> gEDA has got a not so bad reputation lately A lot of work has go into gEDA by some new blood in the last couple of years, getting better all of the time.
gEDA's home page moved to http://www.gpleda.org/ yesterday. The PCB part of gEDA is now funded by the Linux Fund (Other than an issue with printing that I've got to work out, PCB works fine on Windows too). >albeit it still suffers a little from being a collection of individual >tools >that have not been designed to be a single package >from ground up, so each >tool uses a different approach in the >UI. That problem still does exist by default, however key bindings and menus in PCB are now changeable without digging into the source code. > I have used pcb (the layout part of > what later became gEDA) years before, and while it took >some time to get > used to it, I don't remember any horror >stories. ;-) http://www.gpleda.org/links.html has links to many projects, many AVR based. The horror stories that I know of, all relate to bad footprints. Same problem all layout programs have. Just got the solder mask wrong on my own Tiny88 MLF, project. That is why you build prototypes... > I don't really know how well Kicad is doing these days Lots of people like it, but there have been a few complaints of it crashing, especially at exit time. This is a common problem with wxWidget based programs if you delete objects in the wrong order at close. The sources of events to an object must be deleted before the event sink is deleted. An event sent to a deleted object will crash wxWidgets. > There are people who call it "Kinder-CAD" > (children's CAD) http://fritzing.org/ fits that area better. It is intended for people just learning layout, with the intention of moving up to gEDA (per the Fritzing developer on the gEDA list). http://scratch.mit.edu/ would be of interest to children learning to program, not really PCB related, but probably possible. > restricted to two layers and an area of 100x160 mm², PCB has been used to do 8+ layers with 900+ pin BGAs, it has no intentional restrictions. It has a few practical restrictions from unanticipated usage. Someone on the gEDA list was complainingthat it would not handle a board over two meters long, believe it was some type of sign. > excellent, and the autorouter does a good job at least in The PCB default autorouter does an ok job, it does odd things at times that makes you wonder "why did it do that?". A topological autorouter was done as a Google Summer of Code project last year. It has not made it into the main line branch yet. -- http://www.wearablesmartsensors.com/ http://www.softwaresafety.net/ http://www.designer-iii.com/ http://www.unusualresearch.com/ _______________________________________________ AVR-chat mailing list [email protected] http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/avr-chat
