Ugg! These tutorials are completely ancient. I have removed them. Thanks.

The official documentation for the gEDA project can be found here: Official Documentation

How about these documents:

• gsch2pcb_tutorial
• gschem_warmup
• transistor_guide
• Getting started with PCB
• ngspice and gschem
• tragesym tutorial
• Circuit Design on Your Linux Box Using gEDA

There is lots of documentation available for using the gEDA suite of tools and the geda-user mailing list is very friendly to all levels of users. I could probably dig up a few more tutorials if the above isn't enough. :)

I've also added a bunch of new free/open source hardware projects to the gEDA links page. There are some really awesome projects listed there that do not use proprietary tools.

One more follow up here...

Hmmm, I'm confused. From the Eagle website (cadsoftusa.com/freeware.htm):

You are not allowed to use the crippleware version of Eagle for profit/commercial projects. Now if I want to modify/respin the posted schematics/PCBs for a commercial project, I have to either purchase Eagle or redraw the schematics in something else. So not only am I locked into a closed source tool, I have to purchase it too if I am doing a commercial product with this "open source hardware" design. Are these the correct conclusion(s)?

Ah ha. If you are using an IDE like Visual Studio and suddenly Microsoft decided they don't like you using it to write open source software, what are you going to do? If you have written your code to be some what standards compliant and you don't need any of the niceties of VS, great, then it isn't all that hard to port your code to gcc, or clang, or some other compiler.

But that's the rub of using something like Eagle. If Eagle goes away, you are finished. You have no where to go, if you cannot get/run the software to even view your designs. Your Eagle design is lost because the file formats and such are not documented (on purpose). It's all about vendor lock-in and that is incredibly widespread problem in the EDA industry. And every vendor has their own "standards" so you can't just port your design to a different tool.

No boohoo. :-) What if I distribute "vmlinuz-2.6.28-14-generic" and you need to modify it? How would you do it? It would be somewhat challenging wouldn't you say? Boy it sure would be nice if I had given you the C source files and then you could modify/compile those instead. (Thank goodness I am required to give you those sources :-)

Same argument applies here with schematics/PCBs where you do not have the control over the tools that generated them. You are given Eagle files that you might be able to open/modify/save now, but can you guarantee that you will be to do that in the future? No, you couldn't because Eagle is closed source.

> the gerbers are posted, the schematic and source is posted.

One does not generally edit gerbers to make hardware design changes. The usual design flow is to modify the schematics, propagate this change to the PCB and then generate new gerbers.

If Cadsoft ever decides to withdraw the crippleware version of Eagle, all of a sudden a bunch of people might not be able to 1) download Eagle and 2) view/edit/print the designs. If gEDA should go away (or any other open source EDA software), no big deal, the file formats are usually well documented and the design contents cannot be lost.

> gEDA's website, on the other hand, has three links to tutorials, two of which are broken ...

Either way, could you please tell me which two tutorials are broken? I know that one of them is currently down due to the storm activity on the East Coast. What's the other one? Thanks.

> As a side note, there is plenty of images of the schematics [ladyada.net] for this project...

How exactly do I edit an image to change the design? Especially if I have to make a schematic change, propagate the change to the PCB and generated new gerbers?

I am not going to make apologizes (or even advocate gEDA here; that wasn't my point) for gEDA. It is certainly picky who it's friends are and has a steep learning curve.

However, if you don't like gEDA there are plenty of alternative such as KiCad, XCircuit, Fritzing, and host of other tools of varying capability. Some of which are quite newbie friendly and easy to use.

Getting back to my original point, if you don't control the tools, you don't control the design. I'll respond to the other posts with more meat than just this one line.

Neat project, but I wouldn't call this project "open source hardware".

I took a look at the schematic and PCB for this project and they are not in an open source friendly format. As far as I can tell they are in a highly proprietary format (Eagle's closed and undocumented format). Eagle is not open source by any stretch of the imagination. The no-cost version of Eagle is crippleware (limited in capability, closed source, lacking file format transparency and portability, and not for commercial development).

So, how can you create open source hardware by using non-open source software? It is hard to "mess" with CAD/PCB/schematic files that cannot be edited with open source software.

The phrase "open source hardware" is being slowly hijacked to mean something completely else. :-(

--
Full disclaimer: I am developer on the gEDA project. Really I don't care if you use gEDA, KiCad, XCircuit, whatever, just use something that isn't closed. And please don't call projects that use Eagle as "open source hardware".

Thank you for your comment/response.

Yes, that is pretty impressive, I had no idea arduino was shipping that many units.

It is very likely my spam filter gobbled up your emails (if so, sorry about that). I will get in touch with you. Thanks.

I couldn't agree more!

Awesome, which projects and I'll make sure they get some publicity/linkage on the gEDA site (if they aren't there already) :)

Yes indeed. However, I'm quite curious, what sort of project did you have in mind that would be easier with an open source mechanical CAD package? I guess I'm trying to understand the scale and scope of such a project and what sort of CAD you would need (2D/3D/both)?

A good number of these projects are using non-free schematic capture and/or layout packages. What if I want to modify the schematics or layouts? Do I have to redraw them in one of the real free/open source tools?

Eagle is not free software (there is no source code and the "free" download is crippleware since the board size is limited).

PS. Yes I'm slightly bias as I am a developer on gEDA http://geda.seul.org/ and KiCad is nice too. :)