Patrick Franken

Making electronics accessible to the broad public was mainly made possible by Arduino, the Raspberry PI and last but not least Fritzing. Back in 2009 it was a pain to get from a loose wiring on a breadboard to a PCB. Fritzing came up first with a unique breadboard view and a simple to use PCB layout. Fast forward 10 years Fritzing is still widely used by over 200.000 users but struggles to find a sustainable way to fund its development.

This talk will give a rough introduction to Fritzing including its strength and weaknesses and introduce a roadmap for its further development.

TBD

In the topic of Electronic-Design-Automation (EDA) Design Rules are used to validate a drawing against constraints usually set by the manufacturer. In this talk I'd like to introduce a (file-)format proposal for such Design Rules focused on the usage in PCB design.

In the past the definition of Design Rules has been a mess. Most EDA software provider (e.g. Autodesk, Altium, Cadence) have their own set of Design Rules which neither match the expectations of the users nor the requirements from the PCB manufacturers. Beside that the Design Rules are often misleading as they do not allow to describe what really breaks production or not. Because of that most PCB manufacturers give too loose rules which often break production for the customers. An open and democratic format for Design Rules could solve this. We face the issue that at least three parties are involved in these rules which I believe can only be solved by an open source format. Because of this I talked to EDA software supplieres, PCB manufactures and users and asked what they are missing and expect from it. Using this feedback I'd like to introduce our proposal and ask if and if yes, how work should be further organized. Depending on the projects schedule an practical implementation in Gerbv could be presented.

A session to discuss the current landscape for FOSS PCB design tools and possible paths moving forward.

Other people: Kaspar Emanuel Wayne Stambaugh Maciej Sumiński Roland Lutz

Working with Gerber files today is a task done by CAM personnel using extremely expensive and proprietary software. Until today no easy way exists to edit Gerber files through an API. What only few know is that libgerbv from the Geda project has proper support to not only show but also to edit Gerber files.

Using the Ruby bindings for libgerbv it is now possible to edit Gerber files through a simple API.

Working with Gerber files within the PCB manufacturing process takes a large chunk of the work as a lot of tasks like panelization are done directly within these files. However, until today there is no easy or an open source way to work with these files.

The Geda Team has done a great job with their Gerbv software as it is used worldwide to check Gerber files for correctness before production. What most people do not know is that libgerbv, which is used under the hood, is also capable of editing Gerber files. One of the reasons might be, that libgerbv is not accessible by most software engineers. To overcome this we, i.e. AISLER, have developed a simple Ruby binding for libgerbv. Using the API it is possible to load, edit and save Gerber files with just a few lines of code. Possible use cases are panelization, adding fiducials, receiving design information such as drill count and much more.

Right now the libgerbv ruby bindings (which will probably get some more catchy name later) are used within our own PCB manufacturing process at https://go.aisler.net. They'll be published during FOSDEM 2017.