gEDA (GPL'ed Electronic Design) In EE Times 170
Stuart Brorson writes "At long last, today's EE Times published an article about the gEDA project.
The gEDA project has developed a mature, GPL'd, Linux-based suite of tools useful for electronic design. Using the gEDA tools, you can take a circuit design from schematic capture, through simulation, to PC board layout and fab. Some example PCBs done using gEDA include the Darrell Harmon's single board computer, and the 'free hardware' Ronja Project. Happily, the advantages of open-source for electronics design were well presented in the article. It's good to see that gEDA is getting some well-deserved press for the excellent work which has been going on from over six years now!"
Mixed-Up. (Score:2, Insightful)
Give it time... (Score:2, Insightful)
(emphasis mine)
dubbed gEDA for short -- has become, much to the delight of engineers who would rather go their own way than rely on commercial tools. It won't replace commercial software packages, but it does provide an alternative.
... yet. Every desktop converted to open source means one less commercial package has been sold.
Great for hobbyists maybe... but... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Mature tools my ass (Score:4, Insightful)
See, OS kernels, compilers, word processors, and that kind of stuff are old hat now. There aren't any staggering breakthroughs being made in proportional-spacing algorithms these days. So OO.o, for example, has not too hard of a time creating a word processor that does just about anything anyone will ever need a word processor to do.
EDA is a whole different ball game. The leading-edge designs that people want to do are beyond the capabilities of the current software, even the software from the major vendors. Users need staggering breakthroughs, just to make the tools adequate for handling the user's current designs.
I'm not saying that open source can't compete here. But it's very different from "yeah, open source can build an OS that doesn't crash." That was a low bar that one particular vendor's stuff had a lot of problems with due to very bad design; OSS cleared that bar quite handily.
Two things that bug me... (Score:5, Insightful)
First, the developer's insistance that power pins on logic IC's be hardwired, in the symbol, to the nets 'VCC' 'VDD' 'VSS' 'GND' as appropriate. Heaven forbid I have a mixed voltage design or have multiple ground nodes.
Second, there seems to be no concept of scale to the components, or agreement as to how large a resistor should be relative to a transitor relative to the connection spacing on an IC. Capacitors and resistors appear larger than inductors, while all the descrite components, IMHO, are way to large compared to the connection spacing on IC's. This makes it hard to create a schematic that is clear and easy to read.
While the interface is really pretty good, they need to put quite a bit of work into the symbol library to make it especially useful.
Re:Great for hobbyists maybe... but... (Score:3, Insightful)
However, I think your bit about using vim or notepad to write webpages is a bit silly. While I agree that notepad would be pushing it, and being an emacs user myself, I'd like to say that vim is also pushing it, but let's get real. Real, professional web designers don't use stuff like Frontpage or its ilk. That's what unprofessional folks use. The typical web development flow is photoshop (or the GIMP, I guess) for design, which is then handed off to the implementor (who might be the same person) who typically writes all the HTML/CSS by hand (that is, with a plain text editor) and tweaks it until it displays properly on all supported browsers. We'd all love a program like Composer that produces clean, portable HTML/CSS, but unfortunately, these don't exist.
People that use Frontpage or Dreamweaver are almost exclusively non-professional folks. Professional web design companies (at least, all the ones I've worked with) have people that know design (these use photoshop) and people that know web development (these use a text editor). And that's how it's essentially always been.
I'm going to assume you don't know this. But you might be trolling...
Re:gEDA is still lacking a PCB editor... (Score:3, Insightful)
Good definition of the GPL.. (Score:2, Insightful)
[The GNU Public License] lets users download source code and do anything they want with it. But there are some ground rules if people start to distribute software commercially. For one, they have to make the source available.
That's not a bad way to describe the GPL. Just delete that word "commercially" and you've got a nice FUD-free synopsis... better than what I read in a lot of magazines like InfoWorld, etc.
Re:Hey asshole, (Score:3, Insightful)
This a very prevelant attitude, or perhaps prevelant within a vocal minority. It is however, a terrible attitude. True, we should be very grateful to those who pour their time and heart into the volunteer work that is most free software. If all developers hear is "oh that sucks", they will get discouraged. However, authors should welcome and encourage constructive criticism from users. A large part of designing an [interactive] tool is to observe people using it in an attempt to identify and understand the reasons behind common problems and design flaws so that the flaws may be eliminated. True, this is neither the domain nor the desire of every free software developer nor should it be. But to deride any criticism with the argument "well, it's free and open; fix it yourself" is pointless at best and extremely harmful at worst. When users are too discouraged or fearful to complain, bad software that is difficult to use is the result.
To developers: If you are not interested in user complaints that is fine. Please state this in your program documentation. We still thank you for your generous gifts as you give them. If you are interested in user complaints, please make this clear so as to not discourage potential insight from the users.
To designers: Please observe users and listen to and understand complaints; design usable software. We will thank you for your contributions.
To users: Be grateful, but do not let us go on in ignorance. We want to understand your problems.
Now we only need... (Score:2, Insightful)