PCB Design & Assembly Design Software & Services

Hello Pompous nonsense!

12 Jul 17 10:31, you wrote to me: GC> Pompous nonsense.

No, its a PRINCIPALED, CONSCIOUS DECSION. Not to be a sheep.

I made a choice, and considering things of late. I chose wisely.

GC> Use the tools available.

I do. I post my note, as too many will respond with use x, y, or z... All of them use a non Linux platform. Example TinyCAD, and FreePCB are of no use, non Linux.

KiCAD looks to be good, might have a steep learning curve. Even better it has a PPA.

And since you are using a Pi, you should be using Linux. And its killing a certain company that you are not, and their attempts to EEE, as usual, Raspbian out of the space.

GC> Unless you write your own OS, then you are as much a consumer GC> as any man on the Clapham omnibus.

Pompous nonsense.

Rick

... Ding Dong the Witch is DEAD! I Made America Great Again! President Trump!

Reply to
Rick Christian
Loading thread data ...

Hello The!

12 Jul 17 05:27, you wrote to me:

TP> Eagle CAD

TP> The free verson cant do large boards.

Thanks for the info.

TP> But that should be OK

Probably, BUT the issue becomes: "is a Personal Learning License that may be used by individuals for personal, non-commercial use." Which means that I would be in non compliance.

The resulting board will be a COMMERCIAL PRODUCT... and since this is AutoDESK the price is probably exorbinatnt, computing.. YEP! $100/YEAR! NYET not happening.

I pay ONCE for software.. Not yearly... And even if I would go that route, there is no discount for paying in advance. 3 years is $300! At that those rates, the thing better practically read my mind and design my projects before I even think of them.

Definitely no VERY CHEAP. I had to put myself back in the chair when I read the 'Premium" pricing, at least its named correctly!

Thanks for the info.

Rick

... Ding Dong the Witch is DEAD! I Made America Great Again! President Trump!

Reply to
Rick Christian

I've just checked - kicad is available for Raspbian Jessie, but its fairly big. Installing it needs 458 MB of SD card space.

apt-get doesn't say which kicad version would be installed. Since I already have the Fedora version installed on my laptop I'm not about to install it on the RPi just to see what version is on offer, but its nice to know its available.

--
martin@   | Martin Gregorie 
gregorie. | Essex, UK 
 Click to see the full signature
Reply to
Martin Gregorie

Package: kicad Version: 0.20140622+bzr4027-3

formatting link

Index of /raspbian/dists/jessie/main/binary-armhf/ Packages 13-Jul-2017 10:12 50102714

Reply to
Rob Morley

version I have on MINT is "2013 july stable."

so pretty old

Just added the PPA to get latest.

formatting link

says how to port it so cpuld be made to work on a pi, but I rather undertsood rhe Pi to be the target of the final PCB, rather then the development plaftform for it.

--
"What do you think about Gay Marriage?" 
"I don't." 
 Click to see the full signature
Reply to
The Natural Philosopher

That depends on what the project requires. In my case I'm intending to make a PICAXE-based controller/timer for electrically powered free flight model aircraft and to use an RPi as the (portable, for use on the flying field) control box which is used to change timer settings in the PICAXE. The PICAXE chip needs a small PCB to hold various switch connections, three servo sockets, an LED and a 3.5mm jack socket for the USB-serial cable. This cable is used to download compiled BASIC to the PICAXE and will also be used as the link between the RPi controlbox and the timers it manages.

RPiPICAXE comms uses a USB-serial converter cable. I already have a C daemon that can handle the RPi end, so writing its client code (that allows time settings to be modified and uploaded to the PICAXE) and programming the PICAXE are best done on the RPi since the logistics of doing any PICAXE code development requires physical access to it.

However, as I run the RPi headless and its already able to use my main CVS code repository, it doesn't matter where I run kicad since everything can end up in the same CVS module, so its installed on this laptop.

--
martin@   | Martin Gregorie 
gregorie. | Essex, UK 
 Click to see the full signature
Reply to
Martin Gregorie

Not the hardest task in te world. I'll buy a couple off you though

Blimey. Most peole use a couple of pots - time and power level.

Seems like you are making this all too complex, to me.

Yup. Thats how to do it. I write source code on thsi desktop and save it via sshfs to a remote virtual machine miles away and compile it there..

--
"I am inclined to tell the truth and dislike people who lie consistently. 
This makes me unfit for the company of people of a Left persuasion, and  
 Click to see the full signature
Reply to
The Natural Philosopher

If you need Free Flight timers anytime soon, talk to Dan Kennedy and get a couple of his DanTimers and a control box - like most of the FF timers on the market, one controller can set all the timers because it either sucks the settings out of the timer, modifies them and writes them back or, like the Black Magic and other older timers, uses a Palm Pilot as controller and stored copies of all timer settings in it.

Two reasons for this:

1) I really hate timers where you're supposed to use about two switches and a flashing LED to set the motor run time, possibly a trim change at the end of the motor run and a d/t time

2) RPis are cheap enough and anyway this is a good excuse to learn to make one talk to a touch screen and to use GTK to paint a nice display.

Pots may be good enough for sport flying or scale models, but I'm planning to use this on a competition models E36/F1S for sure and possibly F1Q as well.

E36 is simple enough: just a fixed length motor run and d/t time, though these days it probably needs a radio DT as well: push the button the stop the motor if its running and release the d/t.

F1Q is rather more complex because the motor must stop either its burnt the allowed number of joules or the maximum motor run time expires: the first of these stops the motor. Then, if its a fast climbing model it needs to retrim for glide (move rudder and/or tailplane to glide settings). Finally the model should d/t at the end of the flight. It may also be carrying a radio DT system.

Last but not least, I may have a crack at electric scale and it would be nice to use the same timer for that - think putting it on the runway and pressing the start switch. After a pause it starts the motor and takes off. A bit later u/c and flaps come up and power reduces for cruise. After 30 seconds or so motor stops, flaps come down and it glides down to land.

I know how to make a timer that can do all this: its not all that hard, but does need a control box that can be used to modify the timer's flight program[*] as and when needed on the flying field.

[*] by 'flight program' I mean the list of times and servo positions that control a flight, not the compiled BASIC program in the PICAXE chip.
--
martin@   | Martin Gregorie 
gregorie. | Essex, UK 
 Click to see the full signature
Reply to
Martin Gregorie

For free version I looked at that was the case when I looked about 6 months ago.

As a commercial user of Eagle for 17 years I have made many things available for other Eagle users and made many PCBs of many sizes and layers

Some large examples 350 x 220 - 2 layer 330 x 310 - 6 layer

For many different environments and markets

The changing license setup, change to annual subscription, still got the useless built in library parts, let alone some of the annoying bugs, I am now in long process of changing to KiCAD (which is multi-platform).

Long process as lots of information has to be transferred (as with change to any other package would be). Some of my designs have to be supported for 20 years so I have to keep sysytems with old versions of Eagle for a while yet.

Even had long phone conversation with old Eagle staff now part of Autodesk and explained why I would not be continuing with Eagle and changing.

The start of the rot was when it was originally bought by Farnell then Autodesk was final nail in coffin.

For those interested in KiCad a couple of YouTube videos from an electronics blogger who does commercial designs and his impressions back in 2012

Installation and schematic

formatting link

Making POB

formatting link

His overall view in 2012 was it was good then

Kicad have their own tutorials pages as well kicad-pcb.org/help/tutorials/

--
Paul Carpenter          | paul@pcserviceselectronics.co.uk 
    PC Services 
 Click to see the full signature
Reply to
Paul

[]

I doubt it

formatting link

[]

sig sep reqd

Whut?

--
Bah, and indeed, Humbug
Reply to
Kerr Mudd-John

The thing I've been quite impressed by is the Kicad community. For instance I can google for a part, and it's quite often on someone's github. That makes it much quicker to do board designs.

Caveats are that I don't have enough experience to make a statistical sample, and some of these parts might not be production ready. However it's quicker for me to throw a board together in a day, send it for fab, go do something else for a week, then fix up the bugs on the real board and fab the production batch. The alternative is to do lots of checking before it goes out first time - but despite that there will invariably be something else I overlooked.

For the kind of hobbyist fab where you only want one, ever, some more checking might be useful. And use Design For Bodging (DfB), a longstanding hobbyist methodology.

Theo

Reply to
Theo Markettos

Reminds me of an alleged comment by Seymour Cray...

When told by his sales team that they just sold a Cray supercomputer to Apple to use to design the next Apple computer, he laughed. The Sales Director asked why it was so funny, and Seymour Cray replied that he designed the Cray on an Apple computer.

--
Andrew Gabriel 
[email address is not usable -- followup in the newsgroup]
Reply to
Andrew Gabriel

ElectronDepot website is not affiliated with any of the manufacturers or service providers discussed here. All logos and trade names are the property of their respective owners.