So I've been fairly happy with these tools (currently using the packaged stuff from Ubuntu's Gutsy release), but there are a couple little things I've run into, aside from the peculiar behavior that arises when one tries to make an oval pin and use it in a ground plane...
So I did a smallish circuit full of discrete transistors and Rs and Cs, and found usable footprints for all of them, but the pins from the transistor symbols - npn-2 and pnp-2 - didn't match the numeric pin names on the footprints. gsch2pcb spit out a script that I would have thought was intended to deal with that sort of thing, but no, it's all just identities like this: ChangePinName(Q9, E, E) ChangePinName(Q9, C, C) ChangePinName(Q9, B, B) I thought I did everything as described in the schematic-to-pcb writeup, but if this makes you think I forgot a step don't hesitate to mention it, of course. Then there's the footprints, which are good enough to use but not ideal (eg, the m4 TO92 calls out pin 1 backwards from what seems to be the usual practice for that package, at least for the inline-pins variant; then too, I don't really want that square pad, useful as it was for identifying the numbering the footprint used). While chasing links all over creation, I came across Bill Wilson's discussion of transistor pinouts: http://furrr.two14.net/cgi-bin/dwww/usr/share/doc/geda-doc/wiki/geda_transistor_guide.html At first I didn't care for it, having used other tools with a more heavyweight symbol approach, but I've decided he's on to something. I'll talk about a half-formed thought about a possibly better compromise between lightweight and heavyweight symbols, but for the moment I'm just wondering if (1) Bill's approach is generally approved of, and (2) if anyone's already run up footprints (I guess the existing symbols will suffice, aside from that letters vs numbers thing) for this approach. Thanks! -- ...and of course you must be careful not to overwrite the bounds of memory blocks, free a memory block twice, forget to free a memory block, use a memory block after it's been freed, use memory that you haven't explicitly allocated, etc. We C++ programmers have developed tricks to help us deal with this sort of thing, in much the same way that people who suffer severe childhood trauma develop psychological mechanisms to insulate themselves from those experiences. -- Joseph A. Knapka _______________________________________________ geda-user mailing list geda-user@moria.seul.org http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-user