gEDA and Electronic Design

I use the gEDA suite of tools for electronic design, simulation, and circuit board layout as a hobby. (See the gEDA project home page.)

Table of Contents

PCB Footprint Update Plug-in

I have written a PCB plug-in that adds the ability to replace existing footprints in your layout with updated footprints, something that (as of this writing) is not directly supported by PCB itself.

You can read about the plug-in and download it here.

PCB Footprint Scripting Library

I have written a Guile Scheme library for creating PCB footprints with scripts.

You can read about it here.

Component Renumbering Script

It seems like everyone writes their own component numbering scripts for gEDA. Mine is called yar—"Yet Another Renumbering" script, written in Guile Scheme. Some interesting features include:

• Automatic numbering for components broken into separate logical symbols.
• Keyword substitution.

You can read about it here.

Handling Hierarchy and Repeating Schematic Blocks

When designing a circuit board, there are often subsets of a design that get repeated over and over. I have settled on a technique for handling this situation that has worked well for me.

You can read about it here.

coLinux

Many years ago I was able to build some of the gEDA tools under Windows with the help of Cygwin. At the time it was (for me) a painful process both in the initial building and in keeping up with version changes and their changing dependencies. In the end I settled for running gEDA under GNU/Linux.

I presume it is much easier to do today—there are even instructions on how to do it! In any case, I've stuck with using GNU/Linux for electronic design.

As an experiment, I installed coLinux under Window XP, and once coLinux was configured properly it was pretty easy to build a fully functional gschem and PCB. While I only used this setup briefly, I documented the steps I took.

You can read about it here.