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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.
Last time I looked, gEDA had no support for VHDL. There is a GHDL project that is sort of useful, for simulation only. For FPGA synthesis, you're pretty much stuck with the Xilinx (or other commercial) tools. Xilinx webpack is available for free (though it's limited), and I've heard that the command line utilities can be made to run under wine. There are also linux versions of the tools, but I don't know if they have the same availability as Webpack.
B4. What tools are frequently requested but are not going to be developed?
These tools are frequently requested, but will not be developed unless somebody steps up for the challenge.
o IC/ASIC designer.
o A VHDL/Verilog simulator.
The FreeHDL project will create a free VHDL simulator which gEDA will use.
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!
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).
[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.
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.