Alan,

If you have access to a Linux or other Unix machine, there is GPL'd PCB layout
program called, inventively enough, "PCB". It is a Unix/X11 port of the old
Atari PCB program from the early '90s. The bulk of the work was done by Thomas
Nau, but most recent maintenace work has been done by Harry Eaton. The most
recent stable release is 1.6.3 which was released in May '98. This version
has Gerber RS274X and NC drill file output, eight layers, some netlist support,
and SMD capability. It does not do autorouting. There are about 1200 parts
defined including around a dozen PICs; it is straightfoward to add more. There
is a 67-page manual and a tri-fold reference card included in the source
distribution.

I've only tinkered with it a little and have never used it all the way to a
physical PCB, so I can't say what sorts of problems it has. But it does seem to
have a fair bit of promise.

You can find the .tar.gz'd sources at ftp://ftp.linuxppc.org/pub/linuxppc/users/
harry/PCB/
or ftp://ftp.uni-ulm.de/pub/pcb/mirror/ . Since it is GPL'd, the PCB
program and the source are freely available, and you can make whatever
enhancements you wish.

--Bob

On Sat, 28 Nov 1998, you wrote:
>I dont really want to re-hash an old topic. But I was wondering if there is
>any really good shareware or freeware PCB Layout software.
>
>Alan
--
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Bob Drzyzgula                             It's not a problem
bob@drzyzgula.org                until something bad happens
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