kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Solonen Vesa <vesa.solonen@xxxxxxxx>]

15.03.2011 04:16, Clive Nicolson kirjoitti:
> A few months ago I had a need to reverse engineer a legacy pcb for which 
> all I had was the pcb board.
> 
> I looked around for a tool to help me with this and could only find 
> Deltasoft's
> CBR 5.0, then I discovered kiCad ...
> 
> I modified pcbnew (ver 2709) so that I could display an underlay image 
> of my pcb above the background and behind any foot prints. I soon 
> discovered that although I could place foot prints corresponding to 
> those on the pcb I could not easily get back to a schematic in eeschema.
> 
> I then added the following:
> 
> 1) the image underlay code to eeschema, the component editor and the foot
> print editor.
> 
> 2) modified modedit.cpp so that I could create components from foot prints.
> 
> 3) modified schframe.cpp and sch_component so that at the press of a 
> button I
> could flip between a schematic of components and a schematic of foot 
> prints,
> with the wire end points following the pins to which they are connected.
> Newly placed foot prints are automatically given sensible positions.
> 
> 4) created some components and corresponding foot prints for junctions 
> and vias.
> 
> 5) some other stuff!
> 
> Some of this code is buggy, incomplete and a little hackish and without too
> many changes to the GUI (ie no dialog changes), but now I can edit both a
> schematic and it's pcb dual in eeschema.
> 
> I would like to add the following to eeschema/KiCad (not nessecarily in 
> this order):
> 
> i) layers as in pcbnew.
> ii) auto routing of a schematic.
> iii) component locking etc as in pcbnew.
> iv) some functionally from cvpcb to ease adding footprint names to 
> components.
> v) make images drawable just like lines arcs etc.
> vi) copy foot print position and orientation info into the net list files.
> vii) make some newly added behaviour controlable via dialogs.
> iix) ...
> 
> It is a pity that eeschema and pcbnew (and their corresponding component 
> and foot print editors) do not share more code and file formats!
> 
> Any interest in this technology?
> 
> Clive

Clive et al., do you have any interest in porting these [1] things to new codebase with some refining and integration? I'm currently in a need of some system level RE (two of three boards smd) and an own free piece of RE:d equipment is on offer for the guy who helps to solve this.

-Vesa


[1] https://code.launchpad.net/~clive-baby/kicad/reversepcb