FOSSPicks
FOSSPicks

The promised profusion of extra time has failed to materialize for Graham this month, leaving him with too many synth kits to build, a table littered with components, and a leaking toilet.
Circuit design
Horizon EDA
One of the many things that once seemed impossible, but is now accessible, is creating your own printed circuit boards (PCBs). You can now prototype and design your own boards from your humble home computer, and there are also now many manufacturers who welcome print runs as small as one. Add to this a crowdsourcing community happy to dive in to add their own orders and support themselves, and home brew PCB design should properly be considered a new cottage industry. The central part of this new ecosystem is open source software that can help you design, arrange, and build a circuit board that will work exactly as you intend it to and print according to your own specifications and requirements. This is the job of an Electronic Design Automation (EDA) package, which is exactly what Horizon EDA happens to be.
Horizon EDA is a comprehensive circuit design and creation tool that bundles several key components (pun intended). The first, and perhaps most important, is called "the pool." This is the parts library that lets you drag and drop predefined and readily available components into your designs. There's a comprehensive editor for adding your own parts, but you're more likely to clone the 35,000 parts database from Horizon's own GitHub repository and use this via the tabbed-by-category pool manager. There's a big difference in the way EDA implements versus other open source tools, because it uses a very flexible hierarchy of JSON-formatted files for each part, tracked by metadata stored in SQLite. It can also only contain real parts with full part numbers you can type into sites like Digikey.com to place an order. This is something you'll appreciate if you've used, for example, the Arduino IDE parts list.
With a new project created, the second key component is the schematic editor. This is where you place components from the pool to design the circuit with the functionality you need. The connections themselves are composed of networks, such as tracks for different voltages and signals. These networks can have their own algorithmically controlled rules, such as clearance, track width, and hole size. These become apparent in the third key component, the board layout preview. This is where your design becomes an actual circuit with components placed on a board. This view can quickly become complicated when it arranges your components and circuits across the various layers and tracks required to take the logical concept into the physical realm. You can even view the final board in exploded OpenGL 3 3D, which is a brilliant educational tool useful for any example boards you might want to download or share.
The GTK+ 3 interface is absolutely beautiful throughout, and the development team has succeeded in making their application a playground for experimentation. It's also brilliant having everything in one place, without having to skip between different applications or worry about whether one layer is going to be properly translated into a circuit. When you're finished, you don't just get a PCB you can order; you also get a fully populated and formatted bill of materials ready for your component order. If you've ever had to do this manually, you'll know this is half the effort of the entire circuit design. That all this can be found in a new and yet fully mature open source application is remarkable. There's never been a better time to brush up on your electrical engineering knowledge!
Project Website

Music player
Buy this article as PDF
(incl. VAT)
Buy Linux Magazine
Direct Download
Read full article as PDF:
Price $2.95
Subscribe to our Linux Newsletters
Find Linux and Open Source Jobs
Subscribe to our ADMIN Newsletters
Find SysAdmin Jobs
News
-
Escuelas Linux 8.0 is Now Available
Just in time for its 25th anniversary, the developers of Escuelas Linux have released the latest version.
-
LibreOffice 7.5 has Arrived Loaded with New Features and Improvements
The favorite office suite of the Linux community has a new release that includes some visual refreshing and new features across all modules.
-
The Next Major Release of Elementary OS Has Arrived
It's been over a year since the developers of elementary OS released version 6.1 (Jólnir) but they've finally made their latest release (Horus) available with a renewed focus on the user.
-
KDE Plasma 5.27 Beta Is Ready for Testing
The latest beta iteration of the KDE Plasma desktop is now available and includes some important additions and fixes.
-
Netrunner OS 23 Is Now Available
The latest version of this Linux distribution is now based on Debian Bullseye and is ready for installation and finally hits the KDE 5.20 branch of the desktop.
-
New Linux Distribution Built for Gamers
With a Gnome desktop that offers different layouts and a custom kernel, PikaOS is a great option for gamers of all types.
-
System76 Beefs Up Popular Pangolin Laptop
The darling of open-source-powered laptops and desktops will soon drop a new AMD Ryzen 7-powered version of their popular Pangolin laptop.
-
Nobara Project Is a Modified Version of Fedora with User-Friendly Fixes
If you're looking for a version of Fedora that includes third-party and proprietary packages, look no further than the Nobara Project.
-
Gnome 44 Now Has a Release Date
Gnome 44 will be officially released on March 22, 2023.
-
Nitrux 2.6 Available with Kernel 6.1 and a Major Change
The developers of Nitrux have officially released version 2.6 of their Linux distribution with plenty of new features to excite users.