[Discuss] Open Hardware defintion and eagle files

[Pierce Nichols]

One of the major problems is that, until very recently, there has been
no OSS PCB layout tool of acceptable quality. KiCAD only got there
within the past year (gEDA is still not there). It certainly wasn't
there when the Arduino project got rolling -- at the time, Eagle was
the only decent one available that you could use for design without
forking out some serious bucks. Switching tools midstream on a project
is a major undertaking.... and doing it purely to meet some standard
of purity is way too much to ask.

If you'd like to help things along, perhaps you could write a
conversion utility that takes in Eagle 6.* XML files and spits out
KiCAD files? That would be useful, and would accelerate the uptake of
KiCAD by making the choice to switch over far less daunting.

There still aren't any good open solid modeling packages. OpenSCAD may
get there someday (with a *LOT* of work), and Blender is not really
set up for engineering. Neither has the ability to generate the sort
of drawings generally required for most job shops and the like.

-p

On Fri, Sep 14, 2012 at 7:47 AM, Devlin Thyne <dthyne at dh-global.com> wrote:
> As I recall, one of the reasons for not requiring an open document on the
> nature of the editable file format was that the goal of creating OSHW was to
> actually be creating things. An open document requirement would be
> restrictive to the point of cutting off most OSHW creators' tools. The
> definition ceases to be very open if there is a restriction on what can be
> considered open. This may come to haunt us later down the line when an
> abandoned non-open format design needs to be resurrected and no one has the
> tool to do so. This will be one of the many growing pains we will have to go
> through.
>
> Best regards,
> Devlin Thyne
>
> _______________________________________________
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> discuss at lists.oshwa.org
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-- 
Pierce Nichols
Principal Engineer
Logos Electromechanical, LLC