Re: [avr-gcc-list] gEDA [was: Homebrew ICE?]

[Joerg Wunsch]

As Terry Porter <address@hidden> wrote:

>I popped into this thread to suggest gEDA for those who are doing
>schematic capture, as an alternative to closed source solutions. I
>have a page detailing my experiences with gEDA and pcb, complete with
>screenshots and a pic of a pcb I produced at home using the above
>toolset a few years ago.

Well, i don't wanna become religious about the issue, but knowing how
many man-years a good auto-router (and auto-placer, as in BAE's case)
typically costs to develop, i'm happily using a commercial one if
someone offers it to me at reasonable (for my hobby work) cost because
i can understand that someone who develops such a system would like to
do this for a living.  (Note that this BAE CAD system is currently the
only commercial software i'm using at my home machine at all.)

I do know PCB (well, at least slightly older versions), and i wouldn't
hesitate using it e. g. for large but simpler boards which are not
allowed by my hobbyist licence of the commercial CAD system, but when
it comes to stuff like this JTAG ICE clone, i rather value the time
saving by the autoplacer/autorouter.  It allows me to throw away an
entire layout, and re-route it completely without any hard feelings
about the time spent to create it.

Of course, this is the typical tradeoff between opensource and
commercial software.

>I also would be interested in designing a GPL Jtag interface for the
>Avr toolset in the long run, ...

I understand this is the basic goal of the freeice project.
-- 
J"org Wunsch                                           Unix support engineer
address@hidden        http://www.interface-systems.de/~j/