gschem
gEDA/gaf's Schematic Capture
What is gschem?
gschem is the schematic capture program/tool which is part of gEDA. It's
sole purpose is to facilitate the graphical input of components/circuits.
What does it look like?
Here is a page of current
screenshots.
Who is the author of gschem?
Ales Hvezda
ahvezdaATgeda.seul.org
What is "schematic capture"?
Schematic capture is a fancy name for the ability to draw and layout circuits
using a computer. Standard symbols are used to represent the
various gates and components which are interconnected by nets (wires).
Most vector drawing programs can be used for schematic capture but they usually
lack one (or more) of the following characteristics:
- The awareness of the electrical properties of components, nets, and pins.
- Hierarchical design (having components represent some abstracted functionality).
- The ability to associate attributes with nets and components.
- Generate netlists from the schematic.
These are all critical features (among others which I cannot recall right now)
which are shared by all schematic capture programs. The schematic capture
program which is part of gEDA is called "gschem".
So what can gschem do?
Well, it can do schematic capture! :-) It will have all of the above
mentioned characteristics.
Current features:
- Draw graphic primitives such lines, boxes, text, circles, and arcs
- Take all of the above primitives and group them into a component or part
- Draw electrical elements such as nets, pins, and buses
- The same interface to draw schematics is also used to draw components
- A component library which has the basic schematic symbols
- Components and primitives can be placed, copied, moved, rotated, mirrored, and deleted
- Components can be embedded in schematic sheets (no .sym files required to
view the schematic)
- Components can be included in symbol files to encourage symbol reuse.
- Nets can be drawn to interconnect components and other nets.
- Visual indicators show if a net is dangling or connected to another net
(or pin)
- Attributes (text which takes the form: name=value) can be attached to
any object
- Attributes can be either visible or invisible
- There are several functions to search for, change the visibility of, and autonumber attributes
- Any object can be selected either by a single click or by a selection box
- Multiple objects can be selected and operations can be easily performed on this group
- The display can be zoomed, panned, resized, and redrawn at the touch of a button
- Postscript printing of the schematic is supported
- PNG image writing of the schematic is supported
- All colors and certain object characteristics can be changed via a rc file
- Ability to open multiple windows and work on multiple schematics easily
- Support for multiple buffers/pages/schematic open at the same time
- Support of a stroke like user interface
- Scripting. Uses guile (scheme like language) as its scripting language
- Hierarchical support for schematics and symbols
- Automatic drawing of bus rippers when connecting nets to buses
- And more...
gschem is pronounced like "gee-shhhem" (like the German word Schule) or
"gee-skkhem" (like the English word school).
What features are missing from gschem?
Here are the features which are currently missing:
- A more flexible and sane component library
- Automatic net routing around components
- DRC
gschem is definitely a work in progress, however quite a few people are using it for real work.
What is the current version?
20070216
Where can I download it?
gEDA's download page
