Re: gEDA-user: Newbie PCB & gschem

[Sascha Silbe <sascha-ml-geda-user@silbe.org>]

On Tue, May 18, 2004 at 08:40:33PM +0200, Shahab Sanjari wrote:

> I am new to PCB and gschem, though I have experiences with other CADs.
> How have you (active PCB users) learned how to work with gschem and 
> PCB?
I found gschem to be pretty intuitive and easy to use (even for a 
"keyboard-freak" like me), much better than Geddy-CAD which I used years 
ago when I still ran DOS. On the other hand, I'm just a hobbyist, so no 
really complex designs.
There were some things to learn about attributes, but the master 
attribute list [3] describes them quite well.

I'm currently having quite a quarrel with PCB, but it might just be that 
I'm not familiar enough with the usual automated PCB design process, 
since I just used a "vectorboard" (is that correct translation for 
"Lochrasterplatine"?) in the past. A document explaining the basics and 
the terminology (I still don't know what a "thermal" is) might help.
The user interface of PCB really needs getting used to. I'd really like 
it to be much more like gschem. Some things are mostly of a 
psychological nature (like the widget style), others are differences in 
behaviour (like panning/scrolling/zooming).

> Do you know of any User's manual or document which describes a design 
> step
> by step (Schematic Lib --> Schematic --> Netlist --> PCB Lib --> PCB
> --> printing --> Gerber ) ?
Once you have the schematic itself, you can use the gsch2pcb tutorial to 
see how to generate a layout from it.

> Or a document with all the tricks and shortcuts like Grid, zoom , 
> panning and ....
Did you already take a look at the gEDA documentation page [1]?

> Since I follow the mails on this list for a couple of months now, I am
> aware of PCB having an Autorouter option, which I didn't find on the 
> MAN
> page.
I don't even seem to have a man-page for PCB:

sascha@cube:~$ man pcb
No manual entry for pcb

The PCB manual [4] does describe the auto-router briefly in the menu 
section [5], paragraph "Connects".

> Does the PCB and gschem that you use differ from what I installed?
I'm using the following (on Gentoo Linux):

media-libs/libgdgeda-2.0.15 *
app-sci/geda-symbols-20040111 *
app-sci/libgeda-20040111 *
app-sci/geda-gschem-20040111 *
app-sci/geda-docs-20040111 *
app-sci/geda-gnetlist-20040111 *
app-sci/geda-gsymcheck-20040111 *
app-sci/geda-utils-20040111 *

> Does anybody use these programs on FreeBSD?
Shouldn't really make a difference, since it's a POSIX system.


[1] http://geda.seul.org/docs/20040111/index.html
[2] http://geda.seul.org/docs/20040111/tutorials/gsch2pcb/tutorial.html
[3] http://geda.seul.org/docs/20040111/attributes/index.html
[4] http://pcb.sourceforge.net/pcb.html
[5] http://pcb.sourceforge.net/pcb.html#Menu

CU Sascha

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