Eagle V8, Now Subscription based

I posted about this in the basics group.

We switched to Diptrace when Autodesk bought Cadsoft, because we knew what was coming. $65 a month per seat, sheesh.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

Any opinion of diptrace? What version did you buy? I guess the good news is that I've had a nice long run with Eagle.

George H.

Beautiful Layout Hunchback likes it pretty well. It isn't scriptable, unfortunately, but it has ASCII import/export so the DB code can hack together an ASCII schematic and board file that gets imported in one step. (Courtesy of Diptrace's Eagle import ULP that served as sample code.)

There's no maximum board size in DT, and it automatically groups parts on the board the way they are in the schematic. Generally it's more user-friendly than Eagle 6.5, which is what we were using before.

DFH tried to get her to like Kicad, but it wasn't happening.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

Not scriptable, do you mean no command line input. "Move Conn1 (0.12 2.34)" for instance in eagle.

You need something like that to get connectors and holes in the right place.

George H.

You have to type in a dialogue box to do that. And there are no ULPs, which is what I was talking about. DT does have a lot of comfort features, though, and it comes with an autorouter FWIW.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

In Pads PCB, you can open the properties of a part and edit its coordinates.

Pads has internal scripting, but we've never used it. You can ascii-out anything, a part or a schematic or a PCB, and we have sometimes done that, run some Python on the text file, and re-imported.

I've written PowerBasic programs that use the ascii files as input, for parts checking and netlist compares and such.

One of my guys wrote some Python to create the schematic symbols for giant BGA FPGAs, using pin lists swiped from Xilinx documents. That saves days of manual entry and checking.

Yeah, you'd think it was intended for engineers or something. ;)

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

We bought a couple copies of Eagle a bit before it was sold to Newark. It still works on my win 7 'puter. (version 4.15 or something.) So at the moment I'm still happy... with a view of storm clouds on horizon.

George H.

Nice to have confirmation that my decision to do the same was justified.

I believe there's an Eagle ULP for exporting to KiCAD, though I haven't used it.

KiCAD has gotten pretty good.

-- Tim Wescott Control systems, embedded software and circuit design I'm looking for work! See my website if you're interested

Switched from PADS to Eagle about 15 years ago at version 4.1 when it was pretty awful. Eagle version 6.x works just fine for us. No reason for our company to change right now with 10 seats already paid for.

boB K7IQ