Re: gEDA-user: fritzing

[al davis <ad252@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Wednesday 13 May 2009, Brendan Howell wrote:
> for expediency we hacked up a quick output to Eagle.  

I saw that, opened mouth too soon.

> While the demo was cool, it quickly turned into an unpleasant
> experience for coders as we reached the limitations of the
> GUI framework (not to mention the problems of being dependent
> on proprietary CAD tools).  So, last summer we threw all the
> old code out and started over from scratch.

Then saw that, thank you.


On Wednesday 13 May 2009, Brendan Howell wrote:
>   Our long-term goal is to support file interchange with
> other EDAs, especially gEDA and KiCAD so that as users reach
> the limits of what is possible with Fritzing, they can move
> their project over to more professional tools.
>   With that in mind, it would be great to collaborate.  I'm
> currently working on a gEDA/PCB footprint importer to take
> advantage of the great library that you guys have.  I also
> have "export to gEDA" on my list as it would be really great
> to be able to export a netlist that gnetlist can understand.

A while back I made a proposal for a file interchange system 
that is neutral in the sense that it is not tied to any 
particular target.  It's based on the structural subset of 
Verilog.  I think Fritzing, Kicad, and gEDA should all benefit 
from doing it.  Also, if there is a standard interchange format, 
new tools can be developed to interface to the standard, rather 
than to any particular toolset.

Here's a start:
http://geda.seul.org/wiki/geda:format_translation

I have some starter code, which may need to be replaced, as part 
of Gnucap.

Regarding the "footprint importer" ..  This needs to be the 
same.  There needs to be a format for describing footprints and 
symbols that does not belong to any application in particular, 
with an easy conversion to any format.

None of the tools should have the burden of converting to and 
from each other.  All of them should support a standard.  By 
supporting the standard, you automatically support all other 
tools that support that standard.



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