Re: gEDA-user: Help with creating schematics that can be netlisted/placed via PCB

[Bill Wilson <billw@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Thu, 2 Jun 2005 10:06:08 -0700
"Samuel A. Falvo II" <sam.falvo@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> On 6/2/05, Bill Wilson <billw@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > > My suggestion is to use gsch2pcb instead of "gnetlist -g PCBoard".
> > > Read Bill Wilson's tutorial about gsch2pcb here:
> >
> >     http://members.dslextreme.com/users/billw/gsch2pcb/tutorial.html
> 
> I actually read that before.
> 
> So . . . I'm confused.  I should *NOT* be using the "geda" wrapper
> executable to manage my gEDA projects?  Because that's what I'm using,
> and it felt it necessary to use gnetlist, apparently.

What's happening is that using the gEDA wrapper uses "gnetlist -g PCBoard"
which is an old scheme backend developed for the original gchem2pcb
interface between gschem and PCB.  This backend is hardwired to use
the m4 location /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/pcb/m4 which is wrong for recent
PCB installs which put the m4 dir under /usr/share or /usr/local/share.
If you use gsch2pcb, gnetlist is actually executed, but a different gnetlist
backend is used which allows for the m4 dir to be set to alternate locations,
which gsch2pcb does.

So I don't know for sure, but it seems the gEDA wrapper has just not been
maintained to track recent PCB changes... somebody else should
be able to comment on this.  Also, if you have multiple schematics you
really should use gsch2pcb because this is another thing the PCBboard
backend doesn't handle.

> I don't want to sound confrontational, but I'm *completely* new to
> this aspect of the hobby.  Right now, I've got a series of schematics
> which I hobbled together, and I just *know* are not able to be placed
> onto PCB as things are, because I'm utterly deficient in knowledge of
> how to properly use the tool.
> 
> But they look pretty though.  :)
> 
> http://www.falvotech.com/cpu.pdf
> http://www.falvotech.com/ramio.pdf
> http://www.falvotech.com/ipl-port.pdf

Nice indeed!

If you use gsch2pcb, you would set up a project file in the same
directory as your schematics.  Assuming some names for your schematics,
it might only need a couple of lines in it:

schematics cpu.sch ramio.sch ipl-port.sch
output-name computer

Then, if this project file is imaginatively named "project", you
would run:

gsch2pcb project

and get computer.pcb files.  If you run "gsch2pcb -v project", among the
info dumped will be the m4 pcbdir that gsch2pcb uses and it should find
it if it is in a standard install location.   But if you have PCB installed somewhere
else you can add its location to the project file with a line like:

m4-pcbdir  /opt/pcb/m4

But this is getting into stuff that's in the tutorial.

Bill