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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!"
deal about "First Post", anyway?
/ obligatory
Acronym Overload!...My eyes!
!_!
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!
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?
It's good to use your head, but not as a battering ram.
The last time I had to design a circuit board, the boss told me to find a way to do it for free. We found some demo software on the internet that would print out samples of the board overlaid with a grid. (To remove grid, buy the software.) We then had to print to plastic and scrape the grid off with an exacto-knife.
While I no longer do this kind of work, I am pleased to see future generations will never have to worry about irrational demands from the boss. (right?)
Trying to use sarcasm in text-based forums does not work.
So how well do the OSS tools do with mixed-signal designs?
...athering steam with high album sales.
Oh and he is a cock sucker.
Never Underestimate the power of Geeks who are bored out of their mind!!
- Your stupidity got you into this mess, why can't it get you out? -Will Rogers
"The last time I had to design a circuit board, the boss told me to find a way to do it for free. "
Kids these days. We didn't have software in my day. We had to hand-crank our designs, and tape them out onto a piece of plastic.*
*Basically laying bits of plastic out onto a plastic grid, including wires.
Then there was the wirewrapping, and the heavy metal chassis. God, I miss the old days.
...ively entertainer.
Oh and she licks box.
never bitch about GPL software. The source is there, so either submit some patches or shut the fuck up. That's the GPL way.
...that should be Free as in "Piece of shit". Also, please refer to it as GNU/Hardware.
"Never Underestimate the power of Geeks who are bored out of their mind!!"
It's called "The Slashdot Effect".
Blah blah fucking blah.
Have I gotten on the lameness filter already?
Oh well, just in case... First kumquat!!!
(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.
omg gimp sux because it doesnt do everything photoshop does, everything gimp produces is amateurish and will never be as professional as anything made with photoshop, gimp is free only if your time is worthless, etc. kthxbye
omg gEDA sux because it doesnt do everything (some commercial product does), everything gEDA produces is amateurish and will never be as professional as anything made with (some commercial product), gEDA is free only if your time is worthless, etc. kthxbye
FUCK FUCK CUNT FUCKITY SHIT DAMNIT FUCK I WANT TO SEE BLOOD YOU COCKSUCKING FUCKS!_ _ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __
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http://www.dlharmon.com.nyud.net:8090/sbc.html http://ronja.twibright.com.nyud.net:8090/
... not yet ready for prime time. As a former engineer who's done work on many multi-signal, multi-layer boards, I can tell you there are reasons why "professional" design/cad software costs what it does. My congratulations go out to the developers, but let's not kid ourselves. No one's going to be jumping on this bandwagon unless they "have to." Just as only a handful of professional web designers would use notepad or vim for web page design, only a handful of hobbyists will use something like gEDA for serious designing.
I am lazy and don't want to look this all up myself if someone else already knows, so here is a question: Left over from my undergrad project, I have a FPGA (XC4010XL from Xilinx) plus prototype board (XS40 from XESS), and have used the Xilinx foundation tools to code up some nice VHDL designs under NT. How can I do similar design work under Linux? Will gEDA suffice? Or, will I need a slew of other tools? Any VHDL environments? Or maybe Verilog? Something else? Are any of you super-smart /.-ers doing this purely under linux?
10b||~10b -- aah, what a question!
I WANT TO SHOVE KNIVES UP THE TENDER ANUSES OF BABY FERRETS THEN LUSTFULLY DRINK THAT RECTAL AMBROSIA!
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For digital designs there is as yet no SystemC integration for Icarus verilog or a half way usable digital debugger/waveform viewer.
I know, you can use GTKwave but seriously, that tool is insanely slow and buggy and featureless. Their site got vandalized like two months ago and it never even got fixed (maybe in the last couple days). Icarus verilog is also slow although really surprisingly usable otherwise. Anyone who has used a professional environment would rather jump off a cliff than use these tools.
I also know that for Icarus you can use vpi to integrate systemC but that is just way too much work compared to what it takes to make these things work in other tools.
Very nice work but no where near good enough for real design. Hopefully in a couple years gEDA will really mature to where giant monopolies like Cadence will shrivel up and die (as they and their products deserve)
Honestly there is a real opportunity for either small companies or OSS efforts to rip the belly out of cadence and synopsis because their tools are not great either. However, they do everything you need to them to do in their own painful way. gEDA just isn't there yet.
Hate to say it but this is the most constructive comment posted in response to this subject thus far
Just some info about Ronja - it has inspired a lot of similar projects in Prague (it's all developed by quite small group of ppl in Czech Free Net - www.czfree.net) and there are already running some prototypes of Ronja or derived (non-GPL) projects on 100 Mbit optical data link!
Unfortunately, main Ronja HW developer - Karel Clock Kulhavy - is very "hard to communicate" man...
A CD distribution I know includes scripts to download gEDA from the net: they surely have more than 800 users.. so 800 downloads seems a pretty lame number.
about gSchem:
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.
Come test your mettle in the world of Alter Aeon!
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.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
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:
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.
Don't forget Electric, an open source VLSI tool written in java. Sun recently interviewed the author about the challenge of rewriting it in java. Here's the article (with download).
To be an effective AC, you should omit your picture next time.
-- "Makes Little Debbie look like a pile of puke!" - Moe Szyslak
But I actually have to deal with a jerk-off boss in academia who does expect us to design circuits without a budget to speak of.
They are some pretty crappy managers out there.
Protel, OrCAD 9, Eagle... none of these can hold a candle to the ease and simplicity of SDT/PCB386. Pretty much everything has dumped the use of FAST keyboard use to pointy-clicky insanity.
It ain't a word processor or spreadsheet, guys, it's electronic design. I can route by hand with a keyboard faster than I can with a mouse. pwb,cursor,cursor,cursor... piece of cake. Autorouters are getting better but still suck, IMO. And yes, I do new, modern designs (TSSOP, BGA and all the latest part forms, 6 layer boards, you name it.)
I did have PCB386 working under DOSEMU but I've since forgotten how I did it. SDT was working fine but PCB was giving me all kinds of issues. I wish I'd written it down, now I'm gonna have to go back and try to figure it out again. :-)
I haven't checked out gEDA in a long time, I wonder if they're following the path of the big boys (WIMP systems) or if they've come to the understanding that keyboard driven designs aren't dead, nor are they dying.
These guys are working on a linux based KVM-over-IP project with software and the hardware design being made available as open source. They have a Sourceforge project site too.
[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.
``Just as only a handful of professional web designers would use notepad or vim for web page design, only a handful of hobbyists will use something like gEDA for serious designing.''
Far more pros use vim than you might expect. Many of the tools available for web design have only recently become useful, and there's still not much that's very good for *nix. And yet, gazillions of web sites run on *nix, and many of those are built on *nix as well. Not all by a long shot, but lots.
/. readers should know that acting like a 13 year old, such as telling someone to 'go write code a-hole' will not help anyone switch to open source software.
I used gEDA (mostly gschem at that point) back in my sophomore year in high school, (what 4 years ago I guess) and I thought it worked well, very very well considering that it was in alpha at that point I believe. I was designing a fairly simple board to produce some basic square wave output to a speaker for a creative problem solving organization called Destination ImagiNation.
Of course, I wasn't designing a PC board to be etched, but just drawing the schematic up real nice. And it was by no means a professional project. But for my (extreme low-end) (we had a cost limit of about 100$ for the whole deal, of which my sound board was a very small part) use, it worked excellently, and there have been four years of development since!
Way to go!
SIGSEGV caught, terminating
wait... not that kind of sig.
Now we only need some place that can print the circuts once we design them, mabey even make your own custom pci cards, or opensource card designs
just because your a schizophrenic doesn't mean people arn't really out to get you
Maybe next time, use Google and look for "Free PCB Design Software"...
Next time? Did you read the part of my post about not doing this anymore? This was back in the mid 1990s. How useable were Protel, Orcad, Eagle, or PCB Express demos in 1995?
Trying to use sarcasm in text-based forums does not work.
Coming from the company that thinks little smoke icons are more important than an up-to-date simulation engine? A company whose gui is not only a pain to use, but also an insult to the user's intelligence? One that makes it difficult, even impossible to use the meager capabilities of that obsolete simulator? Have a look in the mirror, dude.
The EWB simulator is SPICE2 based. Berkley re-wrote SPICE2 into Spice3 many years ago, for many very good reasons. I consider EWB to be the unprofessional product. At least gEDA doesn't charge a four-figures per seat price tag, or lock customers into proprietary binary file formats.
See it. Tried it. Dumped it!
Anything that's comparable to Verilog and VirSim in their toolbox? What are peoples opions on icarus?
More the the point, Herman, where was Google in 1995? Are you even old enough to remember those days?
It may shock and amaze you to learn that there was a time BEFORE the WWW, and that up until about 1995-6, nobody except the geeks and some researchers gave a rats' ass. Hell, you probably weren't even aware of its existence unless you worked with it or were a Uni student.
Kids today. Think fucking Google can solve all their problems, anyway.
In 1995 the Protel demo was alive and well and was still a fully usable 30-day edition of the full software.
Of course Protel itself was nothing like it is now (it wasn't netlist-based, for a start) but it was better than what the OP described with his manual erasing of gridlines.
Does the Cadence license through Open EDA org work for the community? Will gEDA's ASCII based text files allow us to pick and choose from workflow tools, handle complex, high device count designs, and hand off finished designs to current fabs?
Am I too ambitious to hope that smart, open source folks can take Cadence up on its offer, and build robust (if slightly bell-and-whistle less) EDA tools on top of this (I can't believe they let it go open) db? After all the db is the essential component of any sophisticated EDA design flow system...
Obviously, the $250k + licenses for commerical tools keep a lot of folks out of the fabless EDA world, now...
"Knowing everything doesn't help..."
Look at alliance cad for vhdl compiler, simulator and related tools. It's gpl and there are binaries available for a variety of systems.
"When you sit with a nice girl for two hours, it seems like two minutes. When you sit on a hot stove for two minutes, it
Hello, I have been looking around for something to do simple logic testing, I am trying to learn Logic (Flip-flops, bit shifters, transistors, etc, etc, etc), I saw a tool in suse 9.1 that did exactly this but the name of it escapes me. Is there a free tool for windows to design and simulate what I'm trying to learn?
http://www.micromagic.com/
tools included: chip design (schematic capture), datapath compiler, full custom IC layout, and integrated layout system.
gEDA is targeting the casual hobbyist, not commercial users of multimillion-dollar layout software.
Unless this package has evolved hugely in the last year, I would not be interested. I originally compiled the FreeBSD port and was thoroughly unimpressed, so I deleted it. I suppose I am spoiled after having access for so long to Agilent and PSpice simulators.
Now, there are just too many low cost commercial packages now, and cheap enough that I am willing to shell out the cash. For example, Beige Bag software (www.beigebag.com) has an excellent integrated schematic capture and Spice sim engine for a couple hundred bucks. Also, 5Spice has an excellent schematic capture and Spice tool- it is designed for real power Spice users and costs less than $200. (www.5spice.com)
I suppose these GPL'd projects are useful in one huge way: they force the EDA makers to lower prices.
Sincerely, Rob.
One thing I like about eagle is that everything can be exported into a text based script - libraries, schematics, etc. This openness in the file format is one of the reasons I appreciate the software - if the source isn't open, at least the file formats are!
It's not wasting time, I'm educating myself.
and our company uses it far more than we use verilog...
btw, if you are editing vhdl, check out the Emacs mode for VHDL.
It's far more powerful than vhdl editing aids in any other editors I've used.
(And, yes, you *can* use GNU emacs in Windows too)
Hmmm... Maby I should have said 'was used in the class' He taught verilog. I couldn't even recognise VHDL code as such. I have only his (and others, mostly on /.) word that it is hard.
Laws are horrible moral guides, moral guides make even worse laws.