CAD –  the Computer Aided Design system

CAD is an Open Source project covered by the GNU General Public License v2. It was originally written and currently maintained by Mariano Alvira.

• About CAD
• Documentation
• Download
• Mailing List

About CAD

CAD has several purposes:

• to define the structure of your design and documentation system
• to audit and aggregate all the data held in common between your files
• to provide an interface to detect and resolve conflicts
• to provide an interface to aid managment of your design documents and information

Have a look at the screenshots.

Documentation

CAD has two main components: the XML definition markup which defines your project structure and a front-end to manange the data aggregated from your design documents. The main frontend is cad-curses.pl. cad-termvis.pl is no longer supported (Although I'll keep it around a little longer.)

Your best source of documentation are the README, the def-tutorial and the definition files. I apologize for how sparse and out of date it is.

Your second best source of documentation is the source code. (sorry!)

Also, be sure to check out the Examples section for walk-throughs of different ways to use CAD.

Finally, you can always send an email to the CAD mailing list, cad@devl.org

Supported Handlers and Fetches

Handlers

CAD handlers are used to read design documents and insert their data into your project repository. The handlers available are:

• Eagle Schematics - everything associated with a "part"
• Flat CSV
• BOM CSV - comma separated value in a Bill-of-Materials format where identical parts are collected on to a single line

Fetches

CAD uses fetches to grab more infomation based on data already in the repository (i.e. filled in from a handler or another fetch). Fetches available are:

• Digikey - given a digikey partnumber, provides basic digikey info and pricebreak data
• Mouser - like Digikey but for mouser.
• Execute - runs a little perl snippet with access to the data in that context and can insert values in repository. (e.g after digikey grabs all the pricebreak info, you can have an execute fetch with fill in the minimum order quantity for that part)

Getting CAD

Source Code

If have Git installed, you can get the latest development version via:

git clone git://git.devl.org/git/malvira/cad.git

You can also always browse the current contents through the gitweb interface.

Binaries

For people who prefer precompiled packages, these are available:

Save this file, devl.list, to /etc/apt/sources.list.d to manage this package with APT.

Mailing List

The mailing list for CAD is cad@devl.org Click here to subscribe.

Website Info

This website is tracked in Git - you can browse its development history or clone it from git://git.devl.org/git/malvira/cad-homepage.git. The site is covered by GPLv2 and maintained by Mariano Alvira. This website is based on a design by Petr Baudis for GIT which was based on a design by Jonas Fonseca for the ELinks homepage.

Links

www.freebyte.com/cad - big list of other "cad" programs

www.freerouting.net/ - Java PCB routing software

qucs.sourceforge.net - Quite Universal Circuit Simulator