> I remember a while back DJ posted some really sweet screenshots of his > "puller" plugin for pcb, which would create nice curved traces from > straight ones. Two questions:
FYI it's the "global puller". PCB has a "simple puller" (the "Y" key) that does one specific subset of this, see http://www.delorie.com/pcb/puller/ > What has become of it, I still have it as a patch to pcb. Most of the time, the results are very pretty. The rest of the time, it looks like a three year old scribbled on your board with a crayon. There are some subtle bugs in the math ;-) I asked around for a math/CS major to work on it, and got one taker, but no actual results. > and (no offense intended) what exactly was the point, other than > looking cool? What, looking cool isn't enough? ;-) > Does it reduce RF pickup/emissions, trace coupling/inductance, or > some other such effect? Does it make fabbing via toner transfer > easier? Or does it just look really neat? The original theory (many decades ago, from the software I was inspired by) was EMI and signal propogation. It does, however, get rid of a lot of sharp corners, and un-parallel-ize many of the lines, so it may have some EMI benefits. I suspect that "looking cool" is probably the only real benefit though. That, and making it REALLY easy to tell if a board was made with pcb :-) Also, if the traces leading to pins/vias are straight into the pin, the teardrop plugin produces better results. _______________________________________________ geda-user mailing list geda-user@moria.seul.org http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-user