kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Mitch Davis <mjd+launchpad.net@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, Oct 31, 2012 at 5:24 PM, Edwin van den Oetelaar
<oetelaar.automatisering@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> Thanks for your effort in the project.
> I checked your code on sourceforge and it looks nice.
> I do have a question however, why did you use C++ and not a scripting
> language for this?
>
> In my experience a scripting language allows a programmer to focus more on
> the task (creating vrml) and allows for incremental and interactive
> development.
> Just curious about the reason not to use perl/python/ruby for the task...

See this board?

  http://www.goodluckbuy.com/45-dgree-adaptor-with-12-esc-100a-connection-board-for-multicopter.html

There is a lot of symmetry in that board, not only in the main 8-way
rotation, but also in the 9 tiny holes around each larger hole.
There's no way I could have done that by hand in KiCad.  Luckily, I
didn't have to, because I wrote a Python script to do it, and it was
*easy*.  Especially useful was Python's support for complex numbers.
It means it's really easy to mix rectangular and polar coordinate
systems (even in the same expression), and Python handles all the
vector addition and scaling for you.

Source code is here:

  https://github.com/CapnKernel/4cpower

Cirilio, thank you for your modelling work.  I really hope you can
have a look at Python.  It is easy to learn, and makes programming
fun.  Oh, and it is already the official scripting language of the
next generation of KiCad.

Mitch.