Re: gEDA-user: My uEDA-designed open source hardware board works!

[msokolov@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (Michael Sokolov)]

asomers@xxxxxxxxx wrote:

> "Horror" is the correct description of my first thought.  EDA is such
> an inherently graphical task, a gui seems natural.

For a "professional hardware engineer" type: yes.  For someone like me:
no.  Although I've had an active interest in how electronic circuits and
digital hardware in particular work for about as long as I've been
programming (both since the age of 7 or so), I've been on the software
track mostly and have never done hw work professionally, certainly not
hw design.  When I had discovered UNIX, I totally fell in love with it
and never looked back (to DOS and various GUI shells that ran on top of
it), so now I have a UNIX mind.  My UNIX mind simply cannot fathom doing
*any* kind of intellectual creation work by any way other than writing
the source code in vi, writing a Makefile and then iterating vi source
and make until the product works the way I want.  I don't use IDEs for
software development, only vi & make, I don't use word processors like
OpenOffice or M$ crap, I write all my TPS reports in vi & troff
(non-WYSIWYG text formatter) instead, and now I'm doing the same thing
with EDA.

But unfortunately "professional hardware engineer" types don't think
like this.  They aren't programmers, so they haven't been raised in the
programming geek culture that generally embraces UNIX and its way of
doings things (pipefitting and Makefiles), hence they are blind to its
power and instead like those GUIs that we UNIX people abhor.

To me Open Source Hardware is an outgrowth of the Free / Open Source
Software movement, *not* an outgrowth of the commercial for-profit
hardware engineering world where the Weendoze & GUI types dominate, so
to me it makes perfect natural sense that OSH development can be done by
someone like me who is absolutely not a professional hardware engineer,
but a passionate zealot of FOSS and the UNIX Way of Doing Things (tm).

But I guess the gEDA community is quite different, and I've noticed that
quite a few people here (perhaps even the majority) are *not* doing Open
Source Hardware, instead they are using FOSS EDA to create closed
proprietary hw designs.  Argh!  I'll spare my obligatory Marxist-Leninist
comment on what I think should be done to such people.

> But you apparently
> did without, so maybe I can too?  Is uEDA public yet?  I'd like to
> check it out.

It has always been public in the sense of being developed in a public
CVS repository which anyone can check out at any time (ditto for my
board), but the documentation still hasn't been finished - too many
other tasks on my plate.

The following cvs checkout command:

cvs -d :pserver:anoncvs@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx:/fs1/IFCTF-cvs co ueda ifctf-part-lib OSDCU

will give you the source for uEDA, my part library and the board I've
just got working.

> If you could write a non-gui PCB layout tool, I'd be
> even more impressed.

That isn't my department - Ineiev is my PCB layout partner. :-)

MS


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