Table of Contents

gsch2pcb

Where is the gsch2pcb tutorial?

Currently, the best information about how to get started with gsch2pcb is contained in Bill Wilson’s outstanding tutorial.

There is a wrapper script for gsch2pcb called sch2pcb. Read about it in the pcb_tips section of this wiki.

Where can I download gsch2pcb?

gsch2pcb is part of gEDA/gaf, in the utils. It is normally installed by default (along with everything else) if you install the entirety of gEDA/gaf. If you don’t have it installed on your machine for some reason you can either download the utils tarball from:

or grab it directly from CVS at:

gsch2pcb can't find some of my footprints, or errors out. What can I do to diagnose my problem?

Try running gsch2pcb in double verbose mode: “gsch2pcb -v -v”. This will produce lots of spew telling you where gsch2pcb is looking while it tries to find footprints. It will also tell you where it does find the footprints it uses.

I don't like the default layer stack of gschem2pcb. How can I change this?

Edit $INSTALLDIR/share/gEDA/schemegnet-gsch2pcb.scm to reflect your preferred layer stack. In particular you may have to modify the line that defines the layer groups:

    (display "Groups(\"1,2,3,s:4,5,6,c:7:8\")\n" port) 

and the layer stack itself:

(lambda (port)
    (display "Layer(1 \"bottom\")\n(\n)\n" port)
    (display "Layer(2 \"bott.-poly.\")\n(\n)\n" port)
 ...
    (display "Layer(8 \"lineout\")\n(\n)" port)
    (display "Layer(9 \"ignored\")\n(\n)\n" port)
    (display "Layer(10 \"ignored\")\n(\n)" port)
    (newline port)))

Note, the last two layers will map to silk on both sides of the board. So you will have to define two more layers than you want for your copper layout.