[sdiy] ASM1-VCO Problem

[Magnus Danielson]

From: Don Tillman <don at till.com>
Subject: Re: [sdiy] ASM1-VCO Problem
Date: 21 Aug 2003 17:18:29 -0700

>    > Date: Fri, 22 Aug 2003 01:22:45 +0200 (CEST)
>    > From: Magnus Danielson <cfmd at swipnet.se>
>    > 
>    > Interestingly, I have yeat to see a schematic CAD that works as
>    > well on layouting symbols as well as the stuff I cooked up in
>    > Postscript some 5-6 years ago. Actually that is more of a
>    > disapointment than a lame attempt to boost my morale 
> 
> Gee Magnus, I thought you'd like my QuadTrap schematics?
> 
>    http://www.till.com/articles/QuadTrapVCO/vcocore.html
> 
> :-)

Nice! 8-)

> (For folks who don't know, Magnus and I have very similar opinions on
> the tools we use.)

... so you are admitting that EMACS is really a CAD tool!

(It is, it's just not a schematic CAD tool in most peoples eyes.)

> I haven't mentioned it before, but part of my QuadTrap article is an
> experiment in DIY schematic drawing.  The schematics there are
> *exactly* the way I want them -- the part symbols, the fonts, the
> wires, the drawing rules, the sizes, the spacings, the notations, the
> anti-aliasing... all that is hand-tweaked.
> 
> I used to to do schematics in raw PostScript, but it got too messy for
> complex drawings and I didn't like the anti-aliasing that PhotoShop's
> PostScript implementation provides.
> 
> So for the above schematics I used a collection of drawing routines I
> wrote in Java with the Java2D package.  The Java2D package is
> basically PostScript implemented in Java, except that it's more
> powerful than PostScript and Java is a more powerful language than
> PostScript.

WHAAAA!!!! He said the J-word!!!

(Java is something you drink or a place you visit and nothing else!)

> So it turns out that the main QuadTrap schematic is about 10 pages of
> Java code, and my schematic drawing package is about 13 pages of Java
> code.  It's not huge.

As a reference... my schematic library is a 4534 lines of code while the
revised scematic is a 790 lines of code thingie... (thats 5,3 KLOCS folks!)
Top that with a few lines of Makefile to use the big Postscript compiler in the
sky - the unix "cat" command and toss it through ps2pdf to make it leaner
(85278 bytes of Postscript gets stripped down to 9214 bytes of PDF).

After this wolfhour hacking I've picked up a few ideas on how to make the code
more compressed by rearranging stuff and introducing a few extra functions.
Also learned a few lessons on the way.

What I should do is maybe to find a way for it to eat some form of netlist or
something.

Cheers,
Magnus