avoid going through windows.
- Avoid getting non-significant warning messages when you do a Design
Rule Check (as it happens with mount-holes, where you get 2 messages
each that the ring is too small). How about adding a flag to the element
description that makes DRC skip the check of that element? would be a
somewhat general solution.
- Be more flexible with paths wher pcb-generated output goes - for
instance for placing the gerber files (they clutter up the parent
directory, would be nice to immediately place them in their own
directory) - same observation for the backup files (is that configurable
in the config file?)
I guess that all these are known issues, I perceive them all as rather
annoying, but certainly not as show-stoppers - pcb looks perfectly
usable for my small prototyping application. I have not, though, gone
through to the ultimate test of sending the .gwk file to the layout
manufacturer.
Again thanks for this nice tool and cheers to the authors! J.Harms
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