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Message-ID: <533B5001.9030507@neurotica.com>
Date: Tue, 01 Apr 2014 19:47:13 -0400
From: Dave McGuire <mcguire AT neurotica DOT com>
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To: geda-user AT delorie DOT com
Subject: Re: [geda-user] copy/paste between different schematics
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On 04/01/2014 11:28 AM, Stephen R. Besch wrote:
> I just wish that there were such a simple solution to the "renumbering"
> conundrum. Admittedly, there are some scripts out there thathave taken a
> stab at the problem, but they all are marginal as far as I'm concerned.

  Yes, this is definitely an issue, but it's a really tough nut to
crack.  There's probably a zillion different ways to do this, maybe 1000
"good" ways, and maybe ten that wouldn't lock us into a corner five
years down the road.

> The problem is in the gschem to PCB interface itself. There are 3 files
> involved (the sch, net and pcb files). If a component name changes in
> the sch file the net file gets rewritten and PCB reloads it. When it
> finds the old component name missing, it deletes the old component and
> creates a new one with the new name which has to be dragged by the user
> to it's correct location.

  Ick.

  I've been lucky in that when I copy and paste chunks of schematics,
they're generally only a handful of components.  I renumber them by
hand.  I have a dead-simple script that just selects a refdes of a
particular type (R, C, U..) and prints them out sorted, and I eyeball it
and look for duplicates.  Right now the board I'm working on is a bit
larger, so I'm thinking about extending it to do a count of (say) all
the Rs, then sort them out and ensure that they're monotonically
increasing and not duplicated, then flag the ones that are, just in a
shell window.  I'd then go fix up the problems manually.

  It's not great, but again I usually don't have to do this with very
big pieces of circuitry.

> The only satisfactory way I have found to get
> around this is by hand editing the files in a text editor, which always
> works and allows me to number "geographically" on the PCB and
> back-annotate into the schematic. Someday, when I get the time I'll
> write a GUI based tool to do the tedious part for me.

  That sounds like fun!  Not. ;)

              -Dave

-- 
Dave McGuire, AK4HZ
New Kensington, PA