Which CAD program should we "support" with RenesasRulz example projects?

This is a tough one, because everyone seems to have their favorite CAD package.

We get asked for CAD library files and schematic examples all the time. Maybe not all the time, but sometimes...

Eagle is one that shows up in lots of places due to the very functional FREE version that's available. We even have a project that was posted here: Schematic and DIP package adapter for the R8C/13

What other low-cost CAD tools are in use? Anyone looked at Diptrace?  http://www.diptrace.com/

Is OrCAD a good choice?

I would really consider Kicad which is really getting good now. It's an open source project: http://www.lis.inpg.fr/realise_au_lis/kicad/ It's actively developed. It has been reviewed by elektor recently and they'll consider using it as using an open source project to share schematics and PCB's on internet would be ideal.

Eagle is not free; it's trialware - the no-cost version is not open source, and to do anything significant with it, you have to pay.  Plus, they've started screwing the users if they happen to accidentally (but legally) get a component from someone with a hacked version of eagle.  Let's not support that "business model" please.

I prefer gEDA, which uses ASCII files for everything, but I'm ok with Kicad or any other open source package's format - by using open source formats, we're guaranteed our formats will always be readable, no matter what the vendor does.

Note that gEDA has a web site for user-contributed files - www.gedasymbols.org - so we have some experience with sharing such files.

Also, with open source file formats, you can convert the symbols to any packages that chooses to let their users know their file format.  With closed vendors, you risk undocumented file format changes locking you into their tools.

That's the kind of input we were looking for!

Yes, KiCad looks like a strong candidate. It runs on MAC, Linux and Windows. And it has a pretty good set of libraries - including the Renesas MCUs that Frank L. did for Eagle (they were converted to KiCad by a user.)  Best of all, it seems to operate in an intuitive fashion - unlike Eagle and OrCAD.

I'd like to see some CAD projects posted to the "downloads" section, so we can see how well they can be shared. Maybe I'll do the R8C/27 schematic I was thinking about...

gEDA runs on Windows and Mac (mac via fink, windows you have to build under cygwin) also.  I've got symbols for a couple of the r8c and m32c chips, but gEDA has a bunch of tools to automate symbol creation (see djboxbym and various symbols at http://www.gedasymbols.org/user/dj_delorie/).  ASCII formats means you can use perl to generate symbols   I already have an R8C/27 symbol as I used an R8C/26 in my furnace (http://www.delorie.com/house/furnace/pcb2/)

For fun, I just did a R8C/26 adapter similar to the R8C/13 adapter (they're not quite pin compatible, and the r8c/13 adapter looks suspiciously incorrect - some pins look unconnected!) which I'll upload if anyone's interested - I haven't built or tested it, so I don't want to let someone else find my mistakes.

I put a copy of the files here: http://www.delorie.com/pcb/r8c-27-adapter/ for the curious.

Does Kicad use text files or binary files?

Nice work on the furnace control board! I especially like the look of the boards from PCB. Maybe there's a converter to allow Eeschema netlists to import into PCB?

KICAD Libraries and modules (footprints) are in text. There's a few scripting tools out there now that can generate parts. Here's an example: http://www.rohrbacher.net/kicad/quicklib.php 

I think gEDA is mature and works well, and I'd like to see projects uploaded here for gEDA users to have somewhere to start. At the same time, I think KICAD is gaining momentum, and will be showing up more and more.

Thanks!  They're all manually routed, but the teardrops are added automatically by a plug-in.

PCB uses a fairly simple netlist, it's "net part-pin part-pin part-pin..." on each line.  Adding the elements is a little trickier; gEDA uses a guile script to run each request through a macro preprocessor that sets up the element's attributes, but you can either manually add them, write a pcb script to add them, or write any other program to pre-generate the .pcb file.  If you pre-generate the file, you can insert the netlist there too.

I've got something like quicklib here: http://www.gedasymbols.org/user/dj_delorie/tools/dilpad.html (there's a two-pad one also) and I think writing scripts to generate parts is a lot of people's favorite hobby.  Some have gone as far as writing new languages specifically for the purposes of describing land patterns.

ASCII formats are fun

Is there some way to get the tear-drop into KiCad? You mention a plug-in... is that exclusive to the PCB program? Or does it manipulate the gerber output?

PCB plugins work on the internal PCB data structure.  The sources are here[1] if you want to try to adapt them to kicad (yay open source but they won't work as-is.  The plugins are actually compiled against the PCB sources, and dynamically linked at runtime.

You know, you could try using pcb

[1] http://www.delorie.com/pcb/teardrops/