PolyMicro Systems

Basically, they all suck. Big time! Having recently entered the world of EDA I downloaded every app I could find, both Mac and Windows to try them out. Started off with Orcad since that is what we used at Apple but immediately gave up on that as it was really big bucks and was Windows only.

Next, I looked at the Mac side and found Logicworks which looked ok but the integration with the PCB layout was thru a 3rd party app and not very good, and it was kind of pricy for my needs.

Took a look at McCAD and it was really clunky and not well integrated at all, never did quite figure out which packages were what. Looked like it had not been really updated since Mac Classic days as it was using the CarbonLib to do the interface work.

Then, I found Eagle which although was an X11 app would run on OSX. It was not too bad although the part library creation was really clunky and not intuitive at all.

Island Logic
VisualSpice looks really interesting it is a completely integrated 32-bit analog, digital, mixed signal schematic design and circuit simulation program.

Mentala

Products:

* SmartPCB
* SuperCad and SuperPCB: About $400 for layout and PCB, but with autorouter.

Mentor
A confusing array of what appears to be high priced products since I did not see any pricing information. I only spent a few minutes at this site because basically I could not find any reference to schematic capture although I did find something about PCB layout. Another one of those fancy pretty web sites that the CEO thinks looks nice but is in fact very unfriendly to the user, unless of course you work at the company then you know where everything is located.

Merlin PCB Designer
Merlin PCB Designer is a free printed circuit board (PCB) layout tool that is distributed by Falco Systems to route printed circuit boards using CorelDRAW. Since it did not have a schematic capture feature I did not bother to try it.

Arrg, the gdb Macsbug plugin seems to be broken on Leopard. First of all, the files in /usr/libexec/gdb/plugins/Macsbug were all setguid to procmod so I unset the bits and am now getting

NSCreateObjectFileImageFromFile failed for "/usr/libexec/gdb/plugins/MacsBug/gdbinit-MacsBug" (error 2).

More good stuff on using gdb.

Red Sweater Blog - Hexy Little Thing

(Via .)

Lost my Blog files Well, at least the most recent ones. Recovered from a old backup part of them. Will be now syncing my remote host site to local on a daily basis now that the store is up and running.

That way I will also have a Time Machine copy handy.