Program for PCB/Circuit Design

Max wrote

:>>

The pric>Eagle is also one of the few choices

The cross-platform thing is a nice selling point. As far as I know, the open source packages are the only others that do this (well, in varying degrees).

Yup. No FEATURES are crippled. Limits of the demo:

100mm x 80mm boards 2 copper layers Single-sheet schematics.

If you want to sell what you produce with the demo, you can licence this version for $50.

Amen.

Reply to
JeffM
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I'll probably never sell anything, but I gave CADSoft the $50 just to reward them for supporting Linux.

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Grant Edwards                   grante             Yow!  Why am I in this ROOM
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Reply to
Grant Edwards

I'm useing an Eagle professional version too, but I will switch by the next ocasion.

The reason is their habitus towards their paying customers. About 3.5 years ago, I downloaded a little Eagle project somewhere from a website I can't even remember. It happened that back then, I reused a very small part of this schema (with copy and paste) in one of my projects and continued to copy and paste the same part from my project into a couple of other projects of mine later on. I forgot the schema I downloaded from said website back then and it disapeard from my PC about two years ago when I switched to a new one. No problem cause I did not further needed this third party schema and therefore did not care for it. So far so good right?

Well, not so with Eagle! For about 3 years I did not experienced any problems whatsoever. But this changed after they released version 4.1 to which I upgraded my former fully payed full 4.0 version by buying the upgrade. Thereafter it turned out that some of my projects could no longer be opened. Baffeled about this I opened a support case with Eagles and their final/official reply after quite a long ping pong game was that "my" designs were produced with a cracked version of Eagle alas they would not help me. For those interested, I do have the complete e-mail conversation. Needless to say that I never used a cracked Eagle myself which is obvious since I do have the full version.

Even though they know the complete story and even though this behaviour can easily be reproduced and even knowing my license information and also knowing that I'm a full paying customer for several years, they still (and still do) refused to unlock my designs (which I sent them for analysis) just because I once copied a voltage regulator (I think it was) out of a design which aparently was made by some third party with a cracked version.

The "funny" part is that I would not have had the slightest chance to avoid this, cause this fact (their attitude against such cases as well as the technical circumstances) is to my knownleadge not documented and the 4.0 version does NOT recognize this "foreign" schema as being made with a cracked version. Would it have done so, I obviousely would not have been able to reuse parts of that design. That's actually clear cause a cracker obviousely will have to crack a version after it's release which at the same time means this can happen to any Eagle user any time again!

I do fully understand a companies right to take measures against piracy etc. I do however not understand if they void my own work. That said if say only the very first design would no longer work so be it, or even if they would have asked for money to unlock my projects so be it, but no, no chance - eventhough they confirmed that they technically could unlock my designs therby giving my work back to me.

This evil schema part creaped into quite some of my designs with which the only option I have now is to recapture their schemas from scratch! Lucky me the affected projects are not the biggest/most important ones, but still.

I just wanted to share this little nice experience with Eagle support and CadSoft as a company to give a little counterweight here. So, before you consider buying Eagle, make yourself aware of the fact that you never ever can exchange a design with a third party cause you never know if projects or parts of projects coming from a third party somewhere later in the future all of a sudden will render your own work useless if you happen to reuse only a single bit made by someone else. This is especially true cause the party which sends you a project may is a fully paying customer too but is having something in his designs which originates from some other source which in turn oringnates from somewhere else - you get the idea.

Markus

Reply to
Markus Zingg

Best regards, Spehro Pefhany

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Reply to
Spehro Pefhany

I bought the autorouter with the original Eagle program but the only thing I found it useful for was to give me an approximate idea of whether a layout was going to give me trouble in certain areas. I would run the router and if it could get to 70% or better than I knew I could route the whole thing without trouble. I didn't bother with the auto router on the last version and haven't missed it.

Reply to
Max

That is inexcusable. If the app can determine that a component is from a cracked version, there is no reason that the same mechanism could not be used to flag a bogus component at the time it is being added.

This ex post facto bullshit is way over the line. http://66.102.9.104/search?q=cache:nfU8yxSZ788J:en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirate_Party+reform+patent+right-to-privacy+zzz+design+copyright

Reply to
JeffM

"Markus Zingg" schreef in bericht news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com...

Unbelievable! These guys ought to be locked up. For life.

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Reply to
Frank Bemelman

Has anyone here tried FreePCB? It is available at

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and has a Yahoo group for support.
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I believe freepcb.com also has a forum.

Max wrote:

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Reply to
rickman

...

You can export schematics and components from Eagle as text files using scripts provided by Cadsoft. You can then import them into the new version to remove the problems if the files become damaged.

kevin

Reply to
kevinjwhite

Yes, I do have 4.0 still here and can open the files there, but not being able to port those designs into newer versions is very anoying and actually renders them useless in the long term.

Markus

Reply to
Markus Zingg

On 24 Oct 2006 14:16:28 -0700, "JeffM" wrote: [snip]

Not exactly, cause only the NEXT version will know. That's obivious. Say if they release 4.0 and someone cracks it, there is no way that

4.0 could know about a cracked version. They therefore include the cracked serial number (from what I heard from their support that's how it works) into the next version which then flags those components. But between 4.0 and 4.1 one (like me) could be trapped by this many times.

Oh yes, I obviousely fully agree.

Markus

Reply to
Markus Zingg
[snip]

Do you have pointers to such scripts? CadSoft did not mentioned them.

Markus

Reply to
Markus Zingg

There are ULPs such as "export-board.ulp" and 'export-schematic.ulp" on Cadsoft's web site in the download section.

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They create a text file that can then be used as a script to regenerate the project. They are useful if you want to do mass changes to the libraries or cleaning up boards.

kevin

Reply to
kevinjwhite

A lot of people are afraid to stand out from the crowd by doing anything different.

If he knew what he wanted then he could web search for products, read the material found, and make a selection. But apparently what he wants is to do what "everyone else" is doing.

To a couple replies above I would not have said "pads" but "Gerber photoplot and Excellon drill." What ever one uses to lay out a PCB, generate those two sets of files and the fabricator will be able to build your board.

Reply to
David Kelly

"JeffM" schreef in bericht > I thought that's where you were going.

Hear, hear!

And FreePCB is free too (duh!)

Antoon

Reply to
Antoon

"rickman" schreef in bericht news: snipped-for-privacy@i3g2000cwc.googlegroups.com...

I started using it a few weeks ago since it is the right price for a hobbyist like me. It comes with a number of footprint libraries but you will still have to invest some time to add your own parts. The footprint editor that comes with the package is not the most user-friendly (it can't move lines you've already drawn for example: if it's in the wrong place you need to remove it and try again). It does however interface very well with TinyCAD (also free). The program itself is a tad quirky but is very stable. Unlike one of the demo version I tried of a commercial program (written in Delphi!) which would crash randomly. No autorouting though.

Antoon

Reply to
Antoon

Nice idea, alas thanks for the pointer, but the scrips error out with a parse error in line 57. The ulp code looks fine to me so I have no idea why it does not work.

Markus

Reply to
Markus Zingg

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Markus,

I assume you got this error when you tried to run the ULPs you downloaded on your 4.0 version that will read the "cracked" files. This is probably caused by a difference betwen 4.0 and 4.1 in the ULP language. Go check the release notes and you should see something in there about the changes to the ULP language. Also pay attention to any changes between 4.0 and 4.1 for the scripting so you can modify the ULP so it will produce a script that can be processed by 4.1.

The net effect is that you may have to modify the ULPs so they work with

4.0 but to me that would be worth the effort since it would allow you to avoid starting from scratch if you have a lot invested in your existing designs.
--
James T. White
Reply to
James T. White

I am an engineer and everywhere I have worked, they create tons of footprints regardless of whether footprints are available or not. It seems that in the PCB and fabrication world, there is very little standardization. Every company tailors their process and tailors the footprints to match the process. So having a footprint library is nice, but the pros don't use them much.

About the limitations of editing parts, have you checked the user group at Yahoo? I have used the program a bit, but not extensively. I just know that when I have asked about a "missing" feature I typically find that it can be done, I am just not getting it. There is also a forum at the freepcb.com web site that will likely get a quicker answer from the author.

Reply to
rickman

Thats true, and thank you for the pointer. I will ocasionally dig into this. But then, since I already decided to dropp Eagle I have to redraw those projects I intend to keep longer anyways. Again, it's not only necesairly the technical aspect of this that tells me that CadSoft is no professional partner. It's the attitude they have shown in this case. I mean I even CC'ed their CEO and they did not change their point of view, so I have no other choice than asuming that it's really their coporate phylosophy to deal this way with their paying customers. Sad for the lost investment but there are other CAD companies out there which are happy to have me as their customer as unimportant I may seem to be with a single user license.

Markus

Reply to
Markus Zingg

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