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I was thinking that many people on Twitter follow me because of the retrocomputing or electronic DIY stuff. I will do a short thread about #FidoCadJ, as it I dedicated more or less 10 years of my spare time to it. #opensource #gplv3
First of all, #FidoCadJ is a vector drawing program with a vast library of electric symbols, not a full-fledged electronic #CAD. There is no netlist concept, what you see is everything you have. This means that the program is very simple and immediate to use.
#FidoCadJ will not be the right tool to build a very complex circuit. #opensource tools exist (like #Kikad) and do their job well. #FidoCadJ does not help you to do a professional project, automatically extracting the bill of materials, nor it has autorouting tools.
But you know I am a professor and sometimes I need to put things on slide such as simple analog circuits. You don't want a CAD for this.
Maybe the situation now is better, but a few years ago the big #CAD were utterly crap for this: put a clear and uncluttered schematic in a slide. Let alone in a published book!
#FidoCadJ aims to do this: you draw the schematic, you export it in a bitmap or vector format and you use it in your presentations or documents. No frills, no simulation, no netlist, no nonsense. #Opensource, completely free and using an open and documented format for the files.
Speaking of the format, there is another advantage. If you copy/paste a drawing, you get a compact text-only format. This comes from an old program, called FidoCAD for Windows, that was done to exchange schematics on Usenet discussion groups in Italy. Consider this schematic...
... and imagine you would like to change it, for a reason or for another. Would you do this with a bitmap drawing program such as Paint? Let's imagine that you can somehow get the original #FidoCadJ file. Well, we will see it in the next tweet...
[FIDOCAD]
FJC A 0.35
MC 50 40 0 0 ey_libraries.trnbjt1
MC 80 40 0 1 ey_libraries.trnbjt1
MC 60 60 0 0 ey_libraries.trnbjt1
LI 55 45 55 50 0
LI 55 50 75 50 0
LI 75 50 75 45 0
LI 65 50 65 55 0
SA 65 50 0
LI 65 65 65 70 0
LI 55 60 30 60 0
LI 55 25 55 35 0
LI 75 25 75 35 0
... and that's all. Copy paste this code inside the drawing area of FidoCadJ and you get the drawing, that you can modify. Of course, the 140 characters of a tweet limit this exchange. But the image, even in PNG format was 10kb...
For this reason, #FidoCadJ is used as the official exchange tool for electroyou.it, one of the best Italian communities dedicated to electric and electronic circuits. If you put the code in a forum message, #FidoCadJ runs on the server and silently converts it.
You see an image, but the code is always available. You click on a button, you copy it and you paste again in #FidoCadJ and bam! you can edit as you wish.
Of course, there are some details to know if you defined your own symbols and libraries, but you get the idea...
Let's finish with some links. If you understand Italian language, I have been invited to the 2016 Turin #Linux day for a speech that has been recorded.
Then, you may want to know where to download the program. The official website is here: darwinne.github.io/FidoCadJ/ The current stable version is 0.24.7 and is three years old. I am working towards a new version. The dev is done on GitHub: github.com/DarwinNE/FidoC…
#FidoCadJ contains more or less 60k lines of Java code. It's a small project, but it is non trivial. It has been translated in many languages so far and it is used and (as much as I know) appreciated by a small community of users.
That's all for today. As mentioned before, I am working on a new version after a pause of three years. BTW, If you have questions, don't hesitate to ask!
I may add that in 2014-2015 we developed a version of #FidoCadJ for #Android devices. It was a effort that required a partial redesign of the code, to keep separate the interface elements from the rest. It kind of works, but we never finished it. It still runs on my smartphone.
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