sie@fulcrum.bt.co.uk (Simon Raybould) (03/14/91)
I am looking for a good PCB routing package for the Amiga.
I am prepared to pay for commercial stuff, but can't find
any. There is loads for the PC and I have a bridgeboard
but would rather use native Amiga code if possible.
Does anyone know of ANY pcb programs at all for the Amiga
PD or commercial.
What facilities do they provide ?
Schematic capture ?
Autorouting ?
Just manual layout ?
Any help appreciated.
--
Simon J Raybould (sie@fulcrum.bt.co.uk) // {o.o}
\X/AMIGA \-/
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British Telecom Fulcrum, Fordrough Lane, Birmingham, B9 5LD, ENGLAND.daveh@cbmvax.commodore.com (Dave Haynie) (04/03/91)
In article <SIE.91Mar14135054@lister.fulcrum.bt.co.uk> sie@fulcrum.bt.co.uk (Simon Raybould) writes: >I am looking for a good PCB routing package for the Amiga. >Does anyone know of ANY pcb programs at all for the Amiga >PD or commercial. There are two commercial PCB programs on the market now, Prolific's Pro-Board and Black Belt Systems' BoardMaster. >What facilities do they provide ? >Schematic capture ? >Autorouting ? >Just manual layout ? I did a reasonably extensive review of Pro-Board V2.x many moons ago for the now-defunct Amiga Sentry. The program is decidely un-Amiga-ish. It'll eat a Calay style netlist from your schematic capture program of choice. It's pretty easy to work with; you only get one working magnification, though you can view a full board rats nest. You generally sequence through each net in turn. You can set it up to automatically generate vias based on net direction. It has a so-called point to point autorouter (eg, one wire on your command), but that's useless except for very short, very horizontal or very vertical routes (a long diagonal will basically get routed diagonally). But at least it's fast, as compared to the typical PC Clone PCB program I've encountered. It produces HPGL or Gerber output, no drill tape though there's some add-on module for that, and still no decent laser printer capability. It likes to deal with things on a 25 mil grid, but does support off-grid stuff entered by the numbers (like DB connectors). It only directly supports one trace between pins, though some crazy people have built double sized symbol libraries to support three traces between pins. It seems to have a few bugs, but nothing I couldn't work around. Another revision of this program, and it's companion schematic capture Pro-Net, and you might have a first class system. I only recently got BoardMaster, so I don't yet know how well it works. I like its feature list, though. It is much more Amigaish, using menus and gadgets for its interface. It also supports AREXX. It seems to have a number of output options, and does produce a drill tape for you. It has a very complete looking autorouting module, though I have yet to see if this is capable of some serious autorouting or not. It does one or two lines between pins. I do intend to give it a complete exercise sometime soon, as if it does what it's supposed to do, it'll beat Pro-Board hands down. It doesn't appear to handle off-grid stuff well, though I haven't any immediate need for that (and it might be something I've missed). I belive Black Belt's excellent "HAM-E" device was designed on BoardMaster (I think they said it was autorouted), so it's certainly capable of doing production quality work. -- Dave Haynie Commodore-Amiga (Amiga 3000) "The Crew That Never Rests" {uunet|pyramid|rutgers}!cbmvax!daveh PLINK: hazy BIX: hazy "That's me in the corner, that's me in the spotlight" -R.E.M.