.. so i press wrong buttons, argh :) ok i think i have it now...
On Tue, May 12, 2015 at 8:30 PM, Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton lkcl@lkcl.net wrote:
apologies top post no mouse right now
On Tue, May 12, 2015 at 8:28 PM, Paul Sokolovsky pmiscml@gmail.com wrote:
Hello,
On Mon, 11 May 2015 07:44:16 +0000 joem joem@martindale-electric.co.uk wrote:
KiCAD autorouter freeroute has gone open source and stand alone
For Ubuntu 12.04, install the default-jdk i.e. sudo apt-get install default-jdk
The freeroute files can be downloaded from here: https://github.com/nikropht/FreeRouting/
Finally something refreshing among all those boring news on pseudo-open hardware. If only KiCad itself was getting UI improvements so all the pseudo-openhardware arduinish crowd was really ashamed to use non-open tools...
yeah mostly the problem with kicad development isn't the quality of the code, nor the committment of its developers, but their mindset to input from others.
in the bugreports that i've given them their responses have been incredibly telling.
the first bugreport described how they use "part" and "unit" in the part editor, then f****g well start using "unit" and some *completely* nonsensical word to refer to things by totally different names.
so the exact same thing is called "part" in the library part editor and is called "unit" when you place it in a schematic.
... has this been fixed? of course not.
then i mentioned that the concept of sharing pins across multiple units within a library part is absolute total nonsense - *no* other editor does this. they have some utterly insane idea that it's good that if any pin is in the exact same location across multiple units, that it *must* be the the exact same pin (even if it isn't), therefore when you move a pin in one unit *all* pins move across *all* units.
this stupid nonsense causes absolute mayhem, corruption of library parts, and ends up with segfaults just from loading a schematic. i actually had to stop editing multi-unit parts from the library and edit the text files *by hand* it was that bad.
... has this been fixed?? of course not.
has anyone given a satisfactory explanation as to why pins are shared across multiple units *at all*? no they have not.
and that's not all. there are many many things wrong with kicad that, overall, make it utterly unusable for anything but the absolute simplest of PCBs with a fraction of the components that you would normally have on a professional PCB.
in short - i'd *love* to be able to use kicad, but it's just such an unprofessional program that right now i simply can't.
l.