Without a Windows port you will have a beginners interface (and documentation) but no beginners ;) I have talked to a lot of people at the Arduino Users Group and at dorkbot and the majority are Windows, a fair number on MAC and a few on Linux. Eagle has done excellent marketing. Seeding the university's with Eagle has enabled it to spread rapidly. Grassroots local support is available in a lot of areas. Below is my most recent response to "openness" that I posted on [1]http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/01/ff_newrevolution (* jcl *) =============== Cut Here =============== "Open Hardware" comes in various degrees of openness. For example in the test equipment market top tier manufacturers like Hewlett Packard and LTX provide complete printed schematics, board layout drawings and a bill of materials. This design information enables the user to understand the equipment limitations and troubleshoot application issues. The printed manuals have a copyright but the design is open. Slightly more open would be a design that provides printed documentation along with the manufacturing data files. Although you won't be able to create new data files without the source files you can still manufacture identical copies. Having the source files enables modification of the original design without having to re-create the design files. But having the design files does not make the design completely open. Design files that require a $10K per seat EDA license are effectively closed. As an example of a completely open electronic design using the gEDA/PCB open source EDA tools I did a re-mix of the Drawdio design by ladyada. The ladyada design was a re-mix of a design done by Jay Silver (MIT Media Lab). The documentation and EDA files for my remix are at [2]http://tinyurl.com/bq8pq4 Thanks to Jay for this fun and creative design. Thanks to ladyada for her excellent documentation. ===================== Cut Here ====================== -- You can't create open hardware with closed EDA tools. twitter: [3]http://twitter.com/jluciani blog: [4]http://www.luciani.org
References 1. http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/01/ff_newrevolution 2. http://tinyurl.com/bq8pq4 3. http://twitter.com/jluciani 4. http://www.luciani.org/
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