Re: gEDA-user: pcb SMT footprints

[Darrell Harmon <mail@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, Nov 16, 2005 at 04:30:44PM -0800, Larry Doolittle wrote:
> Good, I'm glad someone else suggested this.  It had occurred to
> me, too.  That would be easy to add at the component generation
> phase in something like footgen, harder once the pads are independent
> entities in the layout.
> 
>     - Larry

With footgen, it would be possible to add the input ("source") to the 
newlib output as comments. This would allow for modification of the
parameters at any time. A seperate program could be used to make
adjustments, or this could be integrated with pcb. For instance to modify
a footprint named LQFP176, the program could search the pcb file for
elements with that name. When one is found, it could read the old
parameters and display a dialog where they could be edited. Once the user
is satisfied, either all instances of this footprint could be modified or
the selected one could be renamed and modified.

Another idea I have had is to add footgen support to gsch2pcb so that
footprints could be generated as needed with no intermediate format
(currently newlib).

-- 
Darrell Harmon
http://dlharmon.com