Affordable PCB Layout Software ???

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I have, like, and recommend Sprint-Layout, but AFAICT it does not support netlists or netlist import from a schematic program. I throw up the parts an' route 'em manually, which is what I'd do anyhow (autorouters have never pleased me).

S-L lets you quickly click in rats-nest wiring to remind you of where and what to route; I like that feature a lot.

If you want netlists don't forget FreePCB

mentioned by rickman. That looks pretty nice. Also consider PCB from the gEDA project,

HTH, James Arthur

You say that Sprint-Layout does not support netlists, but the above paragraph implies to me that there is _some_ transfer of connection data from the related schematic program.

So, is there, or is there not, the ability to transfer component and connection data from the schematic to PCB, whether by an explicit netlist or otherwise? (Protel/Altium links between sch and pcb without explicitly generating netlists.)

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Not that I can detect.

Here's the website:

What I called call the rats-nest feature they call "connections / rubberbands"; click point A, click point B, and a fine line appears from A to B. You then route either manually or with the pin-to-pin autorouter (not particularly useful, IMO). The feature is described briefly on the webpage above.

I find it super helpful; it keeps you from forgetting connections or from forgetting connections. It's manual, but I like it.

Sprint-Layout does have a full complement of output files-- Gerber, Excellon, and isolation paths for PCB milling-- but no import or export of netlists AFAICT.

You could always e-mail them and ask to be sure. I don't use those features, so I might've missed something.

Oh yes, another for the "free" list is KiCAD, which I assume everyone has heard of. I haven't tried it.

HTH, James Arthur

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Not that I can detect.

Here's the website:

What I called call the rats-nest feature they call "connections / rubberbands"; click point A, click point B, and a fine line appears from A to B. You then route either manually or with the pin-to-pin autorouter (works, could route better, IMO). Click the "remove connections" button and the rubberbands for completed routes are automatically removed (the thin reminder line disappears), leaving the unfinished routes. The feature is described briefly on the webpage above.

I find it super helpful; it keeps you from forgetting connections or from making wrong ones. It's manual, but I like it.

Sprint-Layout does have a full complement of output files-- Gerber, Excellon, and isolation paths for PCB milling-- but no import or export of netlists AFAICT.

You could always e-mail them and ask to be sure. I don't use those features, so I might've missed something.

Oh yes, another for the "free" list is KiCAD, which I assume everyone has heard of. I haven't tried it.

Sprint-Layout works well for me so I'm likely to stick with it, but it would be interesting to hear reports about the other packages.

Cheers, James Arthur

Pulsonix exports netlists in these formats:

Accel PCB PADS PCB Zuken Rinf (Cadstar and Visula) P-CAD PCB OrCAD II DOS Viewdraw

Any netlist format can be generated using the Report Maker.

Leon

[deleted]

...Except that, unlike many pay-ware schematic capture programs, it can't import "was/is" (ECO) files to update the schematic based on connectivity and component changes made in your (non-Pulsonix) layout package of choice.

Granted, for many people this is probably a rather minor quibble -- if you've already given up cross-probing and pin/gate swapping (as happens with most scenarios where you're using schematic capture from a different vendor than PCB layout), not being able to back annotate probably isn't that much more of a loss.

---Joel

Heh heh. I have always used Eagle on Linux, and found no confusion. I think this is due to the fact that just about every program on Linux is written with a different GUI toolkit. You never even know when double-click vs. a single-click will make something happen. So you learn to be flexible. The result is that something as subtle as Eagle's inconsistency with standard Windoze apps. grammar easily goes unnoticed.

What's even more fun is when the same app. changes GUI toolkits from one version to another. That seems to have happened with OpenOffice, now using the KDE dialog boxes. On my newest Linux machines it seems every program has a different file dialog compared to my older Linux version. Completely ridiculous. But, at least it's not Windoze.

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Ding ding ding! Yeah, you've sure got that right. An incosistent user interface is one of the major hurdles to get "mass market" acceptance of Unix.

Things are much better these days than, e.g., 5-10 years ago, though.

Unix has a similar problem with configuration files... everyone and their brother invented their own format for storing settings (since there's still no standard central repository for settings as the registry in Windows provides), and while most are simple enough to figure out via examination of what's already there, many are somewhat "brittle" as well (the common example being how easy it is to break X windows by, e.g., leaving out a semi-colon in Xorg.conf ... sheesh...)

It took years for those in the Unix world to even get together on something as simple as how new programs should be programmatically added to a "start" menu; happily the Gnome and KDE guys both seem to play nice on this issue today.

Like the registry, which is *so* much better ;)

[Using a simple text editor]

Fortunately, the Windoze registry is intuitive *and* robust.

As opposed to the years that it took Mirco$oft to figure out how to do preemptive multi-tasking?

But I digress :-P

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It's better than the *NIX approach in that there are standard tools and APIs for creating, editing, and saving individual entries, branchs, etc. Is it great? No. But I haven't seen any "great" answers to the problem -- storing configuration settings is such a general problem that there really aren't any great one-size-fits-all solutions, I expect.

Actually, yes -- the arrangement is reasonably intuitive, and it keeps backup copies of itself around to provide some degree of robustness. (And as with

*NIX text configuration files, you can certainly make as many manual backups as you feel like.)

No one considered Windows 3.1/95/98 to be in the same class of operating systems as *NIX, you know. :-) That started with Windows NT, which had plenty of "real OS" programmers on the team (including David Cutler, who had done plenty of VMS development... and one might argue he learned from many of his mistakes there? :-) ).

I wouldn't argue that Microsoft is particularly good at innovation... but they are good at noticing what's becoming popular in the market and then copying those features for their own OS.

---Joel

Thanks. That made me laugh out loud. :)

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s

I guess I'll never understand the attraction of linux, guys I know will spend all afternoon just to get something to start up, usually some bizarre entry in a config file needs to changed, Windows may be crappy/buggy/inefficient but at least it works

As opposed to Windows, where lots of stuff just can't be changed if it doesn't do what you want.

A good reason to run Linux ;-)

In my personal experience, my Linux machines are more reliable than my Windows machines. And this includes my wife and kids using a blend of each on a daily basis.

And my Linux DVD player has a "menu" button that *always* brings you to the menu, even if the DVD author doesn't want you to skip the commercials.

Even my furnace runs Linux :-)

And linux doesn't have those maddening delays and lockups that windows has where the desktop will freeze, or be unable to display stuff like the desktop/new/folder command in under 10 seconds.

You seem to have a different take on it.

I hope it does so in reasonably prompt fashion. I think my Motorola cable box/DVR runs embedded linux. It regularly gets so far behind (15-30 seconds) in processing commands from the remote control that it's usually best to simply walk away for a few minutes until it catches up!

Cool---but hopefully not when it's supposed to be warm!

Mark Borgerson

Perhaps it's just me, but i expect a quad-core 3GHz machine to be able to keep up with my typing as well as my Commodore 128 does.

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Guy Macon

There *are* standard tools for viewing and editing *nix configuration files - any text editor will do the job. And of course you can use any other programs that work on text files - backups can be simple copies, comparisons are done with "diff", version control can be done with subversion or any other tool you like, etc. Copying configuration between two computers is just the same as copying any other two files.

Although there are no official standards for /etc configuration files (or user configuration files in hidden directories or files in the home directory), there are a number of conventions that are used regularly. For example, lines starting with # are almost invariably comment lines. Programs with larger configurations have their own directory under /etc, while smaller configurations have a simple /etc/prog.conf file. Programs that need hierarchical settings typically use an apache-style configuration format.

You are correct that there are no one-size-fits-all solutions. That's why on *nix, appropriate sizes are used as needed, unlike the windows registry.

Oh, and one more thing - *nix configuration files are almost always well documented. How much windows software comes with documentation for the registry settings?

There is certainly room for improvement in *nix configuration files - a little more consistency would not do any harm. And while some default configuration files come with clear comments allowing you to make simple changes without R'ing TFM, others are much less obvious. But the *nix system is still decades more advanced than the windows registry - the move away from .ini files (which had a nice consistent syntax, but had no good way of storing hierarchical data) was a big step backwards.

"Some degree of robustness" - yes, the backups can help a bit, unless things have gone badly wrong. Then your windows installation is hosed. You can't keep backups externally - there is no way to restore the registry using a live boot CD if it gets trashed. I know that a *nix system can be made unbootable if one of the critical /etc files gets corrupted - but these critical files are much smaller, and much more rarely modified than the windows registry. Simple probability gives a much greater chance of the immense registry files (it's all stored in three files, IIRC) getting corrupted. And if necessary, you can fix a

50-line text file by hand using a boot CD - with the binary format registry file of tens of MB, you have no chance.

I have a W2K installation on a PC that got its registry corrupted - no amount of "repair" from the installation CD helped. The registry is so fubar that the W2K installation disk refuses even to install a fresh windows installation to the partition (same directory or another directory).

No, one might not argue that. One might argue that he tried to make NT modular and layered, with proper separation of tasks (the gui, screen drivers, and kernel were all isolated), with multi-platform support and source code that was independent of details like bit-size and endianness, and planned support for alternative APIs (Win32, OS/2, and posix were all to be considered equals). This was NT 3.51. *All* these solid design decisions were thrown out step by step through NT 4.0, W2K, XP, and Vista (against Dave Cutler's recommendations, I believe).

They are certainly good at making the appearance of their software nice. And they are good at making the easy stuff easy (for users). But they are *not* good at the engineering and plumbing that lies underneath.

That's just you :-)

--
Boo