Re: gEDA-user: Problem with PCB . . .

[Bill Wilson <billw@wt.net>]

On Fri, 26 Sep 2003 17:00:10 -0400 (EDT)
sdb@cloud9.net (Stuart Brorson) wrote:

> I am following the wonderful instructions written by Bill
> Wilson, available at:
> 
> http://web.wt.net/~billw/gsch2pcb/tutorial.html

Thanks, yep gsch2pcb 1.0 is out.  I just put the tutorial up
last night and you found it pretty quickly!  I hope it can
be useful and if anyone sees any problems with it, let me know.

> I am working on creating a first layout from a schematic, and am
> running into problems.  I created a schematic called
> "TrialLayout.sch", and have used gsch2pcb version 1.0 to create the
> board file.  I am following the wonderful instructions written by Bill
> Wilson, available at:
> 
> http://web.wt.net/~billw/gsch2pcb/tutorial.html
> 
> (Thank you Bill for the outstanding contribution!!!!!)
> 
> When I run pcb on the resulting board by saying "pcb
> TrialLayoutBoard.pcb", I get a pop-up box with the following error: 
> 
> ERROR parsing file 'TrialLayoutBoard.pcb'
>     line:        66
>     description: 'parse error'

I see that line 66 is

    PKG_unknown(unknown,A4,gmin=1e-9)

and that means gsch2pcb could not find a package for A4.  It
seems this will happen for the spice symbols you have in the
schematic since they don't translate into pc board elements.
PCB doesn't know what PKG_unknown() means, so:

Try a couple of things:
  1) If you just run gsch2pcb again, it should move the unknowns
     out of TrialLayoutBoard.pcb and into TrialLayoutBoard.new.pcb
     and then you can try running pcb.
  2) Or, just run "gsch2pcb --remove-unfound xx.sch" (or
     "gsch2pcb -r xx.sch") and those unknown packages should
     not appear.

Maybe gsch2pcb should have the default of leaving out the
PKG_unknown() and just spit out a warning...

Bill