Free Electronic Lab

[FEL]: fritzing as new year gift

Chitlesh — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 21:01:26 +0000

On the 1st january 2012, fritzing was pushed into fedora stable repositories, by Ed Marshall.

Fritzing is an open-source initiative to support designers, artists, researchers and hobbyists to work creatively with interactive electronics. We are creating a software and website in the spirit of Processing and Arduino, developing a tool that allows users to document their prototypes, share them with others, teach electronics in a classroom, and to create a pcb layout for professional manufacturing.

Fritzing is a nice project from our german friends, which I feel is a nice place to share their openhardware. They even provide Fab service. For those of you who uses the Italian project Arduino, you will enjoy fritzing along with arduino IDE. Happy prototyping !

[FEL]: Fix for strange characters on Arduino Ethernet

Chitlesh — Mon, 02 Jan 2012 13:05:28 +0000

Thibault North has released an update of avr-gcc-4.6.2 which fixes the presence of strange characters when using the Arduino Ethernet due to a corrupted transmission.

[FEL]: gplcver crash fix and openocd update

Chitlesh — Mon, 19 Dec 2011 21:31:58 +0000

Shakthi updated gplcver to fix a crash upon launch.

Dean Glazeski updated openocd to 0.5.0.

[FEL]: Some minor updates

Chitlesh — Sun, 18 Dec 2011 15:01:30 +0000

Here are some minor updates on the FEL:

dinotrace – new update was pushed on testing repositories
fped – new update was pushed to stable repositories
geda-gaf (Fixes broken dependency libgmp.so.3 on rawhide and FTBFS with glib headers, Fixes RHBZ#604288, RHBZ#710281, L#704829 – Refresh on in-use tab causes crashes)
vhd2vl 2.4 – new update was pushed on testing repositories
Fritzing will soon be part of Fedora repositories
Toped will have a technology editor which will reduce days of porting foundry’s tech files.

[FEL]: archimedes 2.0.0 stable release

Chitlesh — Sun, 04 Dec 2011 13:31:58 +0000

Archimedes, the 2D Quantum Monte Carlo simulator for semiconductor devices, has been updated on both Fedora and EPEL testing repositories.

Since last FEL release, archimedes entails the following changes:

The material parameters have been checked and modified
Benchmark tests were carried out to check the validity of the framework
Scattering phonons can be set to ON or OFF
Support for Full band approach was implemented
Parabolic, Kane and Full bank verified
Full band parameters supports for all materials
Initial implementation of FEM for Poisson
Quantum Effective Potential modified
Bohm Potential Model was implemented
Calibrated Bohm Potential Model was implemented
Density Gradient corrected and tested
Full effective potential model was implemented

[FEL]: ngspice-23 stable release

Chitlesh — Sat, 03 Dec 2011 19:35:00 +0000

ngspice-23 was released into Fedora and EPEL testing repositories with the following enhancements:

New devices: HiSIM2 and HiSIM_HV models from Hiroshima University have been added.
New features: transient noise simulation, a random voltage generator option trrandom and random telegraph noise added to independent voltage and current sources; command wrs2p to write a s-parameter file using Touchstone vers. 1 format.

[FEL]: Bug fix release pcb-0.20110918-3

Chitlesh — Tue, 29 Nov 2011 22:45:26 +0000

A bugfix release of PCB layout tool editor has been pushed to Fedora testing repositories to resolve the following:

Bug fix L#882712 Route styles are not properly loaded after nm conversion
Bug fix L#699307 Panning problem when mouse button is released on scrollbar (sf-2923335)
Bug fix L#891041 png export broken for tilted, square pads

Swiss wine tasting

Chitlesh — Wed, 06 Jul 2011 10:58:03 +0000

Got the opportunity to taste the following Swiss wines :

Aigle, Vieux coucou, Grand Cru, 2010
Aigle, Peau Rouge, Grand Cru, 2010
Aigle, Gamaret, Evionnaz,2010
Aigle, Pinor noir de Chamoson, 2008
Yvorne, Le Florin, sélection Terravin
Chablais, Malvoisie
Chablais, Oeil-de-Perdrix
Ollon, Pinot Noir
Ollon, Rosé de Pinot Noir

the missing -ldl

Chitlesh — Sun, 03 Jul 2011 13:09:40 +0000

export CFLAGS="%{optflags} -ldl -lpthread"

to fix

/usr/bin/ld: dynload.o: undefined reference to symbol  'dlsym@@GLIBC_2.2.5'
/usr/bin/ld: note: 'dlsym@@GLIBC_2.2.5' is defined in DSO
/lib64/libdl.so.2 so try adding it to the linker command line
/lib64/libdl.so.2: could not read symbols: Invalid operation
collect2: ld returned 1 exit status

Restoring Electronics-menu in Gnome3

Chitlesh — Sun, 19 Jun 2011 11:01:54 +0000

With Gnome 3 shipped with Fedora 15, the menu “electronics” is no longer available on Fedora 15′s gnome-menu.

It was rather annoying for me, as this custom “Electronics” menu remained the first thing that non-linux users would look at if they want to embrace Free(Fedora) Electronic Lab.

Finally, I found how to fix it. It seems that the directory /etc/xdg/menus/application-merged became /etc/xdg/menus/application-gnome-merged.

$ mkdir  /etc/xdg/menus/applications-gnome-merged
$ ln -s /etc/xdg/menus/applications-merged/electronics.menu /etc/xdg/menus/applications-gnome-merged/electronics.menu

The “electronics-menu” package will soon be updated to reflect this fix on Fedora 15.