Invention Lab — Powered by RadioShack®

I’m a EE who has been off in the software field, and is slowly getting back into the electronics field. Naturally, you’d expect me to want to use computers to help design circuits. And being an Open Source guy I thought I’d start with geda.

It’s a hopeless disaster. At least, for novices it is. I asked, and Eagle is no better. EDA seems to be one of those things that people think is intrinsically hard, and so they don’t bother writing good software.

To get people designing electronics and circuitry we need to make it DEAD EASY. Like falling off a log. Radio Shack has a reasonably large and yet small sample of electronic parts. It would be quite feasible to write an EDA program which is designed from the ground up to be used by novices. This program would let you:

1) enter a schematic.
2) simulate the circuit.
3) design a PCB.
4) generate an order for Radio Shack.
5) generate an order for (some PCB house that Radio Shack contracts with to make the PCBs).
6) hand over your credit card … wait … then you get a message to come down to the local Radio Shack to pick up the parts.

The plan is to get Radio Shack to fund development of this program as an Open Source project, written portably so it runs everywhere. The program also makes it easy to publish your design, say, here on rsinventionlab.com.

I work at a shack in michigan and one of my coworkers is a keyboard player in a band and he picked up a cheap keyboard and organ a few months ago so we took an 1/8inch to bare wire cable radioshack carries. then we cut off the leads to the speakers and soldered the cable on to make a very easy out put witch is good to record to a computer or anything…a great idea for small bands with anything you need to record