I guess part of my problem with gschem, pcb, and gsch2pcb is that I never understood what gattrib was for. I though it was an internal function used by gschem and gsch2pcb to get the values of symbols attributes out of the schematic file. I never realized it was intended for humans to use. And I DEFINITELY did not understand that it entered new values into the tables. Perhaps if it were called editattrib or setattrib it would be more obvious to newcommers to use it after creating light symbols in gcshem to add pcb footprints and other 'heavy symbol' attributes that are more easily handled in text. Also, this might be more clearly explained in the tutorials. But I still think that some tool, between gschem and pcb so that neither needs to change and John Doty can be happy, that matches up the graphics PCB footprints with the symbol, maybe a text compare of pin names or functions to see if pin 1 of the symbol matches pin A of the footprint. I also like the idea of a database of component part numbers, critical specs like capacitance, resistance, wattage, peak reverse voltage, and also had a footprint for that part. I just cower at the sheer scale of building such a database from many different distributors supplying parts from so many different vendors, each using different styles for their spec sheets, only most of which are online and in PDF form. If we can build such a database, that would help tremendously. But creating it and maintaining it, even with just static data like that listed above, would be a tremendous amount of work. Mike
Not because of the bugs I ran into but since choosing a footprint is a difficult process in it self I was longing for a footprint browser. The easiest place to start a clean implementation may be gattrib, that I found conventient to duplicate footprint choices, once one has been assigned gschem. However, the best overview of what is what and therefore choose the right footprint is probably gschem. With gschem open, gattrib should work however, if one remembers, that gschem is in "read only" then. The problem could be split out of gschem, if it were better supported, to assign a physical part to the symbol. This will probably help other tools too, since e.g. a Spice model is tied to a part, not to a bunch of lines with pins (symbol). I first thought "device" were the thing to use, but in the standard library it's occupied by names like CAPACITOR_POLARIZED which says noting about rated voltage or ESR. Any ideas? Just my 2 cents
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