🚀 go-pugleaf

Well, I might as well throw in my $0.02....

Background.  I've been looking for cheap (i.e. free) schematic layout and
board design software for a few months.  I've downloaded everything I could
find to try.  Yes, I got PADS and installed it.  I hated almost all of
them!  I was ready to plunk down $150 or so for EACH of the two products.
I found some demos that I was fairly impressed with.  Then I found a
schematic capture program called EDITSCH - it's a shareware version, but
the full one is less than $30.  It's no OrCAD, but it does fine for my
smallish projects.  I still didn't have a board layout package though.  I
thoroughly hated PADS.  It was horrible to install, its interface is awful,
etc.

I saw the post about Easytrax and gave them a call one Thursday.  The disk
arrived the following Monday - wow.  I went through the install on my 25
MHz 386 running OS/2.  Everything went great.  I configured it and told it
I had a Paradise SVGA card with 800x600.  THIS IS THE FIRST PROGRAM THAT I
HAVE EVER BEEN ABLE TO USE THAT MODE ON MY VIDEO CARD FOR!  No garbage on
the screen, no telling it which register is used for what, etc.  It just
worked!

Ok so far.  I admit the doc supplied is pretty bare.  It took me a little
while to stumble through and figure things out, but I did.  For example, I
was drawing my boards in the middle of the grid - so it thought the board
was huge.  I would put that more in the inexperienced user category though.
I figured out how to layout a board, change parameters, which library
components were which, and so on.  THIS PROGRAM IS FANTASTIC!  I've printed
postscript output to a file and brought it to work to print - it looked
great.  I printed it out on my Panasonic 24-pin dot matrix - it worked
great.  I played around with making Gerber files - no problem.

I'm happy as a opposum eatin' shit!  (You ever seen a oppossum eatin' shit?
- they're happy!)



			Wally Blackburn AA8DX


Opinions are my own.  Unless, of course, AT&T wants them in which case I'm
sure one of the 6325 forms I signed when I started here says they can take
them!