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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