Mail Archives: geda-user/2016/01/26/13:03:44
On 26/01/16 17:41, Gene Heskett (gheskett AT shentel DOT net) [via
geda-user AT delorie DOT com] wrote:
> On Tuesday 26 January 2016 09:47:02 Evan Foss (evanfoss AT gmail DOT com) [via
> geda-user AT delorie DOT com] wrote:
>
>> On Mon, Jan 25, 2016 at 10:21 PM, <gedau AT igor2 DOT repo DOT hu> wrote:
>>> Hi all,
>>>
>>> thanks for everyone who has answered the poll. I also appreciate the
>>> effort of those who did not reply with off-topic stuff - the thread
>>> did not derail and was kept clean.
>>>
>>> Results: http://repo.hu/projects/pcb-rnd/devlog/20162601.html
>>>
>>> TL;DR: there's no strong demand for blind/burried vias on pcb-rnd
>>> side. This means I cancel my plans to support them. Mainline pcb may
>>> benefit from the feature but the demand there is not as high as I
>>> thought or as list traffic may have suggested lately.
>> It is possible that all the users who need that functionality never
>> adopted this toolchain or left. I doubt it but it is possible.
>>
>> Still I think you made the right call.
>>
>>> Regards,
>>>
>>> Igor2
> If I can throw a toothpick into the water and row a bit, some of us do
> all our pcb's as onezies to sixzies, and even with good machine vision
> cameras, or time consuming to make and calibrate, fixed reference
> pallets to hold the board, we are still limited to 2 sided boards,
> multiple layers, other that glueing the finished boards together, are
> simply not feasible, so we don't try any of the stuff the board houses
> do as just part of the work flow. I can't even do plated thru holes.
>
> What we need that I didn't find, is a pad menu that isn't tied to a
> specific part, but simply a list of pads we can lay down, listed by
> ID-OD style in the name of the pad. Dimensions in mils preferred.
>
> Having a "pad-039-090" to put on the end of a trace where a wire to the
> outside world is to be soldered in, and that is easily found in the
> menu, would be a real advantage to folks like us. Ditto for parts
> placement, the available footprints I found weren't the correct spacing,
> nor the correct lead hole sizes. Had that stuff been easily found as
> single pads to be laid & snapped to the grid, I could have done that 6
> part project in half the pcb real estate it took. My experience at
> laying out pcb's goes back to the 60's at a tv station where we made a
> huge percentage of our own gear, so working with tape at 4x scale comes
> naturally to me. We also had a DEA etcher that made 5 minutes work out
> of making the board once it had been exposed and developed. So PCB to me
> is a new trick for a very old dog. I made it work, but there were some
> surprises along the way.
>
> The ability to edit all properties of a laid down and re-selected pad (or
> via) may have been there, but the "how" was not obvious. Not helped by
> the fact that the help menu's first 3 selections were /dev/null
> operations. I still haven't grokked whats missing on these two systems
> that cause that failure. Nothing is logged.
>
> Thanks for reading.
>
> Cheers, Gene Heskett
Whilst I honestly don't want to sound like I'm teaching the proverbial
grandmother to suck eggs, after a bit of practice, it's really easy to
draw your own symbols and footprints in gEDA, and yes I know from
experience that the libraries can often be 'just a bit off'.
There are some efforts to provide library import/export from other
sources, but for small volumes it really does makes sense to do a bit of
your own homework, look up the dimensions, zoom Right in and trace a few
bits out.
As always, different people like different methods (ymmv), so I'm not
saying this will work 100% for you, but I've found it relatively
painless myself :).
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