Good work,

in my opinion, one = of the biggest hurdles/learning curves for new users is getting workable fo= otprints when moving from gschem to pcb. Anything that simplifies generic f= ootprint selection during design is good for prospective users.

Regards,

Erich

On Sun, Jul 19, 2015 at 3:49 AM, &= lt;gedau AT igor2 DOT rep= o.hu> wrote:

Hi all,

I'm doing a pcb-rnd [1] marathon this weekend. I estimate that the firs= t version of the new footprint system will be ready by monday. A little tea= ser:

http://igor2.repo.hu/tmp/pcb-rnd-fp.avi

Short version: on-the-fly, language-independent footprint generation that w= orks in the library preview dialog and in sch->pcb.

Long version - things that already work:

- Footprints are either static (from file, "file elements") or pa= rametric (generated by an external program)

- The heuristics to decide whether a footprint is parametric is simple: if = the footprint attribute/name contains parentheses, it is parametric. The fi= le name doesn't contain (), tho.

- I've refactored all the element search/open code in pcb-rnd into pcbl= ib_fp.[ch] so that all the above is centralized and coded only once. More c= ode has been deleted than what I had to add and the result is more generic.=

- As shown on the video, I managed to change the gtk hid to use parametric = footprints in the library window.

- Vladimir contributed a gnet-gsch2pcb.scm variant that does not have any m= 4 or footprint attribute mangling in it, it lists all footprints 1:1. Thank= s!

- I've forked gsch2pcb into gsch2pcb-rnd so that it uses the same pcbli= b_fp - no more code/heuristics duplication between pcb and gschem.

- There are provisions for running on win32 (there's an optional wrappe= r around running the external footprint generators so there's no hardwi= red dependency on POSIX shell or FHS paths anywhere - on windows it can be = a bash.exe or a small C code that reads the shebang and executes the genera= tor script with the interpreter specified).

- I've written a few footprint generators in awk (connector(), dip(), s= o()); they are also accessible online [2].

- I've started to build the default library of pcb-rnd, which will cont= ain essential footprints only. It's the cleanup we were discussing on t= he list a few months ago: a small set of footprints a new user is likely to= use. No exotic parts. I plan to provide a lot of the common footprints fro= m generators. I will minimize my dependencies: my generators will depend on= shell and awk only (windows: this means two standalone exes; UNIX: both ar= e generally available on normal installations).

Regards,

Igor2

[1] http://repo.hu/projects/pcb-rnd
[2] http://igor2.repo.hu/cgi-bin/pcblib-param.cgi

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