Allegro PCB Design SKILL Tutorial


SKILL is a scripting language what has its base in Lisp. Using the scription language you can automate a lot of repetitive commmand that will otherwise take a lot of time to do manually. The SKILL language has similarity with conventional C-like syntax. The simplicity of the language allows you to quickly learn the language. If tremendously helps if you are familar with any of the programming language like C or javascript. We will not go into the details of the programming language itself ( except for mentioning in brief about it). Instead, we will focus of working examples of SKILL.

Getting Started



To start directly executing the script, you type skill at the command window and press enter. It will give you a skill promt. You can then start typing the scripts and it will get executed. As an example to concatenate the strings and give output you can do with

Command>skill
Skill> strcat("skill " "programming is fun")


You can also use variables, for loop and many other language contruct. Here is an example the will print "Hello" thrice

Skill>for( i 1 3 print( "hello" ))
Skill>Hello Hello Hello

To exit from the Skill just type exit

Skill> exit

Command>skill


Here is the youtube showing this.



Of course we have not done anything useful. We have just enured that out environment is good to execute skill scripts. In next few pages, we will be writing real codes to do something useful.