Newbie guide to "Eagle"?

I have used Eagle before and I found it to be very clumsy to learn. The interface is very counter-intuative. I find that since I only do PCB layout once in a while, it was always hard to pick back up when I wanted to do a new PCB.

On the other hand, FreePCB is much more obvious and easier to learn. You can find it at

On 12 Dec 2006 07:00:41 -0800, rickman wrote in Msg.

That's because its user interface predates anything resembling modern GUI standards, but once you get the knack of it it allows you to work very quickly.

robert

That was my point. Every time I did a board I would have to relearn the "knack" of it since I had already fogotten all the oddities of how you get it to do useful things. In my opinion it is badly in need of a makeover. I know that you can learn to love any tool, but I think a good user interface is worth its weight in gold. I have spent too much of my life searching through menus and icons looking for the right item or dialog box.

A **BIG** caveat about EAGLE from Markus Zingg:

EAGLE (Easily Applicable Graphical Layout Editor), properly written, is all caps.

As is often said, EAGLE's user interface is counter-intuitive.

A Getting Started tutorial from Kevin Bolding, Instructor, Seattle Pacific University

Overview of EAGLE -- University of California, Santa Barbara

EAGLE FAQ by Ed Robledo http://66.102.9.104/search?q=cache:xGFJhMmSFWAJ:users3.ev1.net/~rpauly/frequently%2520asked%2520questions.pdf

Some interesting stuff here:

Cadsoft's document:

David P. Harris used to have a page

The best place for answers from EAGLE users: news://news.cadsoft.de/eagle.userchat.eng

Answers from the CadSoft company guys: news://news.cadsoft.de/eagle.support.eng

There is also a Yahoo group for EAGLE:

Don't know, I use it in similar ways. Only on occasion because much of my consulting work is finding noise or reliability issues and remedies where you don't need a CAD system. It works for me. Although I wish they'd offer a simple "non-icon" GUI just like in the DOS days. Even better would be a somewhat backwards compatible DOS edition but that's not going to happen since the old DOS version isn't even available anymore :-(

I used to use PADS many years ago, then used Eagle for a few years, and am now back to PADS again... EAGLE was OK for those few years, but now that I've gone back to PADS again, I believe that the developers at Eagle should look at what their competition does.

Eagle could be MUCH better if they'd do some engineering on it. Having said that, there ARE a couple (few??) things that even Eagle does better than PADS, I think. Like, the pan and zoom methods.

Eagles BOM capability sucks big time !

boB

It does but you can write ULPs for that or take an existing one and modify it. The lack of additional part fields is, however, a huge minus IMHO.

Not really, but the manual is very good, its paper.

You can find lots of answers on thecadsoft news server. news.cadsoft.com

Cheers

I totally agree. If Eagle had the capability to have more fields, and be able to change and print those individual fields out with the existing style of Eagle BOM output, it would be fine.

Cad-Soft (and Pads) should look at their competition's products closely, and use both of the products to see why one is better than the other in various ways.

I think that CadSoft, being a German company, may keep them from looking at things the way us westerners do though, so looking at the competition ~may~ not help.

boB

I have mentioned that numerous times in the Eagle forums. Guess what, it worked, they hinted that it may be done in the next release. They didn't say how many part fields and I am hoping for an additional two at the minimum. If we all are extra good maybe they'll bump it up to a total of eight. That is what OrCad always had. I really need the client P/N and budgetary pricing in there.

Yep, then they might also some day understand why a hierarchical sheet structure is important. That's the other thing I've had to wave good-bye when switching from OrCad to Eagle. So far Cadsoft doesn't seem to understand, guess that none of their engineers has ever worked in medical or defense, else they'd know.

OTOH which other company operates such great newsgroup forums? There, several Cadsoft employees are participating on a daily basis. That, to me, was a big factor in deciding.

Joerg ...

I've spent hundreds of hours writing .txt files to specify my entire stockroom of several thousand parts so that CIrcuitmaker and Traxmaker talk to each other flawlessly. Before I go jumping a sinking ship, is there a way to write a conversion file from a .txt file in a specific format to an Eagle part file in Eaglespeak? I don't mind writing the code unless Eagle has their part file in some proprietary format that they aren't revealing.

Jim

AFAIK Cadsoft isn't very secretive about formats. Most others are and that's why it is hard to transfer things like whole schematics. In Eagle the libraries are usually split up into dozens of files. Each contains parts of a certain breed. But you can also generate your own libraries which is what every serious user does anyhow.

This would be a perfect question to ask in the forum. You do not have to be a customer for that. Also, you can give things a try because they offer a small version for free to kick the tires. Eagle has two powerful tools, scripts and user language programs (ULP). I don't know whether a user already wrote one for this job but if so it's customary to share that. Such ULPs look like this example:

ftp://ftp.cadsoft.de/eagle/userfiles/ulp/lbr_man_1_3.ulp

If packages can be copied around I don't see why other items of library parts couldn't.

OTOH if your current CAD setup works for you why jump ship?