hey im new to using the gEDA suit as well. but i suggest you look at the following links so that you better understand the gEDA tools and their limitations.
gEDA tools docs http://geda.seul.org/wiki/geda:documentation tutorial using gschem: http://geda.seul.org/wiki/geda:gsch2pcb_tutorial gEDA gschem User Guide http://geda.seul.org/wiki/geda:gschem_ug hope that helps. David ________________________________________ From: geda-user-boun...@moria.seul.org [geda-user-boun...@moria.seul.org] On Behalf Of Madhusudan Singh [singh.madhusu...@gmail.com] Sent: Thursday, April 22, 2010 1:26 AM To: geda-u...@oria.seul.org Subject: gEDA-user: A little puzzled about the purpose of gschem Hello, I am not new (though a tad rusty) to spice, or the usual design process. Years ago, I went through an analog circuit design, followed by a VLSI design class that involved the use of H-Spice, Mentor Graphics and Cadence software, basically Design Architect, (Modelsim for digital design), Accusim, IC Station, DRC, LVS workflow, with the (IIRC) AMI05 library. I am finding myself in need of doing some circuit design for a lab application, and without access to the aforementioned software and having developed a slight preference for the faster GUI based work (as opposed to using MacSpice - I am on Mac OSX where geda, pcb, etc. are all installed using MacPorts, and seem to launch ok), I decided to give geda a spin. The overall workflow looks superficially similar to the one I outlined above. So, I fire up gschem and decide to test it with a rudimentary inverting op amp circuit using a 741. I wire the net, and then discover I need to use command line gnetlist to generate the actual spice netlist. No biggie, years of Sun and Linux experience (and importantly, zero windows experience) make this a piece of cake. gschem editor experience is remarkably like DA. But, I get a truckload of errors. I start researching and find this gem: http://www.brorson.com/gEDA/SPICE/x150.html Basically, I need to painfully enter all the parameters for a 741 ! There is even a file parameter where I can presumably enter the filename containing the spice model by hand. At that point I stopped to take stock of the whole thing. Correct me if I am wrong, but isn't the entire point of having a GUI entry to ease and more importantly, speed, the development process ? So, precisely in which way is using gschem more efficient than typing in a spice script if I have to painfully pointy-and-clicky every damn single attribute into this ? Some might say that after defining a symbol, I can copy and paste it to create more complicated circuits, but that is what a subckt definition is for. I guess I am asking - what purpose does gschem serve (other than to create pretty pictures, and being a humongous waste of time otherwise since its basically asking you to enter the entire spice script, albeit in disparate pretty boxes) ? Thanks. _______________________________________________ geda-user mailing list geda-user@moria.seul.org http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-user