EasyTrax software, free (dos or dosemu on linux)

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EasyTrax software, free (dos or dosemu on linux)

Postby Doug Coulter » Sat Nov 08, 2014 5:53 pm

I use a "stolen" version of this that has a fairly crappy auto-router too - which I never use. This one's actually better since it can also think in mm instead of just mils. It needs a dos environment, which kinda went away around win2k sp2, except there's dosemu for linux under which this works near perfectly. And since it's from the days of 386's and "640k is enough for anyone" it's more or less blindingly fast. It just draws, that's all it does. You can create library components and add them, but it doesn't know or care about what the pins are called other than a number, or do schematic capture or any of that. It does print to a file (since in real life, nothing will let you talk to a printer port directly anymore anyway) which you can then lpr to most laser printers to expose your board. The only bug I see is that you can mess up the defaults with no obvious way to recover (save the zip file!), and that the cursor movement is out of gain alignment with your mouse. Fine,you never use the mouse anyway if you want a straight line or accurate positioning - both sets of arrow keys work, one at the snap grid distance, one at the visible grid distance - handy.

The new version of this costs 10's of thousands, before you have to buy and expensive library for each manufacturer of parts with all their pin callouts, spice details and the like, and you can only be competent at it if you do it at least 4 hours a day every day it's so crazy complex. This is simple and gets 'er done.

EASYTRAX.zip
Old, really simple DOS PCB software, legally free
(762.01 KiB) Downloaded 505 times
Posting as just me, not as the forum owner. Everything I say is "in my opinion" and YMMV -- which should go for everyone without saying.
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Doug Coulter
 
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Location: Floyd county, VA, USA

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