kicad-developers team mailing list archive

["Lorenzo" <lomarcan@...>]

> There is just too much going on in linux graphics at the moment that the 
> decision where to go is a bit difficult. My bets are on Cairo/Clutter 
> which would mean wxGC and possibly some direct access to native context.

Oh pleeeeeasee... Cairo is slow as hell... gerbv is nearly unusable even without antialiasing, for example.
 
> For example pcbnew and 3D viewer could be combined easily when those tools
> get ready and imho it's not worth the hassle to write pcbnew graphics in 

Maybe when we'll all have FireGL or Quadros in our boxes :P:P current GPU are optimized in filling texture triangles, not drawing lines... cad application are notorius for being geometry limited (games are usually fill limited because its all pre-computed, usually).

For PCB at least the alpha blending (or bitplane processing) could be usefully accelerated but remember than under OpenGL every frame you need to redraw EVERYTHING (short of using dirty tricks like rendering all the 'static' stuff in a pbuffer saving the RGBAZ values before rendering the dynamic one... but it only works if the dynamic stuff is not blended AND you need a rather spiffy card to freeze the whole framebuffer in that way). OTOH my old FireGL4 blasted antialiased LINES on the screen like nothing short of a consumer card of MANY years after... (it had a dedicated geometry processor aside the main GPU :D)

> opengl now. If I just would have done more coding and less soldering, but 

I fear the day when I'll have to rework a BGA :(:( Leadless packages are already a discrete PITA :P

As for coding I feel C++ is too bloated (cmake takes forever looking dependencies... why???)... maybe because I program the PIC18FJ straight in asm :P(with many other architectures... for every project a different MCU :(((

> one can't do RF only in code yet... And nobody works up through hole 
> plating process without some chemistry ;^)

Do you mean that sticky stuff involving colloidal palladium? It's somebody else's work :P I get to insult them when they do the hot air leveling wrongand the holes fills up with solder, anyway :D

Oh, and RF is SICK :D I prefer stronger stuff in low frequency (the latest PCB I designed had some traces of over 300 mil and a 70A relay soldered on it... BTW the 'oblong hole' feature works as advertised, the pcb factory read the files without troubles)

I put a demo pdf in the file section... my webmail isn't working and I don't know how to attach to the mail with yahoo groups...