good free PCB software

[Michael A. Terrell]

Better yet....a 4 letter word.... w a l k .

Three miles each way on a busy highway, no sidewalks and use my
cane? You're insane.


--
Service to my country? Been there, Done that, and I've got my DD214 to
prove it.
Member of DAV #85.

Michael A. Terrell
Central Florida

 

[Robert Baer]

I have a working PDP8/E in my shop... I probably ought to
turn it on sometime, and see if it is still working, or if
my memory of its working is just nostalgia.

I would sure like to find a nice Tektronix 4010 (or 4012),
or ASR33 to go with the 8/E... Something about using a Pentium
laptop with 20G HD to act as a terminal for a PDP8/E
bothers me.

-Chuck

I know someone with a KSR38 (if i have the number correct); it is a
*wide* carriage version.
It is in Visalia CA and free for the asking.

 

[Robert Baer]

Three miles each way on a busy highway, no sidewalks and use my
cane? You're insane.

You need the exercise; good for the heart and the body.
I walk 3 miles in about 30 minutes on a good day, and about 45
minutes if lazy.

 

[joseph2k]

You need the exercise; good for the heart and the body.
I walk 3 miles in about 30 minutes on a good day, and about 45
minutes if lazy.

If you had read the post, try walking 3 miles when you require a cane or two
just to walk at all.

 

[Michael A. Terrell]

You need the exercise; good for the heart and the body.
I walk 3 miles in about 30 minutes on a good day, and about 45
minutes if lazy.

Good for you. I can no longer walk more than 1/4 mile, and I sure as
hell can't carry 50 pounds or more for three miles. I am gasping for
air and ready to faint if I try to push it too far. Two years ago I
could walk to the entrance of my subdivision (1/2 mile), rest on a bench
at the Church on the corner for a half hour and walk back home. If you
live long enough you will have health problems, as well.

I am 54, and 100% disabled. Six years ago I was in decent health. I
was working full time in aerospace electronics, and spending hours a day
on my feet. Some days its all that I can do to walk to the bathroom,
and I have to do that barefoot, because I have a very poor sense of
balance.


--
Service to my country? Been there, Done that, and I've got my DD214 to
prove it.
Member of DAV #85.

Michael A. Terrell
Central Florida

 

[Michael A. Terrell]

If you had read the post, try walking 3 miles when you require a cane or two
just to walk at all.

Not to mention in traffic that is moving at 55 MPH. It is along Hwy.
441, south of Ocala. No sidewalks, and some places you would have to
walk on the asphalt to go around fenced off retention ponds.


--
Service to my country? Been there, Done that, and I've got my DD214 to
prove it.
Member of DAV #85.

Michael A. Terrell
Central Florida

 

[Rich the Philosophizer]

Good for you. I can no longer walk more than 1/4 mile, and I sure as
hell can't carry 50 pounds or more for three miles. I am gasping for
air and ready to faint if I try to push it too far. Two years ago I
could walk to the entrance of my subdivision (1/2 mile), rest on a bench
at the Church on the corner for a half hour and walk back home. If you
live long enough you will have health problems, as well.

I am 54, and 100% disabled. Six years ago I was in decent health. I
was working full time in aerospace electronics, and spending hours a day
on my feet. Some days its all that I can do to walk to the bathroom,
and I have to do that barefoot, because I have a very poor sense of
balance.

Have you contemplated alternative approaches?

Here's an idea:
http://healingtowholeness.com/

It involves mind control, a lot like hypnosis, but it's working for
me.

Good Luck!
Rich

 

[Joel Kolstad]

Have you contemplated alternative approaches?

I have first dibs on hiring Michael if he does recover.

 

[JeffM]

I have first dibs on hiring Michael if he does recover.

....but will he move from sub-tropical small town
to a big city in the rain forest?

 

[The Real Andy]

Just took a brief look - very interesting. I have a few questions I didn't
notice while glancing through:

1. Is there any way to back annotate pcb changes to the schematic?

2. Does the pcb have full DRC?

3. Can it generate a BOM?

Regards,

Mike Monett

Antiviral, Antibacterial Silver Solution:
http://silversol.freewebpage.org/index.htm
SPICE Analysis of Crystal Oscillators:
http://silversol.freewebpage.org/spice/xtal/clapp.htm
Noise-Rejecting Wideband Sampler:
http://www3.sympatico.ca/add.automation/sampler/intro.htm

I had a play with geda the other day. It is free, so I guess one cant
complain, but the interface is just plain horrible and unproductive.
Add to that its like using the old dos protel.

 

[DJ Delorie]

but the interface is just plain horrible and unproductive.

Could you be more specific?

 

[Joel Kolstad]

...but will he move from sub-tropical small town
to a big city in the rain forest?

Small city (Grants Pass/Rogue River in Southern Oregon) and not nearly as wet
as Portland (which is actually considered a downside by some... there's a big
sign downtown across one of the main streets here that says, "It's the
Climate!" -- the running joke is that it's actually an apology ).

I've lived in the Willamete Valley in Oregon for the past 12 years now, from
one end of the state to the other, and I've always been quite pleased with the
climate.

 

[Ian Bell]

I had a play with geda the other day. It is free, so I guess one cant
complain, but the interface is just plain horrible and unproductive.
Add to that its like using the old dos protel.

Try kicad, it is also free but has a much better UI.

http://www.lis.inpg.fr/realise_au_lis/kicad/index.html

Ian

 

[Ales Hvezda]

Could you be more specific?

Yes, as DJ points out, some specifics would be nice.

* Which of the "geda" program(s) did you try?
* Which version?
* What platform/OS did you run it on?
* What was wrong with it?

This information would better help us understand why "the interface
is plain horrible and unproductive". The interface takes a little
time to get used to, but once you are familiar with it, the interface
is quite unintrusive.

It seems kind of silly, odd, and rather unproductive to post a short
negative quib and then not respond for more info requests. Especially
since constructive bug/usability reports are taken seriously by myself
and the other gEDA developers.

-Ales

 

[jasen]

I still use Borland Sprint as my main editor. It was released in
1988, and was designed to run on a 4.77MHz 8088 with several hundred
k of ram. It runs fine on modern cpu's.

The nice thing is it uses macros which you write yourself. I now
have the world's fastest and most powerful editor.

no, emacs is the worlds most powerful editor... at 30+MB it's a bit
larger than sprint though,

It can open 26
files simultaneously, and it autodetects all the different file
types, such as html, Pascal, Assembly, C, plain ascii text, email,
etc.

only 26?
emacs has an entire usenet client (gnus) written it its scripting language,
(some sort of LISP) also a couple of games (incl eliza and tetris)

This means I can use the same function key to perform the same
function, such as formatting a paragraph. For example, F4 formats
this entire message in square justification. In Pascal and C, the
same function key indents each line to identify blocks of code, like
this:

having a good text editor is handy

Bye.
Jasen

 

[Mike Monett]

no, emacs is the worlds most powerful editor. At 30+MB it's a bit
larger than sprint though,

Sprint has a macro package to emulate Emacs as well as a dozen other
editors. I prefer the old Wordstar keyboard commands, probably
because that's what I started with.

I cannot believe software can require tens of megabytes. That cannot
all be executable code. There has to be other things that take up
all that room, such as images or old leftover code.

only 26?

That's about three times as many as I can keep track of at once

emacs has an entire usenet client (gnus) written it its scripting
language, (some sort of LISP) also a couple of games (incl eliza
and tetris)

I can play the Towers of Hanoi

having a good text editor is handy

Jasen

Regards,

Mike Monett

Antiviral, Antibacterial Silver Solution:
http://silversol.freewebpage.org/index.htm
SPICE Analysis of Crystal Oscillators:
http://silversol.freewebpage.org/spice/xtal/clapp.htm
Noise-Rejecting Wideband Sampler:
http://www3.sympatico.ca/add.automation/sampler/intro.htm

 

[Chuck Harris]

Sprint has a macro package to emulate Emacs as well as a dozen other
editors. I prefer the old Wordstar keyboard commands, probably
because that's what I started with.

Emulating the key stroke commands of emacs is hardly at all like emulating
emacs.

I cannot believe software can require tens of megabytes. That cannot
all be executable code. There has to be other things that take up
all that room, such as images or old leftover code.

There are no images in emacs, and the code is all real. Go check out
the source, it is all open and available to you.

-Chuck

 

[Joel Kolstad]

I cannot believe software can require tens of megabytes. That cannot
all be executable code. There has to be other things that take up
all that room, such as images or old leftover code.

EMACS is often described as more like an operating system that happens to
use a text editor as its "desktop." Of that 30MB, for the average person
editing a text file, probably something under 300kB is being "exercised."

 

[jasen]

Sprint has a macro package to emulate Emacs as well as a dozen other
editors.

does the macro package include a full lisp interpreter? ;^>

I prefer the old Wordstar keyboard commands, probably
because that's what I started with.

I cannot believe software can require tens of megabytes. That cannot
all be executable code. There has to be other things that take up
all that room, such as images or old leftover code.

there's a gui but only a few kilobytes of images are involved in that,
there's the on-line help 1700K of compressed files.

the binary itself is over 4 megabytes, containg a lisp interpreter and an
editor with both gui and console modes,

by far the bulk of the package is the extensions written in emacs-lisp.

28 'games',
an email client
a bunch of network plugins
a bunch of different text editing modes , sgml, roff, tex, etc...
support for 21 different programming languages, from ada to VHDL
a usenet client (gnus - occasionally i've seen it in peoples header lines)
modes for different (human) languages (apparently no special mode for klingon yet)

losts of stuff I don't even know about...

I can play the Towers of Hanoi

got that too. life, pong, blackbox, etc...
it just whipped me in a game of gomoku.

 

[Mike Monett]

EMACS is often described as more like an operating system that
happens to use a text editor as its "desktop." Of that 30MB, for
the average person editing a text file, probably something under
300kB is being "exercised."

Apparently a great deal of code is devoted to handling images and
fonts for different languages. That might take some space, but it's
still difficult to see how that could add up to 30 megs.

The basic idea of extensibility is the key advantage. Here is a 1981
paper by Richard Stallman, describing the design of the original
Emacs:

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
EMACS is a real-time display editor which can be extended by the
user while it is running.

Extensibility means that the user can add new editing commands or
change old ones to fit his editing needs, while he is editing.
EMACS is written in a modular fashion, composed of many separate
and independent functions. The user extends EMACS by adding or
replacing functions, writing their definitions in the same
language that was used to write the original EMACS system. We will
explain below why this is the only method of extension which is
practical in use: others are theoretically equally good but
discourage use, or discourage nontrivial use.

Extensibility makes EMACS more flexible than any other editor.
Users are not limited by the decisions made by the EMACS
implementors. What we decide is not worth while to add, the user
can provide for himself. He can just as easily provide his own
alternative to a feature if he does not like the way it works in
the standard system.

A coherent set of new and redefined functions can be bound into a
library so that the user can load them together conveniently.
Libraries enable users to publish and share their extensions,
which then become effectively part of the basic system. By this
route, many people can contribute to the development of the
system, for the most part without interfering with each other.
This has led the EMACS system to become more powerful than any
previous editor.

http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/emacs-paper.html

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Sprint is also an extensible editor that runs in DOS. You can write
your own macros and make it do whatever you want. You can exchange
macros with other users and take advantage of the time they spent
debugging their code.

This is much better than editors with canned instructions that you
cannot change.

Regards,

Mike Monett

Antiviral, Antibacterial Silver Solution:
http://silversol.freewebpage.org/index.htm
SPICE Analysis of Crystal Oscillators:
http://silversol.freewebpage.org/spice/xtal/clapp.htm
Noise-Rejecting Wideband Sampler:
http://www3.sympatico.ca/add.automation/sampler/intro.htm