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Automating PCB input

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joeft
2004-10-29
2013-05-29
  • joeft

    joeft - 2004-10-29

    I am interested in fully automating a PCB session to start the initial layout work on a board.  I've tried to use the "-script" flag with a file containing "Actions" to input
    the necessary commands.  This seems to work to a point, but I can't figure out how to pass parameters to the functions that the Action(s) invoke.
    For example if I want to load a layout file with "Load(Layout)", I can get it to bring up the dialog box for the file name, but what I would really like is to provide the file name from the script.  Then I could proceed automatically with the other commands I need to process.

    (What I'm really trying to do here is start a design by
    throwing all the parts into a layout automatically.  I'm migrating from a obsolete schematic tool (from which I can extract a crude netlist and parts list), rather than
    from the geda schematic tool, so I can't use gsch2pcb on this design.  Is there another way to do this?)

    Thanks for any suggestions,
    j

     
    • Dan McMahill

      Dan McMahill - 2004-10-30

      For something like that I might actually use awk or perl to pull in the parts from the obsolete schematic tool.

      About more automation, yes, there are a number of actions which cause dialog boxes to come up and we need to make a more automated version.  The one I'd like to see is for printing as I'd like to be able to generate RS-274-X files from the command line.

      For the Load(Layout), you could modify ActionLoad() near line 3862 of action.c to take an optional 2nd argument which is the filename.

      -Dan

       

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