Re: gEDA-user: Editing elements in PCB is too complicated

[Jason Skicewicz <jskitz@xxxxxxxxx>]

A word of warning on kiCAD.  I used the kiCAD software for
schematic capture, and thought that it was a great and easy tool to
use.  Especially adding new components to your own personal
library was extremely easy.  However, my manager did not want me
to do the PCB layout, and wanted to farm this out to board
designers.  With kiCAD, I could not find one netlist format that
was compatible with the board designers that our company uses. 
kiCAD supposedly has netlist generation for OrCAD and PADS, but neither
of these were readable by our board designers, who actually use
PADS.  So, a long story short, our board designers had to
recapture the schematic that I made with kiCAD, which essentially saved
us little money by going open source.

I spent some time trying to figure out netlist conversion, but made
little progress.  Couldn't find too much information on
proprietary netlist formats to figure out the conversion between kiCAD
and PADS.  Jean-Pierre Charras, the main developer is a very
helpful guy, and tried to help me solve my problem with a special
release that he made for this purpose.  I still couldn't get it to
work with our board designers.

This is why I plan to try GEDA for the next board.  We only spin
boards about twice a year, so I will probably be using gschem very
soon.  The gnetlist component seems to handle many more netlist
formats, and has conversion capability, which I am excited about. 
I never want to have the problem that I ran into previously with
kiCAD.  I also strongly believe in open source and am interested
in helping out, so don't really want to buy something like PADS.

-jason

On Thu, Nov 10, 2005 at 08:34:42PM -0500, Bob Paddock wrote:
> On Thursday 10 November 2005 05:27 pm, Mike Hansen wrote:
>
> > If the users feel they can complain incessantly about the bugs and features
> >in the software then I suggest doing one of two things:
> > a)  Fix the bug yourself.
>
> That is always the inevitable reply when some one criticizes an Open Source
> program.  :-(

Someone is doing an auxilliary mesaurement board for Ronja and decided
to try out Kicad. He said he was able to do the development cycle of a
simple board in 5 minutes. And that he wants to do it in Kicad because
it's easy and has a feeling that everything works there, and the
required parts are in the library.

I told him Kicad is OK on Ronja because it's GPL as well. So he'll do it
in Kicad instead of gEDA.

CL<
>
> > Either show some respect for the developers
>
> Software Development Magazine September 2005
>     BUSINESS RULES
>      11 Clients You Need to Fire Right Now
>        "Is your customer a chiseler, perpetually dissatisfied or a bully? Are
> you tired of justifying software development practices to people who think
> it's just so much high-paid typing? It's time to cut loose those clients who
> are earning you gray hairs. By Christopher Hawkins"
>
> http://www.sdmagazine.com/documents/sdm0509c/
>
> You do have to register to read the entire article, but it is free to do so to
> my knowledge.