The term gEDA refers to two things: # A set of software applications (

CAD Computer-aided design (CAD) is the use of computers (or ) to aid in the creation, modification, analysis, or optimization of a design. This software is used to increase the productivity of the designer, improve the quality of design, improve c ...

tools) used for electronic design released under the GPL. As such, gEDA is an ECAD (electronic CAD) or EDA (

electronic design automation Electronic design automation (EDA), also referred to as electronic computer-aided design (ECAD), is a category of software tools for designing electronic systems such as integrated circuits and printed circuit boards. The tools work togeth ...

) application suite. gEDA is mostly oriented towards

printed circuit board A printed circuit board (PCB; also printed wiring board or PWB) is a medium used in electrical and electronic engineering to connect electronic components to one another in a controlled manner. It takes the form of a laminated sandwich str ...

design (as opposed to

integrated circuit An integrated circuit or monolithic integrated circuit (also referred to as an IC, a chip, or a microchip) is a set of electronic circuits on one small flat piece (or "chip") of semiconductor material, usually silicon. Large numbers of tiny ...

design). The gEDA applications are often referred to collectively as "the gEDA Suite". # The collaboration of

free software Free software or libre software is computer software distributed under terms that allow users to run the software for any purpose as well as to study, change, and distribute it and any adapted versions. Free software is a matter of liberty, n ...

open-source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open-source model is a decentralized so ...

developers who work to develop and maintain the gEDA toolkit. The developers communicate via gEDA mailing lists, and have participated in the annual "

Google Summer of Code The Google Summer of Code, often abbreviated to GSoC, is an international annual program in which Google awards stipends to contributors who successfully complete a free and open-source software coding project during the summer. , the program is ...

" event as a single project. This collaboration is often referred to as "the gEDA Project". The word "gEDA" is a conjunction of " GPL" and "EDA". The names of some of the individual tools in the gEDA Suite are prefixed with the letter "g" to emphasize that they are released under the

GNU General Public License The GNU General Public License (GNU GPL or simply GPL) is a series of widely used free software licenses that guarantee end users the four freedoms to run, study, share, and modify the software. The license was the first copyleft for general ...

History

The gEDA project was started by Ales Hvezda in an effort to remedy the lack of

EDA tools for

Linux Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, whi ...

UNIX Unix (; trademarked as UNIX) is a family of multitasking, multiuser computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix, whose development started in 1969 at the Bell Labs research center by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, ...

. The first software was released on 1 April 1998, and included a schematic capture program and a netlister. At that time, th
gEDA Project website
an
mailing lists
were also set up. Originally, the project planned to also write a PCB layout program. However, an existing open-source layout program, "PCB", was soon discovered by the project. Thereafter, the ability to target netlists to PCB was quickly built into the gEDA Project's netlister, and plans to write a new layout program from scratch were scrapped. Meanwhile, developers working on PCB became affiliates of the gEDA Project. Other open-source EDA programs were created at about the same time. The authors of those programs became affiliated with the gEDA website and mailing lists, and the collaborative gEDA Project was born. At present, the gEDA Project remains a federation of software tools developed by different (but sometimes overlapping) programmers. The thread which holds the project together is the shared vision of creating a powerful, community-based, open-source EDA toolkit.

pcb-rnd pcb-rnd is a modular and compact (core under 60k SLOC, plugins at 100k SLOC) software application used for layout design of electrical circuits. Pcb-rnd is used professionally as well as in universities. Pre-built packages are available on mult ...

was forked from gEDA/PCB in 2013. Lepton EDA was forked from the gEDA/gaf suite in late 2016.

Detailed description

Loosely speaking, the term "gEDA Suite" refers to all

projects and applications that have associated themselves with the gEDA Project via the geda-dev/geda-user mailing lists. These include: * gEDA/gaf - gschem and friends (the original project) * PCB - PCB layout program * Gerbv -

Gerber file The Gerber format is an open ASCII vector format for printed circuit board (PCB) designs. It is the de facto standard used by PCB industry software to describe the printed circuit board images: copper layers, solder mask, legend, drill data, et ...

viewer *

ngspice ''Ngspice'' is an open-source mixed-level/mixed-signal electronic circuit simulator. It is a successor of the latest stable release of Berkeley SPICE, version 3f.5, which was released in 1993. A small group of maintainers and the user community ...

- a port of Berkeley

SPICE A spice is a seed, fruit, root, bark, or other plant substance primarily used for flavoring or coloring food. Spices are distinguished from herbs, which are the leaves, flowers, or stems of plants used for flavoring or as a garnish. Spices a ...

* GnuCap - A modern

electronic circuit simulation Electronic circuit simulation uses mathematical models to replicate the behavior of an actual electronic device or circuit. Simulation software allows for modeling of circuit operation and is an invaluable analysis tool. Due to its highly accurat ...

program * gspiceui - A

GUI The GUI ( "UI" by itself is still usually pronounced . or ), graphical user interface, is a form of user interface that allows users to interact with electronic devices through graphical icons and audio indicator such as primary notation, inste ...

front end for ngspice/GnuCap * gwave - An analog

waveform viewer A waveform viewer is a software tool for viewing the signal levels of either a digital or analog circuit design.Janick Bergeron, ''Writing Testbenches: Functional verification of HDL Models'', Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2000 Waveform viewers come ...

* gaw - An analog waveform viewer a rewrite of gwave. Works with gspiceui. * Icarus Verilog - A

Verilog Verilog, standardized as IEEE 1364, is a hardware description language (HDL) used to model electronic systems. It is most commonly used in the design and verification of digital circuits at the register-transfer level of abstraction. It is als ...

simulator * GTKWave - A digital waveform viewer * wcalc -

Transmission line In electrical engineering, a transmission line is a specialized cable or other structure designed to conduct electromagnetic waves in a contained manner. The term applies when the conductors are long enough that the wave nature of the transmi ...

and electromagnetic structure analysis Within the gEDA Suite, gEDA/gaf ("gaf" stands for "gschem and friends") is the smaller subset of tools grouped together under the gEDA name and maintained directly by the gEDA project's founders. GEDA/gaf includes: * gschem - A

schematic capture Schematic capture or schematic entry is a step in the design cycle of electronic design automation (EDA) at which the electronic diagram, or electronic schematic of the designed electronic circuit is created by a designer. This is done interact ...

program * gnetlist - A

netlist In electronic design, a netlist is a description of the connectivity of an electronic circuit. In its simplest form, a netlist consists of a list of the electronic components in a circuit and a list of the nodes they are connected to. A network ...

generation program * gsymcheck - A syntax checker for schematic symbols * gattrib - A

spreadsheet A spreadsheet is a computer application for computation, organization, analysis and storage of data in tabular form. Spreadsheets were developed as computerized analogs of paper accounting worksheets. The program operates on data entered in ...

program for editing symbol attributes on a schematic. * libgeda - Libraries for gschem, gnetlist, and gsymcheck * gsch2pcb - Forward annotation from schematic to layout using pcb * Assorted utility programs

Platforms

Linux

Because one of the gEDA Project's longstanding goals is to provide a suite of

EDA EDA or Eda may refer to: Computing * Electronic design automation * Enterprise Desktop Alliance, a computer technology consortium * Enterprise digital assistant * Estimation of distribution algorithm * Event-driven architecture * Exploratory da ...

applications for

, all applications in the gEDA Suite compile and run on Linux. Besides building the programs from source, binary executables for all programs in the gEDA Suite are available from popular package archives; the programs may be installed on many common

Linux distribution A Linux distribution (often abbreviated as distro) is an operating system made from a software collection that includes the Linux kernel and, often, a package management system. Linux users usually obtain their operating system by downloading one ...

s using

package management A package manager or package-management system is a collection of software tools that automates the process of installing, upgrading, configuring, and removing computer programs for a computer in a consistent manner. A package manager deals w ...

tools such as

apt Apt. is an abbreviation for apartment. Apt may also refer to: Places * Apt Cathedral, a former cathedral, and national monument of France, in the town of Apt in Provence * Apt, Vaucluse, a commune of the Vaucluse département of France * A ...

or dnf.

Unix

All gEDA applications will also compile and run on other

Unix-like A Unix-like (sometimes referred to as UN*X or *nix) operating system is one that behaves in a manner similar to a Unix system, although not necessarily conforming to or being certified to any version of the Single UNIX Specification. A Unix-li ...

operating systems, such as

OpenBSD OpenBSD is a security-focused, free and open-source, Unix-like operating system based on the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD). Theo de Raadt created OpenBSD in 1995 by forking NetBSD 1.0. According to the website, the OpenBSD project e ...

FreeBSD FreeBSD is a free and open-source Unix-like operating system descended from the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD), which was based on Research Unix. The first version of FreeBSD was released in 1993. In 2005, FreeBSD was the most popular ...

and

NetBSD NetBSD is a free and open-source Unix operating system based on the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD). It was the first open-source BSD descendant officially released after 386BSD was forked. It continues to be actively developed and is ava ...

. Some of these distributions also support installation of pre-packaged binaries using package management utilities.

Mac OS X

Most gEDA applications also install and run successfully on

Mac OS X macOS (; previously OS X and originally Mac OS X) is a Unix operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc. since 2001. It is the primary operating system for Apple's Mac computers. Within the market of desktop and lap ...

, typically using the Fink package manager and

Macports MacPorts, formerly DarwinPorts, is a package manager for macOS and Darwin. It is an open-source software project that aims to simplify the installation of other open source software. It's similar in function to Fink and the BSD ports collection ...

. Since few commercial EDA tools run on the Mac, this feature has made gEDA a popular electronic design package amongst Mac users.

Microsoft Windows

Microsoft Windows Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for ...

support is currently not a primary project goal. Nonetheless, some programs in the gEDA Suite have built-in hooks for Windows support, and those programs will build and run under Windows. However, binary executables for most of the gEDA Suite are not distributed by the gEDA Project.

Community

An important feature of the gEDA project is the strong user community it has created. The gEDA mailing lists have several hundred subscribers, and many subscribers are electronics experts. Thus, the gEDA mailing lists have become a source not only for information related to the gEDA applications, but also for exchange of general electronic design information. As a consequence of the project's openness, schematic symbols, footprints, and utility scripts are freely created and shared amongst the members of the gEDA community at a spin-off website
www.gedasymbols.org

References

External links

*
Circuit Design on Your Linux Box Using gEDA
— Overview article in th
Linux Journal

gsch2pcb tutorial
— How to go from schematic to pcb layout
Using gEDA
— Another tutorial describing how to use the gEDA Toolset.
Windows installer
— An unofficial installer for windows.
Lepton EDA
— Fork of gEDA/gaf. {{CAD software Free electronic design automation software Electronic design automation software for Linux