pcb-gpmi

Introduction

pcb-gpmi is a plugin for PCB, the popular printed circuit board layout editor. It forms a glue layer between PCB internals and scripts, allowing the user to easily extend PCB using any of the 10 supported scripting languages . Since scripts this way can access the very internals of PCB, they can perform more powerful operations than those scripts running on the save files, outside of PCB. These scripts also integrate better with PCB GUI (be it the GTK hid or the lesstif hid).

A few internals already exposed to the scripts:

dialogs: scripts can pop up dialog boxes to inform the user or read input from the user
exporter: scripts can register their own exporters - as shown on the examples page, it is possible to write a basic SVG exporter in less than 200 lines of tcl script.
layout manipulation: scripts can search objects on layers, selections, etc and may move them, change them or just create new objects
action bindings: scripts can register actions, allowing pcb users to call script functions using the pcb command line, menus and/or hotkeys.

Examples, downloads

There is a small collection of example scripts accompanied by screenshots. Once pcb-gpmi plugin is installed, installing a new script is easy: the user copies the script file(s) in the pcb-gpmi subdirectory under pcb's plugin directory and adds a single line in a config file with the language and file name of the new script.

To download and install pcb-gpmi plugin, you have the following choices:

if you are using a GNU/Debian based operating system (for example Debian or Ubuntu), you can install from our Debian repository
or if you are going to compile libgpmi and and the plugin, you may want to donwload a package that contains both. Note: you will still need to pre-install the interpreter of the script languages you wish to use. This also applies if you want to use the svn HEAD version.
or if you want to download and compile everything yourself, here is a list of source packages you will need to get.
or if you are a windows user and don't want to compile - well, bad luck, we don't support windows binaries yet.

License & Documentation

pcb-gpmi is a Free Software licensed under GNU GPL 2.0 or later. Scripts should be distributed under a GPL-compatible license since they are heavily linked with PCB and pcb-gpmi (directly accessing internals).

The most recent version of the documentation can be accessed from the svn or you can browse the online documentation .

Feedback & Support

You can reach us on the geda user mailing list (geda-user@moria.seul.org).