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Nice Remixed Drawdio (originally developed by Jay Silver & adafruit industries). The kit is also available in the Maker Shed and moving fast!
As a simple gEDA/PCB example I did a remix of Drawdio using the ladyada schematic. The documentation file contains plots of the schematic and pcb layouts, embedded datasheets of all components used, BOM and component lists. Line items in the BOM and component list hyperlink to the appropriate datasheet. The tarball contains the schematic and PCB source files.
John, the maker of this remix is hardcore on the open source hardware tool front "You can't create open hardware with closed EDA tools" -- how many folks here use gEDA for PCB'ing?
Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories uses gEDA. We've been advocating for using open source software for creating open hardware for a while now, and it's good to see more folks showcasing it.
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I know of some introductions to using Eagle, and therefore I've experimented a little with that. Are there any existing equivalent tutorials for gEDA/PCB.
I am completely in favor of using the most open toolchain I can. I just need to learn how to do so.
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The main gEDA page (http://www.geda.seul.org/) has links for new users to wiki, tutorial and FAQ.
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I tried to use gEDA, but it's one of those things where it says "in order to install gEDA, first you need to install X, Y, and Z" and you go to the page for X and it says "in order to install X, you need to install A, B, and C", and then you give up because you have better things to do than install a new program when you've got one that already works (Eagle).
If a program is that hard to install, how fun is it going to be to use?
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I tried to use gEDA, but it's one of those things where it says "in order to install gEDA, first you need to install X, Y, and Z" and you go to the page for X and it says "in order to install X, you need to install A, B, and C", and then you give up because you have better things to do than install a new program when you've got one that already works (Eagle).
If a program is that hard to install, how fun is it going to be to use?
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Forget about gEDA on OS X -- it's a dependency nightmare and doesn't build. (One of the dependencies is guile, whose maintainer is vehemently anti-Apple so he's sabotaged the distribution to not work on Darwin.)
And once you get it installed (I got it going on a Linux box), I found that I really didn't like the schematic capture's "Look and feel," I hated the library scheme, and most important, PCB doesn't have some useful features, like showing the netname in a pad.
The competitor to gEDA is Kicad, which does install under OS X but crashes when you try to close it.
The truth is that the open-source EDA packages have a long way to go before they're on par with commercial packages. I guess if you're doing two-layer boards, they're OK, but for anything else, they're a problem.
Sure, I know, it's open source, so contribute and fix the problems and all of that, but I'm not a programmer. I'm an engineer with work to do.
(FWIW, I hate hate HATE Eagle's interface.)
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Actually gEDA installs and runs quite well on OS X. There's a fink package so you don't need to actually screw with all the dependencies-- just let it chug on its own for some hours to take care of all that stuff.
Also: @ thunderhammer: Eagle is kilodollar commercial software; don't be fooled into thinking otherwise. An Eagle file may be free as in beer, but it's *never* free as in speech.
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I do all my electronics design work with gEDA.. That is mostly power converters and controllers for marine renewables. I'm a gEDA / PCB developer, so the fact I use it is hardly surprising.
To install is simple.. Use Ubuntu (or any other main-stream distro), and use its native package manager.
Its not out yet, but the graphics and general look+feel in the upcoming 1.6 release series of gEDA are _loads_ better than previous versions.
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Thanks Make! for mentioning gEDA, and many thanks to the developers of gEDA. I'm not going to try and fill anyone's head with romantic notions about how it will prevent baldness or improve your golf swing; but gEDA is in fact capable of serious work. It produces output in open, human-readable formats (and a few others). And, it is very flexible, albeit at the expense of ease-of-use. Unfortunately, there's no "easy button" for the Schematics, Documentation, PCB creation process. It is easy to install in Ubuntu though, two-clicks from Synaptic and you're on your way.
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gEDA and KiCad are really cool open source EDAs. Folks may also want to check out Fritzing: http://fritzing.org
We are targeting the less experienced users and small project makers, who can then graduate to gEDA and KiCad. We are still in Beta but it's already pretty usable. Try it out!
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