Re: [avr-chat] ATmega644 : dual USART... or not dual usart.. that, is the question !

[Joerg Wunsch]

Vincent Trouilliez <address@hidden> wrote:

> I am on Linux so no Protel anyway. Last time I checked, the two CAD
> suites that looked viable were gEda and Kicad, with the latter being
> more user friendly than the former I found. Any feedback on CAD
> suites on Linux, recommendations ?

gEDA has got a not so bad reputation lately, albeit it still suffers a
little from being a collection of individual tools that have not been
designed to be a single package from ground up, so each tool uses a
different approach in the UI.  I have used pcb (the layout part of
what later became gEDA) years before, and while it took some time to
get used to it, I don't remember any horror stories. ;-)

I don't really know how well Kicad is doing these days, so I can't
comment on that.  There are people who call it "Kinder-CAD"
(children's CAD), but there are also people who'll tell you they're
doing really well with it, so I guess you've got to figure it out
yourself if you're interested.

In the commercial section, there are at least two tools that run on
Linux (and also run on the Linux emulation in my FreeBSD).  The
probably best known one is Eagle.  I've been using it for maybe a
couple of years, and by that time, it certainly did its job for me.  I
noticed a few weak points (like it runs into quite a bit of trouble if
you are using parts with many different pitch values, because it
always wants to end a connection on a grid point), but then, nobody is
perfect anyway.  Eagle's autorouter, however, is known as a rather
poor tool, so you'd better not rely on that one.  Eagle has a free
option which is restricted to a single schematics sheet, and to two
layout layers of at most 80x100 mm².  There's also a low-cost
commercial version which IMHO costs around EUR 100, and allows for
100x160 mm² with two signal and two power layers -- but better check
the actual details on their website.  Both these versions are
restricted to non-commercial use.

That eventually got me to BAE (Bartels Auto Engineer), where the
author (Oliver Bartels) always praised the superiority of his
autorouter algorithms in the newsgroup de.sci.electronics.
Eventually, the members of that group pestered him enough to offer a
low-cost version, and so I then became one of the first users of BAE
Light.  (It costs about EUR 180 these days, and that version is
restricted to two layers and an area of 100x160 mm², with a little
margin allowed around that.  Unlike the low-cost Eagle version, no
restriction applies to the commercial use of the generated layout.)
Well, I'm still a happy user of BAE, found its support really
excellent, and the autorouter does a good job at least in those
situations where you seriously want an autorouter (i.e. when
dispatching the digital connections of larger SMD packages).  But BAE,
being a CAE tool with years of history to care for (and customers who
are used to that history) is nothing you'd learn within a day or two,
actually at the low usage rate of a hobbyist, it takes a year or more
to make full use of its power.  But then, many of its internals that
might look a little complicated at first start to make /real/ sense.

-- 
cheers, J"org               .-.-.   --... ...--   -.. .  DL8DTL

http://www.sax.de/~joerg/                        NIC: JW11-RIPE
Never trust an operating system you don't have sources for. ;-)