Because I like open-source tools, I thought I’d give gEDA a shot. I installed it (but see below), and attempted to do a schematic for the “Big Baby 8” sequencer I hope to build sometime this summer.
Good things:
- I like the features available for the price
- I REALLY like the keyboard controls. They were pretty intuitive and convenient.
Bad things:
- I never actually was able to get the whole suite completely installed on my Mac. I kept running into some kind of Fink Ghostscript dependency loop that prevented something from getting installed. At some point I decided it was “installed enough” – gschem was installed anyway (which was all I really needed), so I gave up on whatever was missing. I did manage to get the whole suite installed on a SPARC Ubuntu box, and once I get my Ubuntu Studio box configured, up, and running at home , I will try again on that. I’m sure that will go ok.
- For some reason, I couldn’t get the information box that appears on a new schematic to delete. I did this easily on the SPARC box. It may just be a question of selecting everything else, moving it aside, and then lasso-ing and deleting the box, but with my schematic splayed all over it, doing so would probably nuke whatever’s there.
- Connecting nets to components seemed tricky at best. In order to tell if a connection had been made, I usually ended up selecting a component and moving it around to see if the net moved with it.
- I eventually ended up with a connection I COULD NOT connect a net to, no matter how hard I tried. That’s kind of no good.
- At some point (when I was attempting to correct my not-quite-connected nets), it started getting really crashy. After two such crashes I lost my patience and decided to re-do the whole thing in EAGLE.
Now, don’t get me wrong. It definitely seems like a nice set of tools. I’m still kind of a newb at EDA tools in general, so I may not be the best test case. I will probably try again (but on Linux, rather than OS X)