gEDA-user: Electric clothing and gEDA at NYLUG!

[sdb@cloud9.net (Stuart Brorson)]

Hi gEDA users --

If you ever wonder what kinds of creative and wonderful things people
are doing with the gEDA suite, I suggest you to take a look at Mikey
Sklar's "Electric Clothing" projects:

http://www.electric-clothing.com/

I had the good fortune to see his fastinating talk at yesterday
evening's NYLUG meeting in New York: 

http://www.nylug.org/home/index.shtml

About 30 to 40 people attended the talk, a small handfull of them
seemed like hardware designers, which is unusual since NYLUG tends to
attract mostly sysadmins and software types.  Mikey's interesting
clothing was the main attraction at the meeting, of course.  But
gschem and PCB were also stars for the evening -- he showed several
slides of his designs captured with gschem and laid out with PCB!
Mikey also said that gschem was "great"!  You can download the slides
of his talk from his website (browse around).  

Apropos to gEDA, I picked up two observations from the talk and
follow-up discussion:   

1.  gEDA is apparently hard to find if you are not "in the know".
We are apparently "buried in the noise" on Freshmeat.  That is, there
are zillions of projects out there to do this or that.  The problem
with Google and Freshmeat is that it is hard to distinguish the
working and mature projects from the broken or dead ones.  Doing a
little bit of advocacy outside the electronics-geek community for gEDA
wouldn't hurt.   

Interestingly, many people find the best way to find the live
software is via a search for recent Debian packages.  The lesson here
is:  Keep those Debian APTs fresh and up to date!

2.  There is a large community of people using FOSS tools for embedded
microcontroller developement (e.g. free compilers & PROM burners).
Unlike the gEDA project -- which specializes in classical EDA tools --
the FOSS embedded tools area doesn't seem to have a single place which
gathers the tools, or even points to them.  That is, there is
apparently no "portal" for FOSS embedded tools.

I am not an expert in this area, so I don't know from personal
experience.  However, folks at the meeting felt this was the case.
Any opinions about this from gEDA users?

Stuart