FilipiVianna

Working in a place where people do projects on electronics using different platforms (windows and linux) certainly leads us to look for some tool which enables us to exchange our schematics and layouts through all this platforms. There is where Kicad came to help us. And, to help us to use it, here is a short tutorial on how to do simple things with Kicad: Tutorials for KiCad - A Free Open Source Schematic and PCB Layout Editor KiCad Overview and Schematic Tutoria l Going from Schematic to PCB Layout in KiCad (using Cvpcb) Making New Components and Modules (Footprints) in KiCad: Designing PCBs in Kicad and PcbNew: PS.: Other interesting link on GNU/Linux and Electronics: http://1010.co.uk/scrying_tech_notes.html And on electronics: http://www.electronics-lab.com/blog/?tag=power-supply&paged=2

Working supporting old scientific hardware sometimes brings me some challenges. Usually, the manuals are only on paper and when there is a digital version it was digitized (scanned) . Googling a little, came to me an article which relies on waiting for the google to index your files and OCR them. But there is an open source alternative. Looking a little further, I did find another two articles at linuxquestions.org and at linux.com , on which I've found the tesseract-ocr . So to solve my issue, I had to first convert my PDF file to a bunch of TIF images, and so OCR them with tesseract. This way: gs -dNOPAUSE -sDEVICE=tiffgray -r300x300 -sOutputFile=page%03d.tif -- 1850_operators_manual.pdf ls -1 *.tif | cut -d e -f 2 | while read line ; do tesseract "page"$line "page"$line -l eng; done Hope this helps somebody...

I'm still running a couple of projects which rely on CVS for version control. But adding more folders recursively is very painful. So I use this line as many times as there still being files/folders to be added. cvs update -R -P -d | grep "?" | cut -d " " -f 2 | while read line ; do cvs add $line ; done

My son (Gustavo) was born last Saturday (April 10th 2010), with 2.790kg (6.15 pounds) and 48cm (1.57 feet). Here is a picture to share the most amazing moment in my life.