devbisme
[SKiDL Feature Request] support for Horizon-EDA
Have you had a chance to look at Horizon-EDA here on github? I've been playing around a bit with it and so far like it - especially its support for viewing exploded 3d boards... ;-)
Since using schematic capture makes me break out in hives it would be awesome if SKiDL could be used with Horizon-EDA. Parts are managed in a so-called "pool" and are in JSON format so that hopefully wouldn't be too difficult to integrate. I don't know if the netlist format would pose any difficulties, though.
My apologies for the late reply. For some reason I'm not getting email about Github issues.
I'll take a look at Horizon-EDA. The two main issues are:
- Reading library files. Getting these into a Python data structure is obviously easy since they're JSON. Hopefully, constructing the SKiDL Part objects will also be easy.
- Outputing netlist files. I looked at the docs and scanned the schematic source file names. Nothing jumps out as to what the netlist format might be.
Some sample projects can be found in hubble and x-band-tx. The netlist is stored in a JSON file e.g. top_block.json.
From a freenode chat with the creator/maintainer of horizon there's no explicit export or import of the netlist - it's pretty tightly coupled within the program. However nothing prevents editing an existing top_block.json or (possibly) creating a brand new one externally.
I think the flow with SKiDL would be to first manually create a Horizon-EDA project which would generate an empty or mostly empty top_block.json, and then generate a replacement top_block.json from SKiDL and then drive on.
So it's sort of hacky, intruding in the dataflow in a manner not explicitly designed for but apparently supported.
My thinking was to expand the range of SKiDL so perhaps we can some day crush the evil of schematics ;-) But if it's too much work for too little gain I understand. My main use of SKiDL is with Kicad and that works perfectly.
Thanks for the links to the example files.
Horizon-EDA and tEDAx are both systems that SKiDL could support, but I'm currently concentrating on adding more general-purpose features. I'm time/energy constrained right now, but thanks for bringing this to my attention. I'll leave the issue open to serve as a reminder.
More general purpose features sounds good to me - thanks for having a look.
If you get time eventually and are able to expand SKiDL's range of EDA software another project is LibrePCB (which I know even less about than Horizon, having downloaded and played with it once about six months ago).