Re: gEDA-user: pin swapping idea

[kai-martin knaak <kmk@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

DJ Delorie wrote:

> 
> Had an idea about back-annotating pin swaps.

Why is this on the devel list, where mere users are not allowed to write and 
hardly read?


> The big "issue" is figuring out how to back-annotate from pcb to
> gschem.  So... why do we need to? 

Because a schematic should contain the information on which slot a symbol 
corresponds to. 


> gschem need not know about physical packages or pins, ever, unless you
> want to back-annotate a whole board (or merge the pinmap into a
> separate set of schematics for reference). 

gschem may not need to know, but I need to, when I look at the schematic.

A pretty common scenario with my kind of analog prtojects: For some reason I 
know, there is a problem with  a certain analog switch. This switch happens 
to be one of the four slots of IC7. The value of the slot attribute is 
visible on the schematic and says it is number 1. Thus I know, I have to 
poke at pin 1-3 of IC7 for debugging.
If the slotting information would reside in the layout only, I'd have to 
back-engineer form the actual tracks on the layout which pins to look at.


> How confused would gschem get if we omitted pin numbers from it
> completely?

Me, the reader of the schematic would be quite confused. I deliberately have 
pin numbers printed on the schematic for more complex ICs. This helps a lot 
during debugging stage of prototypes. It provides a convenient way to know 
at what pin to stick the scope probe.

---<)kaimartin(>---
-- 
Kai-Martin Knaak
Ãffentlicher PGP-SchlÃssel:
http://pgp.mit.edu:11371/pks/lookup?op=get&search=0x6C0B9F53



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