gEDA-dev: Google summer of code

[Dan McMahill]

David Baird wrote:
> On 3/2/07, Dan McMahill <dan at mcmahill.net> wrote:
>> - a parts manager that takes a graphical symbol and a physical footprint
>> and marries the two to produce a heavy part.
> 
> I've been interested in doing something like this, possibly bringing
> in other representations of an electronic component such as SPICE
> models and using something like OWL (Web Ontology Language) to relate
> the various different representations of a component.

I think designing the tool up front to explicitly deal with and support 
2 different back end flows (layout and simulation in this case) is very 
important.  Presumably that will be a good vehicle to making sure it can 
extend to many back end flows.  I think that is the only way to go, 
otherwise you end up with a real headache trying to make simulation 
netlists work right and maintain decent footprint selection.

> The idea is to make an extensible format for describing electronics
> components;  The library wouldn't necessarily revolve around a
> particular way of describing components (such as PCB .m4 part
> libraries), but it would be possible (by design) to transform any
> component contained in the library into a format required by gEDA.

absolutely.  In my mind this tool has a very small and well defined api 
to communicate with pcb (or whatever else) about footprints but in 
general knows as little as possible about the details of what the 
footprints are and where they came from.

-Dan