Re: gEDA-dev: Google summer of code

[Dan McMahill <dan-at-NOSPAMmcmahill_dot_net>]

Anthony Blake wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> Is geda going to be getting students to do some work on the project for 
> the google summer of code? If so does anyone have any good ideas for 
> work that needs to be done? For those who don't know what the google 
> summer of code is, basically they get student developers to work on open 
> source projects ( http://code.google.com/soc).
> 
> Cheers,
> 
> Anthony
> WAND Network Research Group
> Department of Computer Science
> University of Waikato
> New Zealand

I have ideas and would be willing to be a mentor.

Some ideas:

- support for multiple non-copper layers in pcb that are more editable. 
  These layers would need to be allowed as part of an element and 
standalone.  These are things like keepout regions, assembly drawing, an 
actual board outline layer that is not just a copper layer, etc.

- support for polygons inside of elements in pcb (think microstrip 
filters or resonators).

- a parts manager that takes a graphical symbol and a physical footprint 
and marries the two to produce a heavy part.

- gnetlist -- totally rework the internals using gnetman and/or Steve 
Meiers work.  This would be with an eye towards scalability

- work on bringing gwave more up to speed in terms of not requiring 
guile-gtk (which is basically dead I as far as I can tell), possibly 
supporting hdf5 (as a way to help move towards a better than ascii 
format that is non proprietary), adding a waveform calculator that lets 
you do things like add waveforms, do fft's, etc.

- develop a test framework for as much of pcb as possible.  I'd love to 
see a fairly large regression test suite.  Some examples are sets of 
layouts that just barely pass and just barely fail each of the different 
DRC checks, generate BOM's, x-y files, generate gerbers and maybe use 
gerbv to do a graphical xor against a "golden" file.

- improve the DRC interface for pcb.  Perhaps have a drc layer that gets 
generated when you run DRC.  Then you could have an interface that lets 
you step through them and see on that layer, exactly what failed.  Maybe 
this could be combined with making the drc checks more unit testable.

- add hooks into gschem needed to fully support things like 
backannotation of simulation results and click-to-plot results.

- expand libgeda (if needed) to provide a complete enough guile 
interface to be able to do more complex database manipulations.  One use 
would be to have a back annotation tool that used libgeda instead of 
relying on perl.  The problem with perl is that you've involved Yet 
Another Gschem Parser.

- teach pcb to have the right actions to allow gsch2pcb to tell pcb to 
create footprints instead of gsch2pcb having to know about the internal 
file format of pcb and having to know about pcb footprint search paths. 
    The goal would be a more stable interface.

- Build a footprint calculator that can take the IPC rules and produce a 
pcb footprint.  Preferably write this in a way where the core program is 
independent of a gui so that you can script it for generating entire 
large famlies of footprints or hook it up to a GUI of choice (lesstif, 
gtk, maybe even cgi).


These are just off the top of my head.  I'm sure there are more....

So let me ask this, are there any other developers interested in being a 
mentor?  Are there any students listening interested in being a student? 
  The application window for mentor organizations is march 5-12 and for 
students, march 14-24.  So, we'd have to act quickly.



-Dan


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