Re: gEDA-user: moving slotting to pcb?

[John Doty <jpd@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Jun 26, 2010, at 11:18 AM, DJ Delorie wrote:

> 
> A random thought occurred to me today - why does gschem do slotting at
> all?  Why does it care about footprints and packages?

There's no reason for it to. There's not even any reason to select part values. Putting these things into source schematics is a barrier to reuse.

Another issue is that hierarchy plays poorly with slotting: it should be possible to split a slotted component across hierarchical blocks.

>  Would it make
> more sense, from a design flow perspective, to just send the symbolic
> information to pcb and let pcb assign footprints and pinouts?

No.

1. The gschem->pcb is only one of the many flows gEDA supports. Please, please, please DJ, do not forget this.

2. For documentation, most will want the pin numbers, refdeses, values, etc. to match the board as built.

> 
> That way, gschem does all the symbolic stuff, and pcb does all the
> physical stuff.  It would, of course, mean major changes to pcb to
> handle "elements without footprints yet" and stuff, as well as mapping
> multiple refdes's to single elements.  Probably make power pin
> management more complex too, unless we came up with a new way to
> manage "hidden" pins.

No reason to change pcb. What we need is a schematic processor to sit between gschem and gnetlist. Expand hierarchy, assign slots and values, turn the source schematics into project schematics for both netlisting and documentation. This is a clerical task, not a graphical task, so the extra input could just be a table of some sort.

> 
> Anyway, food for thought.
> 
> 
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John Doty              Noqsi Aerospace, Ltd.
http://www.noqsi.com/
jpd@xxxxxxxxx




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