[Noisebridge-discuss] More fun designing printed circuits tonight at the EagleCAD workshop

[Tymm Twillman]

Hi Felipe,

I'm happy to share some of my experience... this is based on trying gEDA some months ago, but if I remember right, the issues I've had have been primarily:

- work flow: needing to export from one tool, import into another has been a lot more work than it should be
-- especially because changes become really hard to deal with; e.g. changing one part, or even a connection, means a lot of work.  changing a package can really suck.
-- likewise, forward & back-annotation (change something on the board layout and it's reflected in the schematic, and vice-versa, without re-import) is really important... and at least was non-existant with gEDA then

- Libraries... despite lack of quality control w/Eagle libraries (even the ones they distribute) there are lots of them available.

- I remember the UI being difficult.  Not that it's easy with Eagle (downright stupid in lots of places really), but I put in my time learning Eagle before gEDA was even around; now I need to know there's a good likelihood that my efforts will be rewarded if I decide to switch

- OSX, my main platform presently, is not a well supported OS for gEDA (or at least it wasn't when I last checked).  Everything was beta and considered to be likely to break.


I do have to say, the quality of boards I've seen come out of gEDA has been really impressive... but the times I've spent playing with it haven't been very productive, and it's been a bit disappointing.  Admittedly if I didn't already know Eagle fairly well, I probably would have put more time into it.

Thanks,

-Tymm


On Dec 14, 2010, at 12:04 AM, Felipe Sanches wrote:

> hello, Noisebridge friends,
> 
> It really annoys me to observe this trend in adoption of EagleCAD. Even the hackers working on Open Hardware (as I could confirm during the Open Hardware Summit earlier this year in New York) are using proprietary sw tools to create their PCBs.
> 
> As a free software activist, I am concerned about the issue and I would like to better understand it. I'd like to understand what are the specific features that the free sw EDA tools lack nowadays so that I can eventually sit down and code.
> 
> But sometimes I feel that perhaps there might not be really a clear and concious reasoning for users adopting Eagle. I mean... perhaps this is just a cultural thing: people using Eagle just because other people are doing so (and sharing eagle files, organizing workshops about it, etc, etc, etc.)
> 
> Yesterday I sent a short message about it in response to somebody releasing eagle cad files for one of the OpenDoor Hackaton projects. Somebody else judged that my message was not adequate and that I should do something instead of criticizing other people's work. ("If you think you can do better, then please do!") I think that I did not make myself clear by sending just a short, quick message. So that's why I'm sending this longer explanation of my intentions. It is to make clear that my intentions are not to criticise the work of a specific hacker, but instead to criticise this general culture of adopting proprietary tools in hackerspaces (and/or in open hardware projetcs). And also would like to make it clear that my intentions are indeed to actively "do something better" myself by trying to organize a task force for mapping the current issues in free sw EDA tools and then recruiting a team of hackers to put our hands in actual coding.
> 
> I have done something similar for the issue of proprietary architechture&engineering CAD tools (such as AutoCAD) and the result has been the creation of the GNU LibreDWG project ( http://www.gnu.org/software/libredwg/ ). I hope that the experience I got from working on this kind of approach towards software freedom could be useful in the case of massive adoption of EagleCAD too.
> 
> Happy Hacking,
> Felipe "Juca" Sanches
> Garoa Hacker Clube, São Paulo - Brazil
> 
> On Tue, Dec 14, 2010 at 1:47 AM, Jonathan Foote <jtfoote at ieee.org> wrote:
> Last week we went over the basics of EagleCAD, tonight we will see how
> far we can get designing a simple board.
> 7:00 in the couch area, see you there.
> 
> If you missed last week. no worries, you can catch up pretty quickly:
> bring a laptop with EagleCAD installed
> (details here:  https://www.noisebridge.net/wiki/EagleCAD_workshop) or
> just watch how it works on the big screen.
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