Eagle is beautiful software

[MarkL]

...

The Mark tool allows you to set a "false origin" effectively, so if you have a "known" distance from another pad, but not from the starting origin, you can tag the pad as the new origin and measure from there, you can do it the usual way by adding to the offsets of the pad from the origin, but I find it easier and more intuitive to set the false origin using the Mark tool.

...

I find specifying relative coordinates ("R") for drawing lines and other objects with the Mark works well.

Another time-saver is to temporarily assign the grid spacing to match non-standard increments in the component you're building (screw holes, pads, outlines, for example).  Don't feel compelled to work in whatever grid spacing is provided and then try to land the pieces at the right coordinates by hand.  It's also easy to flip the grid back and forth between inches and mm to work in the dimensions in the spec sheet.

More complicated pieces can also be built at (0,0) where it's easier to match spec sheet origins, and then moved and duplicated as needed.

Edit: Fixed confusing first sentence.

[MarkL]

I think "Eagle is adequate software".

It's not mega-featured and it doesn't have a mega price to go with it.  I've been using it professionally for over 10 years and it gets the job done for me.

I've found it's extremely reliable despite other reports.  It has crashed on me once, ever, and even then I lost no work because it backs up everything every minute or so (as configured by me).

I've used their customer support 3 times (email).  Each time answers were prompt (within 1 day) and complete.  In one case a work-around provided.

I've never had any issues with gerbers or raw Eagle files at board houses.

It runs on Linux, which is my requirement.  Others need not apply.

Like any user interface, it requires working experience to get familiar and efficient with it.  There's plenty of things I would have changed in the beginning, but now that I know it, the list is much smaller.  If something bothered me enough, I would learn ULP and write my own function.

Starting new?  Sure, check out everything out there.  But I'm what they would consider an entrenched user.  Eagle has worked well for me and I don't regret investing in it for a second.


(And I like EMACS, and hopeless at VI.)

[Corporate666]

Well, as I said, I use both so I am not going to bias towards or against either Altium or Eagle, they both have their uses and places but to address your issues:

Flipping the board was an issue for me to begin with, but you learn to get used to it by turning on / off layers.

I find the "Mark" tool useful when drawing footprints in Eagle.

I have imported from DXF, some more complex drawings I convert to HPGL then import that, not ideal, but gets the job done.

I have never been required to do 45 degree copper pours, but I am not convinced a ULP couldn't help.

There are solutions (3rd party Sketchup tools and 3rd party POV ray tools) to render 3D.

I fully agree with you and others that it is not the easiest / quickest tool to use, but it is, for use of a better word, capable (considering it's price).

The MARK tool doesn't give any new information or provide any new way to do anything - it simply subtracts a constant value from displayed coordinates.  If you are making a footprint for, say, a through hole DIN plug with 8 pins equidistant on a 10mm circle...impossible without a sheet of paper and a calculator, or draw your layout in a real CAD program and get the X/Y coordinates for Eagle.

Every crosshatch ground plane I've ever seen has been at 45 degrees to the PCB.  When I needed to do one, I got in touch with Cadsoft and their answer was "just rotate everything else and leave the plane at 0 degrees".  Perhaps a ULP can do it, but CADSoft didn't seem to think so.

What kind of DXF import doesn't support arcs?  The official suggestion is a 3rd party utility that was written about 13 years ago and doesn't support splines or most modern CAD features.

Flipping the board... sure many people can adapt and I can "visualize" that I am looking through the PCB, not at it... but the fundamental purpose of software is to adapt their offering to the needs of the user, not for the user to adapt to the software's crap way of doing something.

[Corporate666]

I don't really understand the complaints about the EAGLE UI being "backward."  Maybe I'm just from a time when it wasn't expected for all applications to have common UI philosophies.  Maybe it's an EMACS vs VI sort of thing.  Maybe I just don't use enough "modern" applications...

Imagine every town you drove through had different rules for signage and different units of measurement.... so "max 50" in one town might mean your vehicle weight must be under 50 snorks of weight, where a snork is a unit they developed... and another town has the same sign, but "max 50" means you can't travel over 50 furlongs per kilosecond.  It would make driving onerous, at best. 

That's what the old days of software were like.  Lotus 1-2-3 used the "/"key to bring up the menu and escape canceled out of the menu.  Wordperfect used the Escape key to mean "redo", and the F1 key was cancel (and the F3 key was help).

Standards make people more productive and effective.  Successful software companies spend time and money bringing ease of use features to their customers which, in turn, makes the software more valuable.

Cadsoft employed people who thought click copy icon -> select -> right click -> click "copy group" or click copy icon -> left click part were perfectly acceptable ways to copy a part, and that having 2 different methods depending on whether you were local or "global" copying was OK.   

[MarkL]

The MARK tool doesn't give any new information or provide any new way to do anything - it simply subtracts a constant value from displayed coordinates.  If you are making a footprint for, say, a through hole DIN plug with 8 pins equidistant on a 10mm circle...impossible without a sheet of paper and a calculator, or draw your layout in a real CAD program and get the X/Y coordinates for Eagle.

Try:

  grid mm;
  mark (30 30);
  pad (P 10 0) (P 10 36) (P 10 72) (P 10 108) (P 10 144) (P 10 180) (P 10 216) (P 10 252) (P 10 288) (P 10 324);

That was hard.  I needed several sheets of paper.

[Wilksey]

Or not so impossible, just goes to show that people don't give it a chance.

And yes, everything is easy and intuitive to us that use it every day. 

[rx8pilot]

Try:

  grid mm;
  mark (30 30);
  pad (P 10 0) (P 10 36) (P 10 72) (P 10 108) (P 10 144) (P 10 180) (P 10 216) (P 10 252) (P 10 288) (P 10 324);

That was hard.  I needed several sheets of paper.

I have been doing mechanical design for about 17 years - that method is totally and in all way ridiculous in today's software environment. It is what I would expect in the mid-80's.

In SolidWorks (even back to 1998 version when I first got it) you simply click a center point. type 10 for size and type 8 for instances and press enter. Also, you can define a distance between two objects which is VERY common in pad layout from a data sheet. In Eagle you have to change the grid size or manually calc the numbers. Again, in SolidWorks its a pattern tool that needs only very basic info to make just about any pattern seen in an electronics package. Not sure how Altium fairs in this, but the software concept for drawing patterned geometry is many decades old and EASY to implement.

The point in most of the responses, is not whether you can pull something off in Eagle, but rather how much time and effort does it take. I have been using Eagle for 18 months and never knew the trick you described. I had SolidWorks for a few hours and had a full assembly of related parts that were CNC ready. If the answer is always a ULP that was written by some random person years ago or a whole bunch of command line entries - it is marginal software that gets away with it because it is inexpensive. Work around are NOT solutions - they are by definition a Band-Aid covering a glaring mistake or omission. The concept of ULP is almost a good one but it is clear that CadSoft leans on it to get R&D/solutions for free from end-users instead of coding the needed bits into the software in the first place.

I know that comparing SolidWorks and Eagle is a bit strange - but only to show how easy this 'should' be. PCB CAD geometry is very basic compared to 3D mechanical assemblies. It is exclusively lines and arcs with maybe an occasional spline.
 

[MarkL]

I knew that "trick" because I read the manual like I do for all software and test equipment I buy.  Cover to cover.

And Cadsoft publishes very detailed, sometimes painfully long, release notes.  It's important to read those too.

I know a lot of people don't read manuals, but I think it's like throwing money away.  You'll never find all the capabilities of something by chance no matter how long you sit there and spin the knobs.   A lot of people will figure out how to do an operation the hard way, or sometimes declare it impossible because it's not obvious, and they'll never bother to look any further.

And you're right about the user-written ULP workarounds published on Cadsoft's site.  I think Cadsoft has tried to leverage the community too much to make up for some of the failings of Eagle.  I've tried to use some of those ULPs and they're almost always a disaster.  If anything, Cadsoft should have taken notice of what people were desperately providing on their own and then put those functions into Eagle natively.  A parts management database comes to mind.

And for it being cheap, I'd be happy to spend more if there was something that ran on Linux that met my needs.  Unfortunately, there's a strong correlation between the words "free" and "Linux" that doesn't encourage a lot of vendors to focus on Linux.  Oh well.

I'm not going defend Eagle and say it couldn't be better.  Of course it can.

But still, it works for what I need.  At least for the time being.  Others will need to evaluate for themselves.

[Corporate666]

Try:

  grid mm;
  mark (30 30);
  pad (P 10 0) (P 10 36) (P 10 72) (P 10 108) (P 10 144) (P 10 180) (P 10 216) (P 10 252) (P 10 288) (P 10 324);

That was hard.  I needed several sheets of paper.

I have been doing mechanical design for about 17 years - that method is totally and in all way ridiculous in today's software environment. It is what I would expect in the mid-80's.

In SolidWorks (even back to 1998 version when I first got it) you simply click a center point. type 10 for size and type 8 for instances and press enter. Also, you can define a distance between two objects which is VERY common in pad layout from a data sheet. In Eagle you have to change the grid size or manually calc the numbers. Again, in SolidWorks its a pattern tool that needs only very basic info to make just about any pattern seen in an electronics package. Not sure how Altium fairs in this, but the software concept for drawing patterned geometry is many decades old and EASY to implement.

The point in most of the responses, is not whether you can pull something off in Eagle, but rather how much time and effort does it take. I have been using Eagle for 18 months and never knew the trick you described. I had SolidWorks for a few hours and had a full assembly of related parts that were CNC ready. If the answer is always a ULP that was written by some random person years ago or a whole bunch of command line entries - it is marginal software that gets away with it because it is inexpensive. Work around are NOT solutions - they are by definition a Band-Aid covering a glaring mistake or omission. The concept of ULP is almost a good one but it is clear that CadSoft leans on it to get R&D/solutions for free from end-users instead of coding the needed bits into the software in the first place.

I know that comparing SolidWorks and Eagle is a bit strange - but only to show how easy this 'should' be. PCB CAD geometry is very basic compared to 3D mechanical assemblies. It is exclusively lines and arcs with maybe an occasional spline.

If you ever used AutoCAD back in the day when it was a DOS application, Eagle reminds me of that.  The biggest "trick" with Eagle is that everything can be entered on the command line, and when you want to get "real" output from Eagle, the command line is the right way to enter stuff.

But things like PCB outlines which can be drawn in Solidworks in minutes are ridiculously complex to create in Eagle.  If one could import a DXF, that would be great... except between the two import tools (which are both over 10-15 years old), one of them doesn't support arcs, the other lets you run a couple of imports before you have to pay - and doesn't offer support or support splines or most of the other features of AutoCAD.

Eagle is OK for simple stuff when you accept it's non-standard non-intuitive interface and lack of features and power.  But there are *so* many times when you want to do something beyond a simple little rectangle hobby board and then you run into the limitations of the SW.  Most recently for me it was putting text on the board in a font I downloaded.

Altium... click the text tool, type it in... change it to truetype font, pick your font and drag the corners to size it - like every other Windows program ever.

In Eagle.. open up Photoshop, type the text in to a file... convert to indexed color, make the file huge, and save it as a BMP.  Open Eagle, run the import BMP ULP, have it scan the file for the colors used... then open up the palette and select the colors, then generate an SCR file.  Then run the SCR file, and if you are lucky, your image was imported in positive mode.  If not, it's negative and you need to re-do it all.  It's unlikely to be sized as you want, so plan on repeating the procedure 10-20 times to get it just right.  And the SCR file creates tons (like - thousands or more) of points or lines, making Eagle slow as shit when you resize or pan around your board.  And you better put it on a separate layer, because otherwise you won't be able to just select the image - and you will spend hours deleting all the little line segments or pray you can Control-Z back far enough to undo your mistake.  And if you make a change to your PCB and need to resize the text... back to square one!

Fun fun

There isn't much Eagle can't do compared to other packages in the same way there isn't much a hammer and chisel can't do that a Hermle 5-Axis can do 



(CNC porn above)

[MarkL]

The MARK tool doesn't give any new information or provide any new way to do anything - it simply subtracts a constant value from displayed coordinates.  If you are making a footprint for, say, a through hole DIN plug with 8 pins equidistant on a 10mm circle...impossible without a sheet of paper and a calculator, or draw your layout in a real CAD program and get the X/Y coordinates for Eagle.

Try:

  grid mm;
  mark (30 30);
  pad (P 10 0) (P 10 36) (P 10 72) (P 10 108) (P 10 144) (P 10 180) (P 10 216) (P 10 252) (P 10 288) (P 10 324);

That was hard.  I needed several sheets of paper.

If you used several sheets of paper, your points may have been in the right place instead of being off.  The half millimeter difference in half of them may not matter.... or it may, it depends.  But that illustrates the point... if you could have entered an angle and distance, they wouldn't have been off.  Or you could tighten up the grid and get closer, or use a real CAD program to figure out the actual coordinates and type them in to EAGLE.  But even with a simple arrangement of 8 points around a circle... half of them are off.

....then the PCB's show up and something doesn't fit, and then you realize why Eagle is such shit.

If you bothered to look in the manual you would see those are polar coordinates in the form of (radius, angle) centered about the mark, which was the example you originally cited.

Thank you for demonstrating your expertise and your qualifications to criticize this product.

[Corporate666]

The MARK tool doesn't give any new information or provide any new way to do anything - it simply subtracts a constant value from displayed coordinates.  If you are making a footprint for, say, a through hole DIN plug with 8 pins equidistant on a 10mm circle...impossible without a sheet of paper and a calculator, or draw your layout in a real CAD program and get the X/Y coordinates for Eagle.

Try:

  grid mm;
  mark (30 30);
  pad (P 10 0) (P 10 36) (P 10 72) (P 10 108) (P 10 144) (P 10 180) (P 10 216) (P 10 252) (P 10 288) (P 10 324);

That was hard.  I needed several sheets of paper.

If you used several sheets of paper, your points may have been in the right place instead of being off.  The half millimeter difference in half of them may not matter.... or it may, it depends.  But that illustrates the point... if you could have entered an angle and distance, they wouldn't have been off.  Or you could tighten up the grid and get closer, or use a real CAD program to figure out the actual coordinates and type them in to EAGLE.  But even with a simple arrangement of 8 points around a circle... half of them are off.

....then the PCB's show up and something doesn't fit, and then you realize why Eagle is such shit.

If you bothered to look in the manual you would see those are polar coordinates in the form of (radius, angle) centered about the mark, which was the example you originally cited.

Thank you for demonstrating your expertise and your qualifications to criticize this product.

Yup, my bad - a quick off the cuff example I shouldn't have used and caught just after my reply to RX8.

But if you have been using Eagle for some time, you know as well as I do that it is woefully inadequate when it comes to drawing tools.  The real world examples I gave - such as the inability to import DXF's, the inability to show the back of a PCB in correct orientation, the inability to use fonts, the inability to angle copper pours and so much more (all of which are trivial for real PCB design software) are real examples of where Eagle falls short.

It was not that long ago that there was no workaround for arbitrary pad shapes, and even the current "solution" is a hack requiring a ton of adjustment to layers to get the desired result.

[westfw]

the inability to import DXF's, the inability to show the back of a PCB in correct orientation, the inability to use fonts, the inability to angle copper pours [or do arbitrary pad shapes]

IMO, you have an odd list of "requirements."  Perhaps they're important to real commercial PCB design, but they sounds more like "here are some features that I've grown used to in my favorite SW, and EAGLE doesn't have them."   Fancy board shapes, fancy pad shapes...  That's fine, I guess, but it seems very ... personal.  Sorta like me complaining that my convex hull ULP written for EAGLE can't be used in Altium - I might eventually decide that I don't like altium, but I hope I'd have a better reason...

[wraper]

Fancy board shapes, fancy pad shapes...  That's fine, I guess, but it seems very ... personal.  Sorta like me complaining that my convex hull ULP written for EAGLE can't be used in Altium - I might eventually decide that I don't like altium, but I hope I'd have a better reason...

So are are saying: "DIY shall not do anything except square PCBs with strictly square parts"?

[rx8pilot]

FWIW - All of my PCB's have an odd outline generated by my mechanical design software - that is not all that odd.

They are all shapes that take under a minute to draw in SolidWorks or AutoCAD, but would take a very long time in Eagle. It gets worse when I need to make a small change to the outline because it is not parametric. I use the DXF to SCR utility whcih works - its just a lot of steps for something that should be a single click. I have to make a "part" with the outline and then place that part on the layout. Again, weird. It is but one example of something that is possible in Eagle, but needlessly painful and not a feature of the software. Its a generous user that coded a utility and gave it away for free to work around a limitation.

In my opinion, Eagle is too expensive to be as crusty and weird as it is and too cheap to be the industry leading package. I have and will continue to use it until I have enough money to step up. In the end, I have been getting good PCB's. When I go "PRO", I fear that I will look back at a LOT of time wasted working around the limitations of Eagle. I would classify Eagle as a pro-sumer product.

[westfw]

 

"DIY shall not do anything except square PCBs with strictly square parts"?

I mentioned "convex shell" code, didn't I :-)  (example attached.  The blue milling layer is generated from the reference points by the ULP.)

Nevertheless, it's more like "How often do you have a board shape so complex that you need to draw it with an external tool and import it?"  OTOH, I'll say I'd normally fit packages around boards, rather than design boards to exactly fit complex restrictions...

[wraper]

comparisons between Altium Designer and Eagle feel so forced

Well sure.  Eagle costs between 0 and about $2000, while Altium starts at about $9k...

Actually it seems that eagle does have bad bang per buck ratio. The routing area limitation is just ridiculous for the price. For the price they ask for more or less capable version one can buy much more serious software package. Like Proteus for example.

[LabSpokane]

In my opinion, Eagle is too expensive to be as crusty and weird as it is and too cheap to be the industry leading package.

Yup. For the kind of dough being charged, one would think there would be a development budget. It's hard to not seriously consider Circuit Studio given how laborious Eagle is in its current state - not to mention that it won't improve any time soon given its history.

[Corporate666]

the inability to import DXF's, the inability to show the back of a PCB in correct orientation, the inability to use fonts, the inability to angle copper pours [or do arbitrary pad shapes]

IMO, you have an odd list of "requirements."  Perhaps they're important to real commercial PCB design, but they sounds more like "here are some features that I've grown used to in my favorite SW, and EAGLE doesn't have them."   Fancy board shapes, fancy pad shapes...  That's fine, I guess, but it seems very ... personal.  Sorta like me complaining that my convex hull ULP written for EAGLE can't be used in Altium - I might eventually decide that I don't like altium, but I hope I'd have a better reason...

All my stuff is commercial.... the PCB shape/size/layout is almost always driven by something else like an existing housing or a product design requirement that precludes the PCB being the shape it would be if it was designed in a vacuum.  But I don't think the requirements are unusual at all. 

In the case of the ground plane, IIRC it was for a capacitive sensing board and crosshatching the copper pour was either required by the capsense or by the PCB fab, and not being oriented at 45-deg means all your parts sometimes come between horizontals or verticals leaving very little contact to the ground plane.  Cap sensing isn't uncommon.

In the case of fonts on the PCB - I think that is a pretty common need these days.  Unless one is just doing hobby stuff, there will almost always be a logo somewhere... I see much more of it than I did 20 years ago.

And as for arbitrary PCB shapes, I think if you look at the vast majority of electronics these days, "swoopy" cases is the norm - the old "heathkit" style of products are a thing of the past.  When form follows function, it's rare that a PCB can be rectangular.

Arbitrary pad shapes... I use a lot of power LED's, regulators and FET's, and they all (especially LED's) are increasingly using uniquely shaped land patterns.  I think LED's are one of the biggest areas of electronics these days, and from reading various forums, a lot of people have this same issue.

These aren't things that I searched to find wrong with Eagle, these are real limitations I've run into over the years that were a pain in the ass to solve.  Another is component creation - my hasty and faulty off-the-cuff example above aside, surely component creation isn't a special case?  Some datasheets reference pads from a point, some are relatively positioned.  Some use centers of pads for reference, some use boundaries of pads.  Take an arbitrary pad shape referenced from the edge of another arbitrary shape at angles to one another, and something that would take seconds to draw in AutoCAD can mean a lot of scribbling and measuring to calculate the coordinates required in Eagle. 

And speaking of messing with coordinates, panelization is another total kludge in Eagle, and when you start wanting to do v-scoring or add rat bites, or pull traces onto the panel (like in Dave's video where he had programming/testing traces unique to a panel) - that breaks annotation and makes your board un-editable.  Surely panelization isn't an esoteric requirement?

[Corporate666]

In my opinion, Eagle is too expensive to be as crusty and weird as it is and too cheap to be the industry leading package.

Yup. For the kind of dough being charged, one would think there would be a development budget. It's hard to not seriously consider Circuit Studio given how laborious Eagle is in its current state - not to mention that it won't improve any time soon given its history.

Someone mentioned in another thread that Farnell was apparently not as thrilled with the progress of their Eagle investment as when they initially made it, and IIRC were cutting back on R&D and moving support (and money) over to the Altium offering.

That does not bode well for Eagle.  I think you hit the nail on the head... the most accurate description of Eagle is that it hasn't gotten much in the way of new features over the past 15 years, but electronics has changed a hell of a lot in 15 years. 

Another software I use - MasterCAM - had the same problem.  It was the "prosumer" standard, but Windows 2000/XP had been out for 5 years and MasterCAM was still using essentially a DOS interface.  The old timers loved it because they had learned it and all it's quirks.  But MasterCAM released "X" which was all Windows.  There was much whining but it saved the company and made them much larger.

Eagle didn't make the jump and are paying for it.

[rx8pilot]

MasterCAM SUCKED until they made MasterCAM for SolidWorks IMHO. The graphics engine and interface was/is bad but the CNC programming was good. Leveraging the graphics and tools of SolidWorks with the excellent programming of MasterCAM has created an excellent solution. When a model is changed in engineering - the CNC programming is automatically updated. Massive time saver.


......now back to our regularly scheduled program.......

[LabSpokane]

MarkL,

I appreciate where you're coming from. If this discussion was about 2D CAD, I'd be telling folks the same thing about AutoCad. I started in the command line CAD days and that is largely how I use it. I find the command line very efficient and roll my eyes at those who just don't like it because of its quirks.

I have a very different perspective on everything else these days and get frustrated with oddball interfaces. That just stems from being in the position of a Jack of All Trades, and I just dont have time to become an expert like I used to.  I'm sure I can learn to make Eagle do what I need, the question is the time commitment to do so.

So, there you go, hypocrisy in action. 

[rx8pilot]

I am in the Jack of All trades position as well so I have given up being an expert and dislike anything that requires 8hrs of reading. Its not always fair to software and hardware I have to interface with. The magnitude of the learning curve is directly related to my success,  so I am sensitive to convoluted solutions.

Of course trading a learning curve to save $8k is not a terrible trade.

[IanJ]

MarkL,

I appreciate where you're coming from. If this discussion was about 2D CAD, I'd be telling folks the same thing about AutoCad. I started in the command line CAD days and that is largely how I use it. I find the command line very efficient and roll my eyes at those who just don't like it because of its quirks.

I have a very different perspective on everything else these days and get frustrated with oddball interfaces. That just stems from being in the position of a Jack of All Trades, and I just dont have time to become an expert like I used to.  I'm sure I can learn to make Eagle do what I need, the question is the time commitment to do so.

So, there you go, hypocrisy in action. 

My AutoCad experience doesn't go back so many years.....thus I split my sessions half command line, half icons......and in terms of Eagle it's very much the same.

Regarding the topic "beautiful software".....there will always be divided opinions with Eagle........but I wonder, just wonder where hobbyist pcb design would be now if Eagle had never existed. Whether it's had it's day or not you have to admit that Eagle contributed.

Ian.

[Feynman]

I don't quite unterstand all the hate EAGLE is getting. In its niche, it does perfectly what it is intended to: Create simple Boards with a very steep learning curve. Creating parts is a mess and routing big multilayer boards is a torture. Because of the limitations, you could argue that it is way to expensive in its professional version.

[LabSpokane]

I don't quite unterstand all the hate EAGLE is getting. In its niche, it does perfectly what it is intended to: Create simple Boards with a very steep learning curve. Creating parts is a mess and routing big multilayer boards is a torture. Because of the limitations, you could argue that it is way to expensive in its professional version.

Surely you're joking, Mr. Feynman...   :-D