Re: gEDA-user: Linear voltregs: Symbol bugs or features?

["C. Lechner" <cl0002@xxxxxxx>]

Stuart Brorson wrote:
> > So what are your ideas about this??? Is it possible to remove
> > the "net=GND:2" line from the sym files of the whole LM78xx
> > family?
>
>
> I am one of the folks who thinks that component symbols should not
> have hidden pin connections.  Indeed, this problem is really acute
> when the symbols live in a library, since newbies won't know that the
> pin is connected to GND unless they open up the symbol and look at the
> attributes.
As long as you do standard stuff, for example a uC circuit w/
+5V and GND only, everything is fine. If there would be all those
power supply pins, IMHO it would be a real mess. But if it's
gonna be complicated, I make the power pins visible and connect
them manually to the correct power grid.

OTOH I'm not sure if newbies design a PCB w/ different GND nets
as their first project. But nevertheless, if I would not create
many symbols on my own (Maybe I'll contribute some ;) on a regular
base, I would definitely not have been able to find out what's
going on. Maybe hax0r methods would work: Delete one half of the
schematic and see if the problem is still there and so on.

I did a grep on my symbol library. I searched for "net=GND:2",
so it only lists buggy voltregs in the LM78xx pin configuration
and not in the LM317 layout.

grep says
./linear/lm7812-1.sym:net=GND:2
./linear/lt1782-1.sym:net=GND:2
./linear/lm7815-1.sym:net=GND:2
./linear/lm7912-1.sym:net=GND:2
./linear/lm7885-1.sym:net=GND:2
./linear/lm7810-1.sym:net=GND:2
./linear/lp2954IT-1.sym:net=GND:2
./linear/lm7805-1.sym:net=GND:2
./linear/lm7818-1.sym:net=GND:2
./linear/lm7824-1.sym:net=GND:2
./linear/lm7806-1.sym:net=GND:2

Hope this helps to improve this really great piece of software.

> Stuart
- cl