Eagle, making procedurally defiend trace shapes, copied arrays

[Infraviolet]

Are there any ways short of manually drawing to produce trace shapes in eagle which would be defined by a mathematical equation or other scriptable rule set? I'm interested in trying some coil designs in PCB copper layers for use in inductive sensors.

I'm also looking at situations where I'd want to make multiple copies of the same coil shape, each rotated at diferent angles. In typical CAD softare for physical object design this would be simple,but I don't think eagle has such tools for copying whilst rotating about a point?

Is there hope for egenerating a dxf and importing that, and having eagle then thicken the zero width lines of the dxf file to become the centre-lines of traces of a chosen width.
Thanks

[jpanhalt]

There may be using the command language.  Jorge Garcia could answer that, if he is still at Autodesk.

I have never tried to do that, but if I were to try, I would do the design with a program that would draw what I wanted and import it as a dxf file into the proper layer.  Then adjust width, if necessary.

[Infraviolet]

Dxf import seems possible and worked seemingly quite well for a test file. Looks like this is my best option, as long as I manually "enforce" design rules for separation of traces before exporting dxfs from another CAD program then it should work, with luck.

[jpanhalt]

If you want a precise location, that can be done 2 ways with older Eagle versions (i.e., 7.x and before).  I am not sure about the Autodesk versions, but suspect they are the same.

1) Use properties ("i") and grid to adjust xy.  Eagle generally considers an object's center as its location or add a mark for alignment.  Then move the object close, but not too close to where you want it.  Check its position x and y.  Set grid to x-error, move to make zero and do the same for y-error.  You want to keep that grid somewhat coarse, like 0.1" or so.  Otherwise, it will be difficult to get just one increment.

2) You can also use the command line, e.g., to move the object center to origin, the command is: move (c>0 0) (0.xxxx 0.yyyyy) where 0.xxxx and 0.yyyy are the signed offset you need.  You get the offset needed same way as in #1.

Getting a trace accurately aligned was probably more important in earlier versions where "overlap but not connected" was a frequent error.  Newer versions that snap a trace to a connection are probably not that sensitive.