[Ground-station] How are we set for layout tools?

[Keith Wheeler]

Paul,

Honestly I personally wouldn't have separate repos for the outputs and
source. I'd tend towards a single repo, with outputs being generated for
each tagged release. I mentioned separate repos because many prefer to
model hardware repos on software ones where build artifacts are pushed to a
different channel. The complaint, as I understand it, is that at any point
in development other than tagging a release, there is likely to be a
mismatch between the source schematic document output documents. Seems to
me the best way to resolve this is a well written readme; I think CI/CD is
still a radical concept for board design, at least once you get away from
multik$ tools which have scripting support for automated output generation.

One thing I'd change in the trans-ionospheric repo is the "outputs"
directory. The gerbers, drc, BOM, etc are all there. Perhaps a directory
structure for these would be in order, and one would be the pdf's of the
source docs. Netlists would be a useful output.

John,

I completely agree with your comment about creating a project library. Some
tools make that easy; the top tier Altium does, I don't know about the
"Circuit Studio" I use or Kicad. While "source" a project library should be
at a minimum updated with every tagged release. Other than the tool the
project space should contain every source file someone would need to
recreate and modify the gerbers, BOM, etc, with no surprise library
dependencies. It also prevents issues with name collisions -- I've seen
tools just default to using the first "SOT23" footprint it finds, and if
there are different footprints that differ in pin ordering, bad things
happen.

On Tue, Jul 28, 2020 at 9:36 AM Paul Williamson via Ground-Station
<ground-station at lists.openresearch.institute> wrote:

> On Jul 28, 2020, at 7:53 AM, Keith Wheeler wrote:
> This also opens the question of do we have a repo for source and another
> for tagged released outputs.
>
>
> I’m curious as to why it might be a good idea to have separate repos for
> work and outputs. At first glance it would seem to me that this is just
> asking for version skew confusion and extra work.
>
>
>    1.
>
>    Not all parties interested in the schematic and layout source files
>    will desire access to the tool. We should publish these in a more common
>    format (pdf?), perhaps at every tagged release.
>
> Yes, we absolutely should. Even people who do have access to the tools may
> find it quicker and easier to open a PDF for reference. The semantics of
> the special source file formats can have dependencies on library files that
> could become separated (or version skewed) from the design, or on features
> of specific tool versions. A stable, widely recognized, print-oriented
> format like PDF gives a valuable point of reference for what the thing is
> supposed to look like. Ancillary text-based outputs like netlists can also
> be helpful for people working with the hardware.
>
>   -Paul KB5MU
>
>
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