apollon
Printed Circuit Board editor.
Hystory
While I was in the air traveling to/from Greece, I decided to write a new data structure for gEDA/PCB. Not because it is unusable, but I wanted to have one place for the layout data, and other attributes, like mechanical data, schematic symbol. The whole thing stared out as a small parser of pcb files that puts everything to an SQLite database.
After a while an idea came that what I was really doing, is defining a new data structure and file format for pcb. My mind went further, and realised that the current gEDA/pcb lacks lots of feature, and a new tool must be created to be able to achieve the goals of a professional EDA tool.
In Greek mythology, Aplollo is the God of knowledge, music, art and healing. Apollon is how Hungarian people spell Apollo. I hope this tool will help engineers to create their professional PCB layouts while enjoying the beauty of Apollon.
Contributors needed
I need contributors who help me write this code. I want to use as much code from gEDA/pcb as I can. However I want the following features to be implemented on the top of current pcb functionality.
- The user can edit footprints by using the GUI.
- The user can draw arbitrary padstacks.
- No concept of footprint, just embedded layouts.
- Blind and buried VIAs
What we have today
- We have a data structure and SQL schema.
- A perl script that reads a gEDA/pcb file and builds up a database form it.
That is not much, I know.
Roadmap
- Write a parser of the data structures
- Write an engine that can display primitive shapes
- Either weld this to gEDA/pcb, or create a new tool
- The rest will come :-)
Technology
- SQLite for data storage
- FLTK for the GUI toolkit
- git for VCS.
- Cmake for configuration management
- C++
Author
I hope more will join.