freeware for schematic to pcb?

Learn how to use a search engine. I quite like kicad but I havn't used it for anything serious yet.

Bob

We use this to make small two sided PCBs

"Stripboard"

Convert like magic, make a PCB with no input from you the engineer ?

You will need to learn PCB layout, run a PCB program like a art drawing program.

Good Luck

don

Le Fri, 02 Nov 2007 15:47:11 +0000, Greg Waterston a écrit:

Although KiCad is *not* a freeware, there is some chance that it fits all your needs.

Habib.

"Greg Waterston" schreef in bericht news:3EHWi.17$9N6.12@trnddc03...

Software to convert a .JPG schematic drawing to a pcb? Contact Harry Potter. Otherwise you'll have either to draw the pcb layout from the schematic yourself or redraw the schematic in an appropriate schematic capture program and make the pcb layout from that. In both cases you will need to use your own brains. (Suppose you have some :)

petrus bitbyter

Kicad is both free as in speech (GPL), and free as in beer (sourceforge). How much more free does it need to be to meet your definition of "freeware" ?

Actually, gEDA's PCB has an option for helping with that. You can set the .jpg as your background image for the layout area, so that it acts as a reference to redraw the board in pcb.

It's *too* free to be "freeware". That term tends to be used for software which is merely free-as-in-beer.

It's not completely impossible; there are practical systems which successfully handle much harder image recognition problems.

The main obstacle is the lack of a (legitimate) purpose. Most images of schematics will have been generated using a higher-level data format (either one specific to circuit schematics, or at least a general-purpose vector-based graphic format), so you may as well start from that instead of from a rendered image.

How is your Linux PCB software coming along by the way?

(1) It's not mine, I'm just one of the developers.

(2) It was originally written for the Amiga, and currently runs on Unix (including Linux, Solaris, and BSD), MacOS/X, and Windows (mostly).

(3) It's coming along just fine, thanks!

The screenshot looks impressive. I'm just wondering if PCB attaches the nets to the traces now (which I think is mandatory for a PCB layout package in order to work at all). It didn't do that when I tried PCB a few years ago. Can't find the documentation on Sourceforge though. And documentation always seems lagging behind on work in progress :-) So its better to ask one of the developers...

If you mean "each bit of copper is tagged with the net it goes with", no. Yes, that would solve the "find the short" problem, but it hasn't been a high priority compared to some of the other things we've been doing. We've discussed it, but we don't think it's an easy task to manage that information when you're also doing undos, optimizations, and random edits.

I don't think any internals are "required" as long as you can accomplish the task you want. You can select nets by name, though, which covers most of what people want that functionality for.

And PCB certainly "works at all" so I don't think that statement is accurate.

Yes, that's a problem area for us.

I really believe that when you guys get this implemented, you'll see a lot more people start using PCB. For me it is the only missing feature that stands between me and using PCB. I even think you could cause trouble for small players like Layo1 or Eagle.

I still think different. The biggest problem I had with PCB is that tracks belonging to different nets can become cluttered together resulting in an utter mess. Having 2 tracks belonging to different nets touching each other causes both tracks to belong to one of the two nets. This totally kills any form of DRC. The DRC errors end up on the pads. If the pad is far away from the short, you are in big trouble finding the actual problem. I had loads of these problems on a simple 2 sided PCB. A complete nightmare....

I use this:

You should mention that it's your product you're shilling.

Robert

I agree that that particular situation is a nightmare, and I've had my share of times spent tracking down shorts. It's a problem we're still hoping to fix at some point.

I disagree that solving that by tagging copper with nets is "mandatory" for the program to "work at all". Lots of people do plenty of boards with pcb, therefore that change is not mandatory for the program to work at all.

I think an easy to install Windows package is the key to getting a lot more users.