Re: Linspire....

I appreciate your effort on these but there are two big issues. Believe me the PCB layout industry talks about Linux programs quite a bit and non of them have advanced to the level for professional work yet.

1) The industry recognizes a few packages, PADS, OrCAD, Protel, Allegro and that is about it. If your design is not compatible with these formats you are pretty much hosed because these are the formats your clients are using.

2) I do 30-50 complex PCBs a year (very small pitch parts, BGAs etc, lots of layers, yada yada) for professional clients who pay me for speed .. All the packages you mention are amateur packages and not equipped to do these kinds of boards with any quality or professionally. Checking the features - the new features are the ones we had 10 years ago. There is a reason they are free - they lack features. Note how the example for every package you show is for through hole boards - not Surface mount. Yes I am sure they can do them - with limitations - but to have the complex rules, routers, layer and pitch needs as we use for modern high tech electronics they just won't cut it.

So again - it's a nice idea but the software just isn't there yet for me and many other nich industries.

FWIW this is the package I mostly use - it's about $30,000 or so.. big bucks - very advanced.
http://www.mentor.com/products/pcb/pads/

Also I do have experience with PCBlibraries as you list in another post. Most folks have thrown there decals out as not usable as they do not follow IPC rules and are not manufacturable (no matter what they insist)

Hawker




On 9/14/2006 4:33 PM, The digits of Terry Richards's hands composed the following:
http://www.polybus.com/hdlmaker/hdlmaker.html

are your projects something that can be done with autocad?

i'm not gonna pretend i know what you mean<drilling holes in a circuit board?>but it is possible to "roll your own" with linux. <design your own software to do what you want>

http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/8438

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:-)^2



here's another article, again, i don't know if it is applicable:
http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/4428

Try:
gschem http://www.geda.seul.org/
pcb http://pcb.sourceforge.net/

Get Kicad (http://www.lis.inpg.fr/realise_au_lis/kicad/), 100% free and runs
on Windows & Linux.
Or FreePCB (http://www.freepcb.com/) together with TinyCAD
(http://tinycad.sourceforge.net/)

For getting footprint information, http://www.pcblibraries.com/ offers
a free footprint viewer called LP Viewer. Lots of footprints for
ho-hum parts to the latest icky packaging technology. On the right
side of their web page, look for "featured items". You may want to
load in a few more libraries from their "library documentation" area.

Usually, the footprint info is in the data *** or the manufacturer
has an area in their web site that has this information.

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