Re: gEDA-user: gEDA and pcb status and minigration from Eagle

[Peter Clifton <pcjc2@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Thu, 2009-11-12 at 15:09 +0900, Torsten Wagner wrote:
> Dear gEDA community,

> Furthermore, can I do all the stuff I was used to do in eagle with gEDA and pcb 
> ?
> Are there any shortcuts or limitations ?
> How mature and stable are the suite yet ? 
> Can it be really considered for serious work ?

Not knowing the limitations of Eagle, I'm not sure I can really answer
your first question.

What are your requirements?

Are you designing simple 2 layer boards, or multi-layer? I've seen PCB
used successfully from 1 through to 8 layer complex designs (Not to say
it can't do _more_ than 8 layers!)

PCB has complex real-time polygon support, better than some packages
I've used in the past. (I've no idea how Eagle does planes / polygons).

Simple 1 layer design of mine (PCB "photo" output):
http://www2.eng.cam.ac.uk/~pcjc2/terminator.png
Simple 2 layer design of mine (PCB "photo" output):
http://www2.eng.cam.ac.uk/~pcjc2/tower-board.png

Or, you can get serious - and do designs with amazing complexity, such
as these by John Bass:

http://www2.eng.cam.ac.uk/~pcjc2/geda/pcb+gl_3d/pcb+gl_3d-6.png
http://www2.eng.cam.ac.uk/~pcjc2/geda/pcb+gl_3d/pcb+gl_3d-7.png

Please excuse the 3D rendering in those screen-shots.. that is something
of an experiment I'm working on.

If you are working on designs that complex, the trick is to put the
power planes down last - which keeps the speed up. Interactive speed on
the experimental OpenGL branch is also pretty good.

> As for me I have no problem to get my hand dirty and crawl around in config-
> files and text-files. I even will love to see that maybe one or another task can 
> be done by simply writing some text-files in emacs (or vi to avoid a war).

All possible with gEDA and PCB.

> For Eagle, I liked the little command line at the bottom of the window, which 
> allowed me to type in comments rather then clicking and searching around in 
> GUI-settings. If there is something like this in gschem or pcb I would be 
> happy to use it.

PCB has "actions", so for example, you can select a load of things, then
type:

:setsize(selectedlines,50,mil)

Again, I'm not familiar with what Eagle offers.

> I know to ask all this questions here is a bit silly, since you all are 
> somehow biased (otherwise you would not read this list ;) ). 
> So, please try to give me a very objective idea about the status of the 
> project. :)

Very biased.. I'm a gEDA and PCB developer ;)

Both projects are alive, but sometimes they move slowly because the
developers are all busy people. That said.. when the tool set does what
you need - continual churn and development isn't always necessary.

People using EDA tools very often value stability and maturity in their
tool-kits. gEDA and PCB are pretty mature in some respects - and
youthful in others. (Hopefully we have a good balance).

gEDA typically tries to get out a new major version every 6 months to a
year, with bug-fix releases on its stable branches as needed.

Some distributions might be shipping old versions due to their release
cycles. Debian and Ubuntu spring to mind (Debian feeds packages into
Ubuntu).

> Just don't want to ride a dead horse and notice later that the projects freeze 
> and I spend all the fun to learn it without further be able to use it.

Part of the value of open-source software - is that in the strictest
sense, you never cease to be able to use the software. I'll grant that
some continual maintenance is important to keep pace with the rest of
the libraries on an up to date desktop. We try our best at that!


Best regards,

Peter C.




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