Re: gschem only partially works

[Joe <joe@jretrading.com>]

On Sat, 9 Jan 2016 12:39:35 -0500
Gene Heskett <gheskett@shentel.net> wrote:

> Greetings all;
> 
> I have drawn a simple 6 part schematic, in gschem, for something I
> need several copies of as part of the control mechanism of a cnc
> machine tool.
> 
> Now I would like to translate that to a pcb I can make.
> 
> However, its been an exercise best described as the 10,000 monkeys
> with typewriters miraculously re-creating Shakespears works.
> 
> The reason?  In the help pulldown, the top 3 items that should give
> one access to the documentation for the geda suite of programs, do
> ANAICT nothing, not even a disk access spike is shown by gkrellm.
> 

I've been using the gEDA suite for over eight years, and it never once
occurred to me to look on that help menu... you're quite right, it
doesn't work, and I have the full set of packages here.

In this case, the Net is the repository of all wisdom. gEDA is still
under considerable development and documentation changes fairly
quickly, in fact, the whole organisation of the gEDA site has changed
since I last looked there:

http://www.geda-project.org/

This might be what you're looking for at the moment:

http://wiki.geda-project.org/geda:gsch2pcb_tutorial

and you'll probably want the PCB manual in PDF:

http://pcb.geda-project.org/manual.html

Check your PCB version, this is a moving target.

Here's one of the many tutorials:

http://www.delorie.com/pcb/docs/gs/gs.html

If you have any problems finding components in either schematic symbol
or PCB footprint form, you may need to make them. This isn't difficult,
they're all text files and there is plenty of documentation. There
are some footprint generators, I made a two-pad SMD generator in a
spreadsheet, but there are more ambitious scripts out there.

There are quite a few parts in addition to those built into the
application, this site is the main collection:

http://www.gedasymbols.org/

I had a bit of a communications problem trying to get some space here,
so in the end I put some of my symbols and footprints here:

http://www.jre-systems.co.uk/geda/index.html

I've had the Gerber files produced by this suite fabricated by at least
three different PCB manufacturers, with no problems. It can also produce
position data for automatic assembly of the SMD components, if you ever
move into mass production.

Yes, the learning curve is a bit steep...

-- 
Joe