I am designing a telephony version of the BlackfinOne DSP/uClinux board. To develop the design I am using the gEDA CAD tools. This board runs uClinux on a Blackfin BF532 processor, and has been designed using the open source gEDA tools which makes it really easy for anyone to re-use the design. Thank you very much to Dimitar Penev and Ivan Danov who designed and published this board. They have done an excellent job.
The first stage in any electronic design is usually to enter the schematic. The schematic shows the components and their wiring in a form that is easy to follow:
I wanted to add two Ethernet ports to the BlackfinOne design, so I found a reference design and entered the schematic using the gschem program.
After I entered some sheets for the Ethernet chips, I had a little problem. In the schematic above you can see that every component has a letter & number next to it, for example, C1, C2 for capacitors, or U1, U2 etc for chips. This is a unique ID for each part. The letter generally indicates what sort of part is is (capacitor, resistor, chip etc). These IDs are know as reference designators or as a “refdes”.
Now I wanted the refdes on my new Ethernet sheets to merge nicely with those on the existing BlackfinOne design. For example if the last capacitors refdes on the BlackfinOne design stopped at C51, then my C’s should start at C52.
There is a program to do this (refdes_renum described here in the gEDA tutorial) but unfortunately it renumbers all of the refdes in the design, and I only wanted to renumber the new parts that I had added. I didn’t want to mess up anything in the existing design. Please also see the Links section below for a new alternative – grenum.
Now of course it is possible to number the components manually in gschem via the GUI, but if you know a little Perl then its much more fun to hack out a solution! Now fortunately gschem uses text files to store the schematic. The refdes are stored in the schematic file like this:
--snip--
C 7000 87800 1 0 0 bf-93LC46.sym
{
T 8200 89100 5 10 1 1 0 0 1
refdes=U19
}
--snip--
I think this means that the component (leading C) that is drawn using the bf-93LC46.sym symbol file has a refdes called U19. The line starting with T tells gschem where to place the refdes text on the sheet. Anyway all I am really interested in is reading and changing the refdes lines.
So the Perl script num_refdes.pl first scans all of the existing schematic files for lines that have the text /refdes=/. The number of the refdes is then extracted, and stored in a hash if it is the largest refdes so far. On the new schematics, I initially enter each refdes as C?, U? etc. The script scans these, and wherever it finds a ? it replaces it with the next refdes in that series.
Improvements and Reflections
There is one obvious improvement. The current script isn’t smart enough to use a refdes that hasn’t been used yet, for example if C1,C2,C4 are currently used it isn’t smart enough to use C3, it will use C5 instead.
This script took me about 70 minutes to write and it worked perfectly the first time. To be honest it didn’t really save me any time (I could have manually entered the refdes in less time) but it was lots more fun to do it this way. And I guess it will be useful the next time I have this problem. Perhaps now that I have posted on it some one else might also find it useful. Come to think of it writing this blog post took longer than writing the script! DOH!
BTW every time I work with Perl (which is maybe once every two months) I spend the first 20 minutes looking up web sites to work out which regexp to use, how to iterate through a hash, etc. If I don’t work on Perl and regexps constantly it all looks like line noise to me after a few weeks:
if ($line =~ /refdes=(\w)(\?)/) {
But hey, its no big deal to refresh my memory every few months.
Solving little problems like this with Perl is fun. You almost hope there isn’t a solution out there already, just so you have an excuse to write one!
Links
I have also written a few Perl scripts for PCB (the PCB design application in the gEDA suite) here.
After I posted the above, Levente Kovacs kindly pointed out his grenum utility which is now included with gEDA! This has been recently added to gEDA and performs the same job as the Perl script above, but can also spot gaps in refdes sequences. As grenum is now part of the official gEDA distribution I would recommend using it rather than num_refdes.pl. I share a trait common among engineers – a strong desire to “do it myself” rather than checking carefully for existing solutions! Thanks Levente!
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