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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!"
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?
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
"Never Underestimate the power of Geeks who are bored out of their mind!!"
It's called "The Slashdot Effect".
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.
(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.
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!
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...
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!
what, you mean like this?
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).
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.
[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.
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.
``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.
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.
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.
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 $250k + licenses for commerical tools keep a lot of folks out of the fabless EDA world, now...
"Knowing everything doesn't help..."
Look at alliance cad for vhdl compiler, simulator and related tools. It's gpl and there are binaries available for a variety of systems.
"When you sit with a nice girl for two hours, it seems like two minutes. When you sit on a hot stove for two minutes, it
http://www.micromagic.com/
tools included: chip design (schematic capture), datapath compiler, full custom IC layout, and integrated layout system.
God help us if nuclear reactors are controlled with WinXP! Brings a whole new meaning to "blue screen of death"!
I'd add that some software, free and commercial, is not only useless, it is worse than useless in that it soaks up the time of the user without warning for no return.
In those circumstances I have no problem complaining about the fact that it is time stealing.
If it is well documented that it is in an unusable state before download/purchase then no problem.
---
It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work.
It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons.
Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
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 $200. (www.5spice.com)
I suppose these GPL'd projects are useful in one huge way: they force the EDA makers to lower prices.
Sincerely, Rob.
Sir,
Thank you for posting to "$project$-dev." While we appreciate that clueless trolls like yourself have nothing better to do than to agrivate our $project$'s users in the "$project$-dev" list, we would appreciate it if you would please buy a clue.
We feel sorry for the poor users of $project$ because they cannot afford to type the entire word "for," nor can they afford lower case letters to use in their subject line, and as package maintainers, we would very much like to help this segment of our community.
We note that while you say that because $project$ uses $license$, which is an OSI approved open source license, that you feel users should "fix it themselves," however we're compelled to note that we have yet to receive even one fix from any person posting to this list, while it's clear there are a good number of people with legitimate complaints.
And so we, the core developers of "$project$" ask that you please quit suggesting that users should not complain about $license$ software until you are willing to make a useful contribution yourself.
In the mean time, please feel free to use Paypal to donate to the user who cannot afford a complete set of keys.
Dave Bacher
$project-position$
$project$ $version$
If your code is acting bloated, and is running rather slow, it's likely and predicted that some loops you will unroll.
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.