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

Jonathan Foote jtfoote at ieee.org
Tue Dec 14 17:25:17 UTC 2010


Juca,

Thanks for the note, and your contibutions to the open-source community!

I would personally prefer to use open-source PCB tools, but I'm not
doctrinaire enough to shun good tools for purely ideological reasons.

The reason I use EagleCAD is mostly historical. A few years ago, there
simply wasn't an open-source option. (And though I'm sure it's
improved since then, when I last looked at them a few years back,
KiCad and gEDA were simply not ready for prime time -- in particular
the pars libraries were particularly malnourished --  and the fact
that gEDA was not multiplatform like Eagle was another hindrance. )

Eagle is not completely closed in that it has a Turing-complete
scripting language; should I ever need to move my designs into another
format I could theoretically write an export script. And this means
there's a great ecology of 2nd party applications: there are lots of
openly available scripts that create, for example, 3D views and CAM
files for fabrication.

Having said that, EagleCAD has been making noises  about
interoperability and text export since their purchase by Element14;
check out this post by open hardware advocate Phil Torrone:
http://www.element-14.com/community/message/15751




On Tue, Dec 14, 2010 at 12:04 AM, Felipe Sanches <juca at members.fsf.org> 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.
>> _______________________________________________
>> Noisebridge-discuss mailing list
>> Noisebridge-discuss at lists.noisebridge.net
>> https://www.noisebridge.net/mailman/listinfo/noisebridge-discuss
>
>
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>



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