Re: Has anyone produced a board using Kicad?

Hi Stuart,

I'm also doing open source work in my free time, with very little
outside help, even though some three dozen people have asked to join
the project, and most have since been "fired" for failing to contribute
even at a discussion level (and there are a few more likely to be fired
for the same reason soon). Potentially helpful developers are certain
to look at the long list, and falsely assume there are enough people
for the project. http://sourceforge.net/projects/fpgac

The difference is that I listen very carefully to my users comments,
and suggestions, rather than argue with them that should should settle
for less, take it or leave it. I see the project as a reflection on my
skills, as the ability to do a reasonable job at real life projects
too. FpgaC has a long way to go to be commercial quality, and my goals
are nothing short of that, despite it's current (and numerous) short
commings.

I believe that hobbiests and small businesses (IE consultants) should
have access to EDA tools too ... without a $30K budget for a netlist C
compiler that has usable synthesis ability. Ditto for quality spice,
schematic, and pcb tools. When our imagination is limited by our tools
budget, our home projects, and the contracts we can bid for, are
severely limited to "toy" sized projects.

There are many, and the most notable, open source projects that don't
strive to produce a toy operating system, a toy compiler, a toy word
processor, a toy windowing system, but full featured industrial
strength projects every developer that contributes to can be proud of.

Stuart Brorson wrote:
* From your experience, can you quantify how large a design must be
before it begins to hit memory limits when using gEDA/PCB? How many
nets/components? This information would be interesting to the
developers. (Or if your observations are about general computer
performance as opposed to gEDA/PCB, perhaps you could make that clear,
so we don't worry about possible performance enhancements we might
make?)

You know your design better than anyone else ... how many parts and
line segments will fit in a 128K or 256K or 512K L2/L3 cache? While it
might not seem a problem with a highly interactive (human is the major
delay) application, consider that it will be a problem as soon as you
start doing things to actually save the human time ... like
autorouting, or assisted drawing by dragging a rat, etc ... where
waling your lists will flush the caches and severely compete with X
that also has large memory requirements.

The GTK version of PCB has been "useless" for a year, and still is
today, because it generates 10-80 second delays with the mouse locked
up refreshing a drawing of a modest sized board. The older Xaw and the
current Lesstiff based version don't have that problem .... so the GTK
version pretty much is for toy designs only. Much of this delay is
memory thrashing.

The thought behind gEDA should be to build commercial quality tools,
capable of real design layouts ... motherboards, complex PCI I/O cards,
complex embedded systems designs, so that home hobbiests and small
businesses/consultants designs are not limited by their budget for
tools.

* As for making schematic capture and layout separate threads of the
same process: they weren't designed together, don't share
datastructures or an API, and so therefore integration represents a
lot of work.

I believe in do it once right. The more energy that you put into doing
it in a way that can not be used to do it right, is actually wasted in
the long term and of very little real value in that respect. If you
decide to limit your portion of gEDA to toy sized projects, someone
else someday will have the vision to replace your work completely, and
do it right. You create your own legacy with open source.

At the level of interoperability, the schematic capture program and
the layout program work great together. But they're not the same
program, and combining them into one program is not only difficult,
but is not necessarily a good thing. This is basically a FAQ:

depends certainly on your goals ... I face people every day that argue
for substandard, sometimes with very valid reasons from their
viewpoints. I also actively help others that set much higher goals, as
my time is not wasted, and the end product will be worth having my name
on.

Therefore, this business about "better integration" is just nonsense.

Actually, I don't think so ... but you are doing the job ... do it your
way, and people will certainly remember you for it.

* As for this business about "toy student projects", my experience is
that a good chunk of boards are of the 6" x 8" 4-6 layer type, both in

I'm glad most major open source developers are not that short sighted,
or else linux, gcc, gnu tools, mozilla/firefox, open office, etc ...
would all be toys and not really usable as they are today.

My answer to you is: Which to you prefer, shelling out a few
thousand $$$ for a better computer to run a powerful open-source
design suite, or shelling out tens of thousands of $$$ to run a secret
source design suite (likely requiring a high-end work station anyway)?

It has never been either/or .... for Linux, for gcc, for gnu tools, for
mozilla/firefox, for open office, for KDE/Gnome, and hundreds of other
high quality open source projects whose commercial counter parts where
also very expensive just a decade a go.

* Finally, I'll point out that gEDA/PCB is an open-source project, so
people interested in new features are always welcome to submit patches
for incorporation into the code base. We get a large number of people
complaining about one or another imagined misfeature in the gEDA
suite. However, the ratio of code patches to suggestions/complaints
is pitifully small. I sometimes tell the folks with suggestions: A
patch is worth a thousand suggestions.

not imagined ... from experience .... and from that experience I've
learned that when someone sets their sights for barely good enough,
they will always fail. When someone sets their sights very high, with
excellent standards, even when they miss the mark, what they have
produced will always be very noteworthy and worth the effort to finish
using the same high standards by others.

.