Re: gEDA-user: geda for "open hardware"

[Stuart Brorson <sdb@xxxxxxxxxx>]

The "open hardware" distributable you are thinking about has the same
requirements as the creation of a project archive.  Some EDA tools
give you a way to create a self-contained project archive which you
can put into a database or write out to a CD and stick on the shelf
with reasonable confidence that you can return to it some years later,
open it up, and everything will be ready to go.

Long ago I wrote something called garchive which is part of gEDA/gaf.
It only archived schematics.  You would call it using one or more .sch
files as the args.   It tried to pull copies of all symbols
you used out of the symbol libs and stick them in a new directory,
then it would tar & gz up the whole thing into a convenient tarball.
Then, to open an archive, you would pass it the name of the project
archive tarball, and it would open up the tarball and put everything
into place, ready to use.

That program had a few defects, most notably that it did not archive
PCB files.  It also only guessed the symbol lib path, so if you did
something screwey, then it would not necessarily find the right
symbols.  Finally, I haven't touched it in years, so it probably
suffers from severe bit-rot now.

Anyway, my point is simple:  Requirements for an open-hardware
distributable are the same as requirements for a project archiver.
IMO, the best solution is some convenient method of finding or
specifying all dependencies in your project, and then creating .tar
files with all dependencies placed into the .tar file.

Stuart




On Wed, 17 Jun 2009, KURT PETERS wrote:

>
> I've been thinking a bit about gEDA for "open hardware" lately, and have a few thoughts that I was wondering if people on the list would help me think through:
>
>
>
> 1) open hardware implies (to me anyways) that someone has produced a PCB and makes available the schematics, layout, symbols, footprints, and BOM.
>
> 2) The "new user", wanting to modify the hardware, should be able to "copy in" a few extra components into the schematic and gsch2pcb back to pcb, but the previous layout shouldn't be changed at all, just a few extra components are available to be added.  gsch2pcb already supports this pretty robustly.
>
> 3) the new user then places the new components and adds/modifies traces as necessary to get it to work.
>
>
>
> The question is, is there an "approved solution" for packaging all the necessary materials to ensure someone developing hardware can ensure the "new user" has everything they need to accomplish 1-3 above?  I assume it would extract symbols and footprints and encapsulate the versions of PCB/Gschem used to create the PCB.  I also assume that it should somehow distinguish between core symbols and footprints, and "custom" ones.  Of course, then, the core ones would also need a version number, I suppose, in case they change.
>
>
>
> Thoughts???
>
> Kurt
>
>


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