Anyone used Eagle Professional PCB editor?

Hi, I've just wasted about a fortnight at work, all thanks to the Protel 99SE schematic/PCB program going berserk, corrupting its own files, being impossibly non-intuitive and generally doing everything it can to make me want to smash my monitor out of frustration. I refuse to ever do another schematic and PCB layout using that woeful bugware (in my opinion). Has anyone here used Eagle Professional for doing multi-layer SMD artworks? I'm thinking seriously of going to it from Protel, and would like some feedback from actual users before I go any further. Thanks. :)

Regards, Bob

Reply to
Bob Parker
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Do you have the latest Service Pack bob? Protel 99SE is extremely popular because it is a pretty stable environment and does work very well. Sure it has a few issues, but you learn to deal with them with time.

Forget what other people say when it comes to using PCB software, try the demo yourself on some real boards, only then will you know if it's any good for you. If you use anything but protel, you might have to generate Gerbers to send to the manufacturers. If that's your normal thing, no problems, if not then it's an extra step which can be a pain in the butt.

Dave :)

Reply to
David L. Jones

Hi Bob, I use eagle pcb, and find it completely adequate. It does have some well known quirks though re user interface, but I don't find it a problem once you get used to it. I haven't used the modern protel so I can't compare it with that. You could try the lite version (free) to make sure you are happy with the user interface before buying the pro version. Regards, Jon

Reply to
Jon

I agree completely about Protel 99SE. Its *only* benefit is that the file format is accepted by PCB manufacturers, without need for Gerber plots. I think that after time some people are able to adapt to Protel and jump through the hoops. People pay money to do Protel courses. Protel 99SE is poorly designed, poorly coded.

I tried Eagle, but I never felt at home. Eagle is available for Linux as well as Windows, but I would rather the standard Windows control conventions. Instead, like most other CAD programs, you just have to adapt. Many people recommend Eagle.

I use Protel at work, but only the PCB layout part. For the schematic, I use TinyCAD, a freeware schematic editor which exports a Protel format netlist. TinyCAD is easy to use and works how you expect. It doesn't lock up. Surprisingly, Protel PCB is much better behaved when importing a netlist rather than doing its own stupid schematic to PCB. You can modify the schematic and Protel PCB will suck in the new netlist and match up all the copper and parts.

TinyCAD is so good I use it for all my work schematics. You can cut bits of TinyCAD schematic and paste into Word etc documents. TinyCAD does multi-sheet for big jobs.

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this was recommended as "human friendly" :

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Roger

Reply to
Roger Lascelles

...

I've only just moved from EasyTrax to EaglePCB for hobbyist work at home, mainly because I couldn't run easytrax at work anymore due to compatability issues with work's hardware.

It is a bit different to use compared to easyTrax, but I've managed to get used to most of it fairly easily. The biggest thing I miss is the ability to edit component pads directly within a layout. With eagle you have to create a new package within the component library and modify the pads on that then import the new package onto the board.

It does come with reasonably complete component libraries for my humble use, and I've used it to do some (limited) SMD work successfully, board number 4 will make more use of SMDs though.

Eagle does have a powerful 'C' like programing language, and there are a range of user programs which add functionality and again for my humbe use the autorouter doesn't seem to work too badly, but saying that, if I could still run autotrax on the work PCs I would probably stay with that - the price for professional edition for home use is beyond me, coupled with the pad issue - who knows, maybe they might fix that 'feature' in a new edition.

I would whole heartedly agree with Jon - try the demo version on a couple of small sample boards before making up your mind.

Trevor

Reply to
Trevor

Thanks Dave, Yeah, our Protel 99SE has been upgraded to SP6 which is the latest one on the Altium website. "A few issues" seems to be a big understatement. :) All the people using that program where I work know it to be very unstable and prone to coming up with all kinds of weird errors. One time I told one of the blokes "99SE crashed twice on me this morning". His comment was "Only twice?" and he was serious. He backs up his Protel files every 2 minutes just to be sure of not losing much work when it does something stupid. I'm an optimist... I back up about every 5 minutes! We completely re-installed the program and SP6 from scratch and we just replaced the 2.8GHz Celeron motherboard/128MB ATI video card with a 3GHz P4/256MB Nvidia video card in the despairing hope that 99SE would become stable enough for me to finish the project I'm working on. That didn't significantly help either. It finally turned out that 99SE had subtly corrupted the .ddb file. Of course using its "File repair" function didn't make the slightest difference. Only time-wasting trial-and-error methods identified which components on just one page of the schematic were invisibly corrupted, and I was able to fix it (I think/hope). I'm only really annoyed because I was beginning to wonder if 99SE was going to lose me my job because I was wasting so much time trying to find the problem and the manager was running out of patience.

Thanks to you and everyone else for your thoughts about Eagle. If it's stable and not so quirky that I can't get my brain around it, it has got to be better than 99SE! :)

Regards Bob

"David L. Jones" wrote:

Reply to
Bob Parker

Thanks Roger! You can obviously relate to what I've been going through. :) I really appreciate your input and I'm going to seriously check out both those websites/programs you recommended. I too have found that the PCB layout part of 99SE isn't too bad. Most of the bugs and instability seem to be in the schematic capture and PCB updating part of the program. If TinyCAD does what I expect it to do, that will be a whole new experience after 99SE where many commands seem to have been placed in the last menu in which you'd expect to find them. Thanks again!

Regards Bob

"Roger Lascelles" wrote:

Reply to
Bob Parker

What OS are you guys using?

I use 99se+sp6 under win2K or XPpro to lay out schematics and manual route 4 layer boards and have not had a crash in years (4? 5? years).

If you are running it under win98 or earlier you will have problems, this has been documented on the techserve protel mailing list.

Reply to
Phil Allison is a sad lonly ol

Yup. I wasted three hours of my life trying to get some value out of the 99SE evaluation version on Tue night. Never again. Might have been better if the service pack would apply itself.

As I wrote to a friend the next day:

Under XP, it's utterly broken. I can't even remember half the defects I found during three hours of hair-tearing frustration. Almost nothing worked in the way a naive user would expect, and some fundamental and annoying quirks made the experience unpleasant. On the whole, the "help" isn't, and isn't consistently searchable - they can't even decide whether they're talking about "parts" or "components" for example. And that's before you get beyond the design "features" into the numerous outright bugs, of which only one is possibly attributable to running under XP. Every time I hit Save, I got an error dialog from the Access Ado driver about a "null string truncated on the right" or some such MicroShit unintelligable garbage. The file seemed to be saved correctly every time except the last time at 11:30 PM, which was *empty* when I re-opened it. Needless to say, I gave up in utter disgust, it's an absolute disgrace.

Altium, if you're listening, sack your entire software development and documentation staff and hire some new ones. It won't impede your business more than continuing with the current pile of dogshit.

Installed Eagle under Linux yesterday, and though it's a bit "different" in its approach to a few things (verb-noun instead of noun-verb), it works reliably and I've almost completed my first library, schematic and board. The Eagle files are directly accepted by

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so I don't have to worry about doing Gerber and drill files as I would have with geda, the other software I tried.

Clifford Heath.

Reply to
Clifford Heath

Have you got the new video drivers from ? They seemed to work ok under XP.

Clifford Heath.

Reply to
Clifford Heath

I run 99SE primarily under W2K and have only had one issue since SP6 has been installed. That is due to file names (including paths) on the server exceeding 256 characters.

99SE is most probably the most popular professional package in use in Australia. It's not for hobbyists, but for professional use it's hard to beat once you get used to it. I actually love the way you can re-install parts of the program if needed. Eg, if the Autorouter is playing up or a program file gets correct, just reinstall that part. No other program I know of lets you do that - real nice. Before that I used Protel 2.8 PCB for years, now that was a NICE package - small and fast, did enough but not too much.

I always liked to show up the Autotrax guys who recon Autotrax was faster because it was DOS based. Once you pull up a board and zoom in, it was no contest, you could literally see the tracks being drawn on Autotrax, but 2.8 (and 99SE even) is instant at any zoom level. I never went back to Autotrax after that.

Dave :)

Reply to
David L. Jones

The number one tip when using 99se, do not use the database function. That will be your biggest downfall. That aside, Protel99se is fine.

Reply to
The Real Andy

Bob, This ddb corruption has happened to me a few times. Sometimes the sch/pcb files will appear as some kind of shortcut inside the ddb which the s/w does not recognise. Exporting the files out of the ddb, then creating a fresh ddb and reimporting the files fixed it. The path length to the working files as someone else mentioned can cause some weird behaviour. At work I tend to work in a desktop folder. r.

Reply to
rob

What kind of name is that? Most of us are running XP Pro. I've been using XP Home but have just upgraded to XP Pro as one of the things we hoped would make it behave. Now that the corrupted page schematic page "seems" to be fixed, it's been stable. I hope it stays that way!

"Phil Allis>What OS are you guys using?

Reply to
Bob Parker

All I can say is that I'm jealous of those people who don't seem to have any problems with 99SE. If it would stop producing assorted memory conflict errors and the "Floating Point Division By Zero" one which brought all progress to a stop for about a week (which Altium Aust said they'd never seen before) while I tried to identify the cause and correct it, I'd be delighted!!! I still hate that program with a passion now, regardless of the fact that it does have some nice features like all the global things it can do so easily.

Bob

"David L. J>Phil Allis>> What OS are you guys using?

Reply to
Bob Parker

Wow! I had to stop and make sure that your post wasn't something I've written to mates about 99SE. Those are all my thoughts exactly, even though 99SE has frustrated and infuriated me in somewhat different ways to how it's taken its revenge on you. There are times when I was sure its designers had gone out of their way to make it baffling, frustrating and almost impossible to do many of the functions. The "help" files are so ambiguous that they usually only make me more confused about what the program's supposed to do. Thanks for your comments about Eagle. I don't mind a few little problems related to its German origin, as long as it's stable and does what I expect. Every time I do anything with 99SE, I stop and carefully check to see what unwanted side-effects there were... like finding that the far end of a line on the schematic had also moved along with the end I was working on, producing a nice short-circuit waiting to haunt me later, etc etc etc. This 99SE/Eagle discussion has been very educational!

Regards, Bob

Clifford Heath wrote:

Reply to
Bob Parker

Hi Rob, I wasn't aware of the path length issue. Yes, it's pretty long on my work machine. I'll think about correcting that, thanks. I'll also keep your other comments in mind for next time there's a disaster. Having said that, the fact is that the people who created 99SE think in a very different way to how me and obviously a few others here think. What to the Protel teams must seem very ergonomic and obvious is to me ridiculously convoluted and illogical. Whoever wrote Eagle does think the same way as me, so I'm gunna give it a serious tryout on my next design.

Bob

"rob" wrote:

Reply to
Bob Parker

I have found the autorouter on Eagle to be a dog, very twitchy with the settings, and ok for all but a couple of tracks which can be manually routed without too much dramas

Reply to
Ed -|-

The thing is, this sort of garbage is really unacceptable. When you pay a fairly huge amount of money for a piece of software, it should bloody well work, and in particular, NOT corrupt files which it itself has created!! This is one of the reasons I prefer open-source software... if there's a bug, you can fix it yourself, or if you care enough and can afford to, you can pay someone to fix it for you, independent of the vendor / original author. There are quite a few decent open-source electronics tools out there now, such as Electric (for VLSI), PCB, the gEDA suite, oregano (SPICE front-end), Qucs (circuit simulator) etc.

I used to use Protel for DOS some years ago... which was rock solid... the first Windows version was horribly unstable - perhaps understandable as a newly supported platform - however subsequent releases have gotten worse each time. They need to do major work on the quality control front. It's not that hard to create good quality, STABLE software... maybe if enough customers bitch about this they'll do something about it.

- Daniel

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*    Daniel Franklin - Lecturer in Computer Engineering
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Reply to
Daniel Franklin

I've been using the database file system without fault. The the only problems I have heard about were caused by the versions of MS ODBC drivers being out of date.

99se+sp6 is a very stable program when run on the correct operating system (win2K or above) with the correct resources. Join the techserve mailing list and you will find many, many happy users of this program.

Protel V3 was an abomination however.

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