gEDA (GPL'ed Electronic Design) In EE Times

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!"

gEDA is still lacking a PCB editor...

[Lisandro]

... which, for me, it's a showstopper and forces me to use EAGLE (which is excellent and available for Windows and Linux, but not OSS). PCB [sourceforge.net] seems to be powerful, but i simply cannot get accostumed to it's interface.

The rest of the package is quite good though, and i have to agree, they've come a long way in these six years. Kudos to the developers!

Re:Mature tools my ass

[RealAlaskan]

We payed millions and didn't get a set of mature tools from the major EDA vendors. How are they expecting to develop the same with no budget?

Sounds as if the bar has been set pretty low. If the major vendors are giving you immature crap, these guys might be able to do better, even with zero budget.

It's sort of like the story of the software monopolist with the multi-billion dollar budget and the zero-budget, GPL operating system which might yet out-compete the monopolist's amazingly expensive OS.

Re:Hey asshole,

[Lisandro]

never bitch about GPL software. The source is there, so either submit some patches or shut the fuck up. That's the GPL way. I don't, i'm just pointing it out. I've used gEDAs' schematic capture and SPICE simulation and found both to be very mature (and useful). Like i said, it has evolved quite a lot. But a PCB designer is an integral part of a electronic design software; it's pretty sure anything you'll design on a computer will end up on a PCB. Sadly, gPCB was abandoned. I would like a PCB designer well integrated to the suite rather than a separate program, no matter how good.

It's a good project

[jd]

No question about it. I've been following it for a while. There are some hiccups (ngspice died for a few years, had one update in January, then seems to have died again) but that's easily fixed by getting it some publicity, so people know it's out there.

I would like gEDA to talk with the University of Manchester, who have some excellent electrical design software for asynchronous systems. They've a huge pool of software resources which nobody ever sees because there's no reason to think it might be out there. (There's a Freshmeat entry for one of their packages - guess who added it! - but half of those who last saw it on the front page have died of old age.)

There's a lot out there that could be used, pooled, collected and gathered. And, damnit, it should be. gEDA is doing a great job, but electrical engineering is a vey big field and gEDA doesn't cover more than a tiny fraction of the problem-space.

Open Source in EDA

[wannasleep]

Just few comments to clarify what we are talking about here

First of all, EDA (Electronic Design Automation) is a 30+ years old industry (maybe even 40+, but I wasn't born then). It spans tools whose cost goes from hundreds dollars to few hundred thousands dollars per license. It also spans several fields, from computer science, to systems theory, to physics, to micro-electronics, to chemistry, etc. etc.

The typical flows for a successfull tools are:

• a PhD student or his advisor has an idea, writes papers about it and maybe even implements it. Then he starts a company and they make milions with it. Synopsys and Cadence (the two biggest players of the market) were started like that.
• The same people have an idea and actually have a full implementation and they sustain the basic research. The tool is put in open source fashion (rarely is GPL'd) and every company can modify it. The shiniest example is SPICE [berkeley.edu]. The first version was written more than 30 years ago. Berkeley still owns it and everybody implements variants that are more or less compatible. Either Commercial eda tools (HSPICE, spectre, eldo, adssim) or proprietary implementations that are used within a company (TI spice, ST spice, motorola own spice, etc.). Analog design wouldn't exist without spice.
• Companies try to dominate the market. They figure out that they need to develop and control a platform. They make it open source (of course all its products work on it, more or less). An example is Cadence with open access [si2.org]. The idea of course is opposed by competitors who try to pass their own platform. Eventually they will reach an agreement

Of course, there are plenty of others, like magma's case and also plenty of unsuccessfull ventures, but in general EDA has benefitted a lot from open source, and some of the biggest names in the university are still open source fans.

Re:gEDA is still lacking a PCB editor...

[Lisandro]

Didn't mean to diss, sorry.

My main quirk is the lack of integration with the rest of gEDA - on interface and other issues; for example, on EAGLE i can modify a schematic on the capture program and have the changes reflected automatically on the PCB design, and viceversa.

Having said that, i've just emerged PCB v1.99 (i can't recall the last version i've tried, but it was a while ago). It seems to have got quite better. I have some single-sided boards to design and will give it a shot - complete with feedback from the user experience. I was planning to dicth the EAGLE schematic capture part anyway, so gEDA seems like a good starting point.

PS: Don't mind assholes like me. I've said it before: this is a powerful program indeed; thank you for working on it for free.

Re:gEDA is still lacking a PCB editor...

[dj.delorie]

i can modify a schematic on the capture program and have the changes reflected automatically on the PCB design, and viceversa.

Funny you should mention that, we were recently pondering how to do that. If you've got ideas or experience with annotation files, we could use the help ;-)

Re:Great for hobbyists maybe... but...

[Long-EZ]

...only a handful of hobbyists will use something like gEDA for serious designing

That may be true... this week. But many people said the same sort of thing about Linux, and it's running tons of servers now and is rapidly making inroads on the desktop. Firefox is currently devouring Internet Explorer market share. OpenOffice.org is a great alternative to M$ Office. There are plenty of other examples.

You may be missing the point of open source software. By empowering users, any code that is used is inevitably improved. A critical mass phenomenon occurs where the more users there are, the faster the improvements occur.

EDA is a market that is definitely large enough to prosper as open source, especially given that a large percentage of the EDA users are geeks willing to add to or improve the code. gEDA seems poised to be THE open source EDA solution.

I use the Linux version of Eagle [cadsoftusa.com], and I like it. I particularly like the autorouter. But it won't be long until gEDA will have an improved user interface, integrated PCB layout, an autorouter, etc. In other words, it'll be a full featured open source alternative to commercial EDA software, with none of the annual update fees and licensing hassles.

I expected open source software would be free, but I was most impressed by the way open source felt. It's hard to describe, but when I wasn't forced to scroll through a 140 KB end user licensing agreement and then suffer through a lot of copy protection crap during the installation, I felt like the programmers were on my side. I'm not opposed to people making money from software, but open source is a lot friendlier to the user, and that attitude carries over into everyday aspects such as open file formats that make it easier to export and translate data or share my work with other people, as opposed to proprietary data formats designed to lock in customers and ensure a steady revenue stream by maintaining a de facto software standard based solely on marketing.

There are too many advantages of open source for it not to be a dominant force in the immediate future of computing.

Re:Mature tools my ass

[bit01]

I'm not really serious about this stuff, I'm just screwing around. I hope someone has a use for a logic cell that doesn't clock too well at yesteryear's bus speeds. Oh darn it, this poly menu is grayed out again, what do I do now? And why is that square on my screen red again? Welp, gotta run off to my shift at 7-11!

Reinterpretation:

For engineers who are not commercial software bigots. They use good software where they can find it and recognise that the software industry is becoming increasingly commoditised. Open source and freeware is simply statistics; with 6,000,000,000+ people in the world and with widely used software it is statistical certainty that somebody somewhere will have both the means and the motivation to create good free/open software for use by others. And once it's been done once, it can be copied millions of times; the multiplier effect is enormous.

---

It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work.
It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons.
Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.