Re: gEDA-dev: idea for power pins

[John Doty <jpd-at-NOSPAMnoqsi_dot_com>]

On Nov 12, 2008, at 10:17 AM, DJ Delorie wrote:

>
> I've seen this elsewhere, how feasible would it be to add such a thing
> to gschem/gnetlist?
>
> Somewhere on the schematic, include a table.

Why put in in the schematic? It would be much more useful as an  
auxiliary file.

>   This table has three
> colums:  refdes, pin, netname.

Yes. The easiest netlist form to manipulate.

>
> The table would have to be a real object, not just decorated text.  It
> would have to retain the relationships between the contents, so that
> gnetlist can use it to attach the listed pins.

It would be extremely handy for gnetlist to be able to read such a  
file and merge the information into the netlist derived from the  
schematics. I see multiple applications:

1. Tabular design

This seems be your intention. Some aspects of circuit design are  
better represented by tables than by graphics. Power connections are  
one example. Connector pinouts are another.

One advantage of a file is that you can easily manipulate it into a  
form you can turn into nicely formatted documentation.

In my old Viewdraw->PH70 flow, I had a way to merge files like this  
into netlists, and also a way to make them into nice docs using tbl  
and troff. Makefiles and AWK scripts, pretty simple.

2. Netlist merging

It should be easy to parse almost any text netlist format into this  
form. This would allow us to merge netlist outputs from other tools  
into a gEDA project. This issue actually came up today on one of my  
projects.

>
> "Pin" could be either a pin number or a symbolic name, so that you
> could list "VDD" regardless of which physical pin that's on (i.e. if
> you switch from dip-14 to qfn-16, no need to update the table).
>
> I suppose "pin" could be a comma-separated list, too, for chips with
> multiple power pins.  "refdes" could be a list too, for identical
> chips (or at least chips with identical power pinouts).
>
> Alternately, the table could remap "net=" assignments within the
> symbol.  So a row "U4; VDD; +5v" would map the Vdd pins to the +5v
> net.
>
> When you edit the table, it brings up a dialog that looks like
> gattrib, so it's easy to edit.
>
>
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>

John Doty              Noqsi Aerospace, Ltd.
http://www.noqsi.com/
jpd@noqsi.com




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