What is Reddit's opinion of gEDA Project?

I used gEDA to make my raspberry pi project (the pcb SW is just called "pcb"). Here is the writeup on my process.

That's my first PCB, haven't done much with it since, but it worked well.

> Oh, so you are an advanced user.

I'm an advanced eagle-7 user, and arguably an advanced EE (I'm Director of EE at the largest hardware startup accelerator in the world).

Still a complete noob with Kicad however, and considering what Autodesk have done to Eagle since they acquired it, it's high time I learn something new - and better fitting with the fact that I've been using Linux since it came on floppy disks and started using Linux desktop as my primary 15 years ago (when geda was the best Linux EDA and it was frankly horrendous).

> Hope your patch reaches the master branch

When git head doesn't segfault every few minutes, I'll probably adapt my patch, and ask the GUI programmers to wrap some GUI elements around it because I'm no good at that sort of thing and I suspect most kicad users may not feel comfortable with this feature being thrust upon them.

I use eagle on the PC. But I've been playing around with the gEDA tools on Linux lately, including gschem, pcb, easy_spice and they're not half bad.

I mostly do small, single-sided 70x100mm boards -- it's a cheap size of copper clad boards all over eBay.

One fun project IMHO is to design & build an Arduino "clone". For example, I took this one and modified it to have a standard 2x3 pin ICSP connector that can be programmed with a USBadp adapter (cheap on eBay) -- since that design doesn't have a USB connecter & controller chip.

An Arduino shield is another good PCB design project, for example one based on this transistor curve tracer but perhaps adding one of the tiny 1inch I2C OLED displays that sell for about 2 or 3 dollars (you guessed it, eBay again).

To add to what's already been said, another useful piece of software is gEDA. gEDA is an open-source software suite for schematic layout and PCB design. For simple boards, it works very well, and the existing library of parts is pretty good.

Also, if you're a student, chances are you have access to beefier commercial software that is useful if you need to make a complicated board. For example, the institution I attend has a site license for Altium, a very expensive electronics design tool.

I use the gEda tools on Debian (so I guess it'd work for Ubuntu). And easyspice as a front end -- so it launches gschem for schematic entry and then ngspice for simulation.

It can be rough around the edges but it works, and you're running SPICE, so...

Then you can design pcbs with the gEda "pcb" tool.

EDIT: typo

I would like to use gEDA for my simulations, but the truth is LTSpice just works better for me, even running under Wine. It's not that it can do anything I can't piece together with FOSS software, but I already have a little library of sub-circuits, test-rigs and templates so I'm more comfortable and efficient with it.

Still, even though I could be using FOSS tools, I think if I shared some of my schematics or signal graphs and someone criticized me for it, it would be a little weird.

Side note: if we're really having this conversation again, let's keep in mind Caroline and the rest of the engagement team are real people who volunteer time to supply us these materials. We should be able to discuss and criticize a thing, without attacking or demeaning a person.

Googled some of the file header and the source file linked by OP in comments is from gEDA.

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

The big tip that the file wasn't Altium is that it wasn't a binary blob on GitHub.

>And quick followup: does anyone recommend a particular software for creating schematics? I'm looking for something pretty bare bones, I don't need a simulator or anything very fancy. Right now I'm just using a random free one online.

Eagle has a limited free version, which is popular among hobbyists.

KiCad is free and open-source, also popular.

gEDA gschem is less popular, and comes with a little bit of a learning curve, but I personally really like it.

It looks like I need to rethink Q1 as I had wrongly assumed it would provide both benefits. Thanks for the kind words. I use gEDA for circuit design. Definitely the easiest program I've worked with that allows custom components. I believe I found some Windows binaries floating around if you wanted to try it out on something other than Linux.