Schematic Capturing

gschem

I searched a long time for a schematic drawing app that's easy to use, has a proper component library, is for free and of course runs on Mac OS X. Well I found one. It's called gschem and is a member of the open source project gEDA. It's actually built for Linux but compiles easily on other UNIXes like Mac OS X. It runs in the X11 environment, so don't forget to install X11 from the Mac OS X Install Disk. To compile the app you also need the Developer Tools with the X11 SDK installed. Fink and FinkCommander provide the easiest way to install gschem. gEDA is in the unstable tree, so you gota do following or it wont show up in fink:

Edit /sw/etc/fink.conf, add unstable/main and unstable/crypto to the Trees: line, and then run fink selfupdate; fink index; fink scanpackages.

I suggest you also make sure that "UseBinaryDist:" in fink.conf is "true". Installing the dependencies from binary will speed up the whole process tremendously. If you run into serious problems, be free to mail me.

For more resent fink files go to Charles Lepples page and follow the cvs instructions.

This is how my gschem looks like:

To give gschem the Mac OS X look, also install the Panther Theme from Fink. You also got to place a .gtkrc-2.0 file into your home directory for the Font and and theme settings. You can download my file from the Downloads Page, place it into your home directory, open the Terminal, type: "mv gtkrc-2.0 .gtkrc-2.0". In X11 you can add gschem to the Applications menu to easily start the app. The command should be: "/sw/bin/gschem". Enjoy.

Eagle

An other schematic capturing and layouting app with a huge symbols library is Cadsoft's Eagle. It's a professional and commercial app, but you can use the Light version for free. As far as I know the limitations are board size and layer count. You can download the Mac OS X X11 binary from Cadsoft's Download Page. The app runs in X11 and doesn't look that nice.

Version 5 will be running natively on OS X. Yay! That's possible because it's based on the Qt Framework from Trolltech. A beta can be downloaded here.