February 2024What is EDeA again?
EDeA is a set of tools to automate some tasks for developing electronics. The core idea is to make it possible to share sub-circuits with their schematic and layout and easily integrate them into new projects. Think like software libraries but for electronics on the circuit level.
The project consists of different libraries and services with the overarching goal of automating and helping users with the engineering part of Electronics Design Automation. Plain "edea" is the python KiCad parser and library which allows to work with KiCad projects outside of KiCad itself and is most useful for building tools upon.
Building on that is edea-cli which is a command line tool for working with edea modules (small KiCad projects with schematic and layout, think software libraries but for hardware) and allows for merging modules into projects, plot schematics and PCBs, and more. Sharing the same goal, there's also edea-tmc for test and measurement automation, but more on that in an upcoming post.
As for the services there's edea-ps, the portal server for exploring, sharing and downloading modules and edea-ms, the measurement data server which we'll come to later on.
Where we're at
We're currently very close to finishing up the rewrite of the portal in python and are putting out edea releases on an irregular pace. We've recently released v0.6.0 (also on pypi, docs) which allows to add modules to a project with our new parser. Some further work is also depending on the KiCad 8.0 release which should come really soon. edea_draw, the library for plotting schematics and PCBs was refactored out into its own library and will get a release soon too.
What's next
We're close to releasing first versions of both edea-ps which builds upon all the work we've put into the edea library. Furthermore we're also very close to releasing our first version of the EDeA Measurement Server (edea-ms for short) and the accompanying library for Test&Measurement as Code (edea-tmc). The current status is that it's ready for use, almost all of the basic features we wanted to have are implemented but the library edea-tmc still needs some real world use to iron out all the workflows. If you're eager to try it out already you can find it here: edea-ms and edea-tmc.
With the edea-ms release out of the way our combined focus will be on finishing up edea-ps so that we can finally easily collaborate on cool modules for projects.