Re: gEDA-user: pcb refdes name restrictions?

[Peter Clifton <pcjc2@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Tue, 2006-10-31 at 10:04 +0000, Peter Baxendale wrote:
> Thanks for the comment on refdes values. I'll add a few things to next
> year's notes for the students.

We're hoping to introduce more students to gEDA here at Cambridge, and
as a related project, myself and Peter Brett spent our summers
programming improvements for gschem (and PCB, but nothing user visible).

I am curious to know if your notes are available online, or are released
under such a license that we can make them available to students here?

> It had never occurred to me to use anything but an upper case alpha
> character followed by a numeric value for a refdes, but students have a
> habit of trying the unexpected. It threw me for quite a while trying to
> understand what pcb was complaining about, since it referred to a "CONN"
> part which wasn't in either the schematic or the pcb netlist or the pcb
> file. Now I know about the lower case feature I'll know what to look for
> next time. 
>
> Correct me if I'm wrong, but only lower case at the end of a refdes is
> ignored by pcb (but not by gsch2pcb), so something like Rp4 is ok.

That should be fine.

Incidentally, we wrote / are writing a GTK frontend to gsch2pcb, since
we identified this as one area where the workflow in gEDA isn't all that
friendly to new users.

It isn't stable enough for production use yet, but once we've got some
back-end features improved in PCB (a patch to allow communication via
DBus), we should be in a position to make a more formal release of the
code.

Regards,

-- 
Peter Clifton

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

Tel: +44 (0)7729 980173



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