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{ 2007 03 07 }

Eagle for PCB

PCB Board for my Honors Project

For the last 3 days I have been working on routing the Honours project. For the design I use CadSoft Eagle. However, it’s been annoying me quite a bit.Here is just a shortlist of things,

  • You can’t change pads unless you modify a library. At my Uni they use a rivet system for doing plated through holes, these means that the holes and pads have to be a certain size as you have to solder the rivets to the pads. This means that you often want to change a hole and pad for a particular instance of an IC so that it can have a rivet put in it.
  • Polygon Pours can not be put in “outline” mode. This makes it quite annoying, as you want to put in the GND plane first so it removes all the GND airwires, but then you are constantly using the “rip-up” command so you can see where you are putting signals.

I’m thinking of moving to gEDA because it’s free software, I would no longer be restricted with what I do. However, it’s quite hard to use and doesn’t come with the extensive libraries that Eagle has.

I’m thinking that I’m going to write a ULP script which converts EAGLE stuff to the format used by gEDA. We’ll see what happens.
Posted by mithro on Wednesday, March 7, 2007, at 11:53 am. Filed under Ideas, PCB. Follow any responses to this post with its comments RSS feed. Comments are closed for this post.

{ 2 } Comments

  1. Booker | January 5, 2008 at 2:24 am | Permalink

    Have you found any decent manual for Eagle 4.1?

    There is just one hang-up I am having with it, and that is adding user-defined components to the library (device manufacturers don’t support Eagle much at all). Their component editor is a real piece of crap, really bad! Almost useless. I have to follow the steps in their tutorial every time I need to add a new device, and even then I risk crapping out the whole library.

    Does anyone offer a “missing manual” to your knowledge?

  2. mithro | January 5, 2008 at 10:46 am | Permalink

    I have found the user-defined components stuff quite easy to use myself. There are some really good tutorials on the web for how to do it – just seach for eagle tutorial.

    Sorry I couldn’t be more help.