gEDA-user: New Tool for Making pcb footprints

[Steve Morss <smorss@catalinacomputing.com>]

Recently, I built a board using lots of custom surface mount parts, as 
well as a number of unusual through hole parts.  When it came time to 
generate the footprints, I needed to design a number of new footprints.  
I looked into the tools available, and found some graphical tools and 
specialized scripting tools, but they either were hard to use, or I 
couldn't get them to build some of my footprints (sorry in advance, if I 
misrepresented someone's tool).  To solve my problems, I came up with 
"pcblander", which has been very effective for me.  It uses human 
readable scripts as input.  The scripts are pretty easy to follow, as 
they are mostly assignment statements and a few function calls.  For 
those of you who use Darrell Harmon's "footgen" program, it has a number 
of similarities to that - I got myself started on pcblander by learning 
how footgen works.  pcblander is quite flexible and extensible - if 
there's something missing, I should be able to add it in quickly (or if 
you prefer, you can do it by writing macros or, if you want complete 
flexibility, functions in perl).

If you are interested, I've got a release at 
www.catalinacomputing.com/gEDA containing the program and source code, a 
readme, and some footprint examples.

Steve




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