On Wed, Feb 23, 2011 at 3:49 PM, Stephan Boettcher <boettc...@physik.uni-kiel.de> wrote: > Mark Rages <markra...@gmail.com> writes: > >> You would be wise to avoid PCB for anything non-rectangular. It is >> exceedingly painful. > > I do recommend pcb for anything non-rectangular. The arcs can be nicely > done in gnumeric, python, awk, whatever. With a gui this will be > difficult. > > For example the outline of the board on the attached picture (which will > launch into space later this year to land on Mars) >
It looks nice. I notice you did not use any curved traces, and except for outline and three components (hall sensors?) everything is rectilinear. A GUI can easily accomodate arcs if we teach it about concepts from mechanical 2D CAD: trim, extend, offset. I first learned this way of drawing twenty years ago in AutoCAD, but they are ink-and-paper concepts. I don't think their application to PCB would be hard to do. I got started in on it, but I got stuck on a trivial problem and can't get anyone's attention who might help me.[1] Anyway, other tools are not much better. When it became clear that PCB wasn't going to work out, I switched to a Windows program called "Altium." Altium's pcb layout is only slightly better, but not worth the thousands of dollars we paid for it. Regards, Mark markrages@gmail [1] http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.comp.cad.geda.user/35369 -- Mark Rages, Engineer Midwest Telecine LLC markra...@midwesttelecine.com _______________________________________________ geda-user mailing list geda-user@moria.seul.org http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-user