Anyone used Eagle Professional PCB editor?

Pre-SP6 I was of the same opinion. I simply wouldn't trust the database functionality and ran with seperate files. However since moving to the database under SP6 I wouldn't go back. One file for everything has many advantages, especially within our organisation. One thing with the database though, you MUST use the Auto Compact database option, otherwise the file gets bigger and bigger every time you save. If you are a habitual saver like I am then it gets big real quick. I've seen a nearly 100MB file for a small simple board!

It's amazing the difference people seem to have with 99SE. Everyone I know swears by 99SE and has never had a problem with it, yet others on here seem to have no end of problems.

Dave :)

Fair enough. I do agree its price is incredibly inflated, and there's no way we can justify the expense of upgrading to Protel DXP.

You can remap the keys to be the same as protel or whatever else you like.

There are newsgroups for eagle on their server news.cadsoft.de

There is a book on eagle as well. Have a copy here somewhere but I haven't read it yet

Same guy who has writen a few basic stamp books.

Make sure to have a search around the cadsoft web site for extra libraries , user projects etc There is a script file that will allow eagle to import protel99se files. Think its under ulps.

Alex

There is two choices for professionals when it comes to CAD packages for electronics, Protel and Cadence, the rest are toys. When you use protel to it maximum capabilities, there is only one better, Cadence. It is extremly powerful. If you can handle using the toys, go for it, you are probably a back yard operation anyway.

BTW, I have been using protel since dos to 99se. 99se is the best i have used, the most powerful and the most stable. IF you blame Protel for their ddb, then go and have a whinge to MS because Access databases are shit and so are both there native drivers and the ODBC drivers. When 99se was developed, there was JET (access) and sybase anywhere. Sybase would have added another $300 to the cost.

Hi Alex, Thanks for all the really useful information! I just went to the Eagle site and downloaded:

protel2eagle.zip 56,468 7,207 Thu Dec 12 09:58:28 2002 This ULP will convert a netlist in Protel .NET format to an Eagle script and PCB layout. Uploaded by Tom Connelly from Cardonald College

I hope this is the one you meant. I'll check it out the moment I get some time. This might be the answer to my prayers in many ways. Regards Bob

"Alex Gibs>

My thoughts exactly. Protel and some other companies seem to have the attitude that anything which is intuitive and straightforward and doesn't have you constantly jumping through all their hoops has something wrong with it. They equate simplicity with "deficiency" and make it as complex and obscure as possible to do almost everything. In 99SE You have to dig down through about 3 levels of menus just to turn layers on and off, for example. Maybe I shouldn't put this in a public forum, but Altium sent us an evaluation copy of their latest Protel/DXP(?) 2004 package on CD. On three out of four PCs we tried it on, the installation froze up. All were fast Celeron machines running XP Pro with lots of RAM. Only a

1GHz Pentium 3 running XP Pro would work with it. For some reason we weren't the slightest bit surprised. Altium were. They said it was fine on their Celeron laptop.

Bob

"Roger Lascelles" wrote:

That's exactly what management in the company I work for said, too.

Some swear by 99SE, and others swear at it! I was actually going to print out a strip of 99SE icons in colour and glue them to my packets of headache pills. I usually have a headache after 1 - 2 hours of fighting with that program. We'll probably never know why people like me seem to have constant problems with 99SE, and others have a pleasant experience. For example, I've sometimes been plagued by phantom net lines on the PCB, which terminate at little spurious dots which are only visible sometimes. From trial and error I found that doing a File Repair then deleting the tracks near those phantom lines makes them go away. But you gotta ask: what kind of a program has a file repair function built in, to fix problems that it creates?!

Regards Bob

"David L. J>It's amazing the difference people seem to have with 99SE. Everyone I

which was probably the full extent of their in-house testing ....

FFS don't mention that to MicroSloth - their implementation would add even more bugs.

And aren't we all glad that MS don't produce a PCB package (shudder at the thought).

My company recently bought a number of Protel DXP 2004 upgrades because Altium were about to stop issuing upgrade licences from 99SE. However so far there is no decision to start using it because:

1) Many of our workstations are slower than 2GHz, or with less 512Mb RAM. They are too slow to run it properly, especially with large project files or complex simulations. 2) It seems far too complex and no one wants to suffer the productivity loss.

regards, Johnny.

Just looking at the complexity of the DXP startup screen is enough to make me not want to use it. :)

Regards Bob

Johnny wrote:

What a thought.... as scary as having the flight control systems on an aircraft running Windoze, like in this picture:

Regards Bob

budgie wrote:

On Sun, 12 Jun 2005 15:26:46 +1000, Clifford Heath wrote: Yes, I tried those Video drivers, and they don't work either!

Work have moved to compacs with LCDs and since then I've been unable to run the s/w on those machines with any drivers I've found.

Trev

Yes.Think thats the one.

Also to export a netlist to protel format

netlist_protel.ulp in the Download area, ULP directory.

Eagle power tools under misc can import dxf files limited demo available also other ulps for this as well.

This mini faq may be useful

Alex

Thanks again Alex, Ironically I'm flat out busy making up for all that lost time now that 99SE seems to be in one of its relatively good moods (isn't crashing or bringing up "Floating Point Division By Zero" messages as it throws components off the schematic page). I'll follow up your latest suggestion very soon, because I really want to use Eagle for all my future designs! Regards, Bob

"Alex Gibs>Yes.Think thats the one.

Just as a little followup, 99SE hasn't crashed on me even once in about a fortnight of intensively using it on the 3GHz P4 motherboard which replaced the 2.8GHz Celeron one. Yes, it's done its "phantom netline" trick once, but that's about all so far. BTW, the Celeron had 512MB of RAM and so does the new board. The Celeron was running XP Home and the P4's running XP Pro. Apparently

99SE is very cranky about what kind of machine it's installed in. However, 99SE continues to be highly irritating to use, all the more so because I've played around with Eagle quite a lot and have been spoiled by its intuitive-ness. My next project will definitely be done with Eagle. :)

Cheers and thanks again to everyone for your helpful/interesting comments!

Bob

"David L. J>

Bob, are you running Service Pack 6 ?

Yes, I certainly am.