Are there simple line-powered MP3 recorders?

No, too complicated. Instead, it is a USB enabled PIC project, with an MP3 encoder/decoder chip to do the heavy lifting, and a decent front end with mike/line inputs and line outputs (balanced and unbalanced...)

Charlie

On a sunny day (Tue, 04 Nov 2008 12:54:10 -0800) it happened Joerg wrote in :

Wow I admire you. In spite of all the related posting here about geda, and I even downloaded a complete CD some years ago with a distro + geda, I never got it to work...

Many years ago, say 15 or so, kernel 0.9X, I had a command prompt, and the only help was a book I bought about Unix in the eighties.

Then the file structure... X11, but it was so much better then DOS with win3.1 on top, and it had a free compiler, great. And no memory limits like DOS, and great networking.

But Unix, or Linux, is a never ending learning process.

I do use the 'PCB' program sometimes, very neat thing.

Maybe not, but think of the satisfaction you'll get from a job well done.

:-)

Cheers! Rich

Well, it does work. But a CAD program lives or dies with symbol editing and that's where it gets a bit hokey. That is what I am working on now. I have to migrate away from Eagle because they decided to not include a hierarchical sheet structure in V5. So I am not going to upgrade. If OrCad still had the robustness of SDT I'd go back there. But IME it doesn't anymore.

I just hope this is going to be my last CAD system switch before I kick the bucket. Because you start from zero every time, all new symbols to edit, none of the old schematics are compatible, etc.

I found the DOS file system to be much better and easier. And I ran my last DOS in 5MB, with a multi-tasker roached onto it, mostly having OrCad SDT, MS-Word, MS-Works, sometimes SPICE and some other stuff open at the same time. Pretty much the same productivity as today sans the Internet. Well, that was added later in the form of the Mosaic browser.

Today, for a similar productivity, I need >500MB.

This is at church so we aren't after worldly recognition or self-pride :-)

Say Joerg,

Did you take a look a Kicad? If so, what did you think?

---Joel

No, I haven't. One reason I tried gEDA is because it seems to have a larger group of followers. I am not totally convinced yet because it leans heavily on quite intricate command line action. But I want to give it a shot. Ran into a few serious limitations already, like with multi-section parts (U1A, U1B, etc). It does not seem to handle those very well. So who knows ...

Have you tried it?

Forgot to mention, the other reason why I tried gEDA first was that I read about KiCad netlist problems with the PADS format and my layouter uses PADS. Don't want to take chances there, but it may have been fixed by now.

On a sunny day (Tue, 04 Nov 2008 16:05:29 -0800) it happened Joerg wrote in :

When you get to heaven's gate, and Petrus says: 'God is looking for somebody who knows how to do this audio thingy in 368 board', then there is a possibility they send you back if you do not have the experience...

Hi Joerg,

No, I haven't, although I keep meaning to one of these days. From what I can tell, although it might not be as powerful as gEDA overall, it's somewhat more finished/polished at this point (although perhaps not with PADS netlists!). Both definitely seem mature enough that people are making real boards with them.

---Joel

Yes, but meantime I ran into some hard snags with gEDA so I am going to try KiCad as well. Plus I don't like having to close everything and run the command line for proper renumbering, adding a sheet etc.

So, now I did try KiCad and I must say I like it a lot. It's like driving a big old Chevy, all the time you discover a new button or feature. Handles nicely from the GUI console, although it's a bit overloaded with hard-to-remember pictograms or icons. Some menus are a bit far down like that to change a part value but I guess keyoard shortcuts are possible. So I'll check that CAD program out some more.

Someone even wrote a converter for Eagle schematics but that blew up on me. Ok, it can't all be paradise and when switching CAD programs nothing is usually going to cross that road along with you. But at least some libraries could be converted. Needing heavy clean-up, but still. That's why I really want to make this switch stick, don't want to do it again.

Cool, thanks for the update/review.

Schematic converters being 100% usable/correct seems notoroiously uncommon... presumably due to the lack of documentation (of the file format to be imported), in many cases, combined with the relatively small market demand.

---Joel

Another upside is it's Windows-based so you don't have that dreaded "you are not authorized to write to this folder" behavior of Linux. Meaning I can place my libs where they belong, in the lib directory.

I'll try that again if I have my custom libs converted. Problem is: Every schematic editor names files *.sch. So it's hard to decipher which file was from which CAD system. Only if you go by date, and even then sometimes not because you may have to massage an old file with the old CAD.

I have much worse problems with Windows in this regard. In Linux, I can always say 'sudo' and do whatever I need to, whereas the Windows security model is complicated and (to me) almost entirely opaque. Unix-style OSes are good at doing what they're told--they know that root is The Boss.

Cheers,

Phil Hobbs

And i had thought that Marantz had gone out of business long ago. Maybe this is a "logo / brand name" resurrection.

So where did the money come from for the top of the line Marantz?

You are in exactly the right place to help me. I have yet to get gEDA running enough to even begin schematic entry. How did you do it? On what underlying variant? Oh hell, you can read headers, talk to me.

Hey, go join a big company and you can have that problem on Windows too. :-)

You probably know this, but the Linux philosophy is that you place all "your own" stuff somewhere in your home directory (e.g., ~joerg) where you do have full read/write/execute permissions by default... and they figure that if you're trying to do something "system wide" (e.g., make a /lib), you should spend the time to "chmod" the result to set the read/write permissions as the the "system administrator" -- you! -- prefers.

Agreed, that is a bit of a pain. If you open up the files in a text editor (possibly set to binary mode), is it readily obvious where each file came from? If so, it wouldn't be too difficult to write a small script to loop through the files, take a look inside, and then rename them as, e.g.,

SI-Metrix names schematics something like *.sxsh (more-than-three-letters extension), but unfortunately the old DOS three-letter limitation seems like it's never going to go away with most software.

---Joel