This past weekend I set out to begin laying out a PCB for my VGA->LCD converter board. Unfortunately, I could not find a decent PCB layout package that I could use natively in Mac OS X. I found one that seemed half-decent called Osmond PCB, but it is not yet complete. After doing the included tutorial and getting real excited about laying out my board, it failed horribly by not wanting to open any of my netlist files that I created. Boo-urns!
Fast-forward a few days, and I have the tried-and-true pcb available to me. I compiled it quite easily out of the box, and it runs decently under X11. It’s not perfect in every way (some UI quirks due to X11 + Aqua interaction) but it works very well for what I need to do. Not just that, but I am able to create new element files for all my weird parts that I pull off of other boards and find datasheets for, and my netlists work very well. Apparently if I want to use the the gEDA package, I can easily export the files from the schematic capture software directly to PCB. w00t!
Yay for Apple and their UNIX compatibility!
November 4th, 2006 at 12:33 pm
Have you seen Eagle? I’ve never used PCB so I don’t know how the features compare. http://www.cadsoftusa.com
It is pretty popular because they have a free “Hobbiest” version that you can use for non-commercial purposes. Its fully featured, but limits the size of board that you can make.
They support running on OSX, but I believe it is also under X11.
November 4th, 2006 at 12:40 pm
You know — I switched to Eagle very shortly after writing this post. I used it to lay out the Pedja Rogic power supply board PCBs which worked great until I arc welded them a few weekends ago…