On 17/05/11 22:40, John Doty wrote:
On May 17, 2011, at 4:36 AM, Russell Shaw wrote:Hi, A schematic/pcb editor is not "huge" unless it's done in an inelegant way. A very first task i would do is create a decent gui for drawing the symbol and footprint in the schematic/pcb library, and make a decent library browser. Then i would make a drawing mode so that whatever symbol i click on in the schematic, will appear under the mouse in the pcb. Likewise, clicking a pcb symbol hilights it in the schematic. I'd design everything from the ground up to decent reverse annotations so that pin and gate swapping in the pcb appears in the schematic. Hierarchical schematics is a must too.OK, you want an integrated tool. Integrated tools are great: I have a nice, handy multitool on my belt. It's the tool I use most.By serializing all the gui actions internally, undo/redo and scripting is easy to add. Creating a schematic and pcb should be done productively within the first hour of never having used the program, yet have no limitations for power users.Impossible. A multitool cannot do all of the things a well-stocked workshop can. The architectures are different.
A well-stocked workshop is nothing more than a multitool workshop. There's no reason why a schematic and pcb editor can't have tight coupling and still interact with all external tools. The only disadvantage to external tools is that an interface layer is needed. The coupling could simply be an ipc protocol between separate programs.
Your program will probably never export designs to other layout programs. It will never support a variety of simulators. It will never support symbolic circuit analysis. It will never support scripted documentation generation. Or the other things in the open-ended list a toolkit can support.
A main priority was to draw schematics for input to a spice or microwave circuit simulator (simulator writing is my other interest), and have an easy gui way of displaying the results.
That's fine for an integrated tool: target the specific flow you want. It's no doubt what the majority of users would prefer, at least at the start, and gEDA will still be around for those who need more.
Everything in geda is 180deg opposite to what i'd do.
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