Re: gEDA-user: Outstanding improvement tasks

[Al Davis <ad106@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Friday 03 March 2006 03:10, Peter Brett wrote:
> I _may_ be able to get the university to pay me to do nothing
> but hack gschem & friends over the summer. If so, what sort
> of particular tasks are outstanding and would be accessible
> to someone not yet familiar with the codebase?

I think the biggest weakness of the gEDA system is the 
integration between tools.

I would like to see a simulator interface added to gschem, so it 
appears to integrate with gnucap like Multi-sim or 
PSpice/orcad.  It should be easy to outclass PSpice/orcad.

Even a part of this would help a lot. 

Something like merging gschem and gspice-ui, although I don't 
think a code merge is the way to do it.  The way to do it is to 
add configurable menus to gschem than can drive the simulator.  
That is, to issue simulator commands, automatically translate 
the file format by calling the translator program, etc.

Adding back-annotation to gschem, so information from the 
simulator (voltages, etc) can show on the schematic.  Perhaps 
this can be done by accepting a message from the simulator to 
update attributes of devices.  Open an incoming pipe for an 
external program to assign attributes, perhaps as lines like 
"Mout : Vds=2.567"  There already is the ability to have lots 
of arbitrary attributes.  If they can be set by an external 
program, a MOSFET could have attributes like Vds, Id, etc. A 
net can have a voltage, state, impedance, temperature, etc. 

Adding forward annotation, so gschem can send such messages to 
another program, perhaps notifying a simulator that a device 
was added to the schematic, or a connection was made.  Open an 
outgoing pipe.....

If this is too much, a simpler improvement that would be of 
value is to organize the symbol library.  One big problem for 
beginners is that the symbols needed for any particular design 
are scattered among many libraries.  To see what I mean, find 
all of the symbols that you would need for a simple transistor 
amplifier.  This is one that could be done by someone who is 
just getting started, maybe at the level where you just did 
your first transistor amplifier.

The netlister needs to be improved.  It probably should be 
replaced, but to do a good job I think this one is the hardest 
of all I listed here.  It might take the whole summer just to 
spec out what it should do.