Re: gEDA-user: gEDA/gaf capabilities

[Peter Clifton <pcjc2@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Thu, 2007-11-08 at 00:00 +0000, Kai-Martin Knaak wrote:
> On Wed, 07 Nov 2007 08:23:57 -0800, Steve Meier wrote:
> 
> > 1) Lack of support for hierarchical buses. 
> > 2) pcb lacks buried, blind and micro vias. 
> > 3) no back annotation between pcb and gschem.
> 
> My personal hit list of weaknesses is more concerned with usability. Much 
> can be done, but is more hassle than desirable. Even a very common task 
> like an update of the layout after a trivial change of the schematic 
> suffers from this. Say, I added a low pass to my signal path. To 
> propagate this into the layout, I have to:
> 
> 1) save the schematic
> 2) call gsch2pcb foo.sch 
> 3) in the file menu of pcb choose 'load layout to buffer'
> 4) point the file chooser to ' '
> 5) left-click  exactly once at some free space on the canvas of pcb
> 6) choose 'load netlist file'
> 7) point the file chooser to 'foo.net'
> 8) type ':ExecuteFile(foo.cmd)'
> 
> All of this could be reduced to one and a half step: A special save 
> command, that calls gsch2pcb on the fly. A running instance of pcb would 
> be informed, that new versions of foo.new.pcb, foo.net and foo.cmd have 
> been written. In response, it produces a pop-up to ask whether or not the 
> files should be processed. 

You might try xgsch2pcb. Your steps then look like.

1. Save schematic
2. Alt-tab to xgsch2pcb
3. Hit "Update Layout" button
4. Update feeds into running PCB

The main down-side is that the components are auto-placed in the
top-left corner of PCB, on top of whatever is already there. This is
something which isn't easy to get around at the moment.

-- 
Peter Clifton

Electrical Engineering Division,
Engineering Department,
University of Cambridge,
9, JJ Thomson Avenue,
Cambridge
CB3 0FA

Tel: +44 (0)7729 980173 - (No signal in the lab!)



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