Eagle Premium no longer included with Fusion for hobbyists?

[TomS_]

Hi all,

Was a bit shocked when I went to renew my Eagle Premium subscription that used to come with Fusion, only to find that it now only includes the Free tier.

That kind of screws me over, since my current project is within the 80cm board area, but using 4 layers. I cant fix one of the inner layers for a board revision since it is outside of the 2 layer scope included in the free tier.

Have I missed something, or is this the end of Eagle for slightly more ambitious hobbyists? My board requirements almost universally blow the free tier specs because I tend to design more complex projects.

I hate to say it, but Ive now begun looking into KiCad as a replacement, and will have to re-do my current project in that to make further modifications. I really like Eagle, but as someone who only does PCB design for fun and enjoyment and does no 3D design I cant really justify the price of a higher tier.

Thanks

[ataradov]

They explicitly stated that they want to kill Eagle and re-implement the whole thing from scratch using fusion graphic engine. So, Eagle is not long for this world anyway. It will be dropped any time now.

[PlainName]

You gotta wonder why they bought it if they're intending to scrap it.

[langwadt]

You gotta wonder why they bought it if they're intending to scrap it.

maybe they didn't look too closely at the code before they bought it? or maybe they didn't really care they just wanted the user base

[ataradov]

Yes, I presume the user base. And may be idiot managers.  From a technical point of view, I could have told that it would not be easy to integrate even without looking at either code base. But mangers typically don't care about stuff like this - "just make it work".

[Monkeh]

That kind of screws me over

Welcome to the business model of Autodesk.

[james_s]

I doubt they will get much of the user base either, all 10 of the users that haven't already jumped ship soon will.

[KE5FX]

You gotta wonder why they bought it if they're intending to scrap it.

[jpanhalt]

Buying a potential competitor and shutting them down is not that uncommon: https://insights.som.yale.edu/insights/do-companies-buy-competitors-in-order-to-shut-them-down

There are all sort of urban legends related to that.  One story I heard while young involved the invention of power brakes for cars, but I was unable to verify that.  In any event, at least the practice is known to exist.

[rob77]

this is exactly why i did not switch from my perpetual "make edition" eagle license i'm stuck with legacy 7.7 but at least i have it forever in the same form and with same limitations (160x100 @ 6 layers)

[ataradov]

It is also not forever. It will start to rot as the OS versions upgrade. You can stick to your current OS for a long time, but eventually you will have to upgrade.

And already with Linux versions of the old Eagle you have to substitute some system libraries  with the older version.

[rob77]

It is also not forever. It will start to rot as the OS versions upgrade. You can stick to your current OS for a long time, but eventually you will have to upgrade.

And already with Linux versions of the old Eagle you have to substitute some system libraries  with the older version.

not really, running eagle 7.7 on elementary linux 6.1 (ubuntu LTS based distro) without any issues and as far as i recall correctly, i didn't had to downgrade or substitute anything.

[ataradov]

On the latest Ubuntu Mate I had to substitute libcrypto.so.1.0.0  and libssl.so.1.0.0 through LD_LIBRARY_PATH. Otherwise I get "./eagle: error while loading shared libraries: libssl.so.1.0.0". LibSsl v1 was removed from the repos. You might have it installed from all the updates, but on a clean system it does not run.

[boB]

We still use Eagle but opted to NOT go with Autodesk's leasing model.

Eagle 6.50 worked very well and Cadsoft improved its operation quite a bit over the years plus we already have over 12 legal seats.

It's still working great for us !

I do sometimes miss PADS though.  I know there are newer programs out there that are better.  One day, I will be happy with the KiCAD user interface and possibly change to that.  Price is an object.

boB 🌜

[rsjsouza]

Buying a potential competitor and shutting them down is not that uncommon: https://insights.som.yale.edu/insights/do-companies-buy-competitors-in-order-to-shut-them-down

There are all sort of urban legends related to that.  One story I heard while young involved the invention of power brakes for cars, but I was unable to verify that.  In any event, at least the practice is known to exist.

In PC computing, one of the old stsnces was the acquisition of Central Point Software (then owner of the PCTools suite) by Norton Software (owner of the Norton Utilities, which became Symantec). The acquisition was clearly predatory aa both companies had almost the same software suite.

[rob77]

On the latest Ubuntu Mate I had to substitute libcrypto.so.1.0.0  and libssl.so.1.0.0 through LD_LIBRARY_PATH. Otherwise I get "./eagle: error while loading shared libraries: libssl.so.1.0.0". LibSsl v1 was removed from the repos. You might have it installed from all the updates, but on a clean system it does not run.

yes you're right. i had to install libssl1.0 package from external source (provides both libssl and libcrypto) , but nothing replaced or downgraded in terms of OS libraries.  just installed one extra package which doesn't harm anything, doesn't block updates, just sits there for eagle.

[Karel]

On the latest Ubuntu Mate I had to substitute libcrypto.so.1.0.0  and libssl.so.1.0.0 through LD_LIBRARY_PATH. Otherwise I get "./eagle: error while loading shared libraries: libssl.so.1.0.0". LibSsl v1 was removed from the repos. You might have it installed from all the updates, but on a clean system it does not run.

Same here on openSuse Leap 15.x.

> ./eagle-lin64-7.7.0.run
Ensure the following libraries are available:
        libssl.so.1.0.0 => not found
        libcrypto.so.1.0.0 => not found


Copy libssl.so.1.0.0 and libcrypto.so.1.0.0 from an older distro (opensuse Leap 42.3) and copy them to your new distro.
Use the following command to start Eagle:

LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/path/to/libs ./eagle

[jpanhalt]

In PC computing, one of the old stsnces was the acquisition of Central Point Software (then owner of the PCTools suite) by Norton Software (owner of the Norton Utilities, which became Symantec). The acquisition was clearly predatory aa both companies had almost the same software suite.

I was thinking specifically about the purchases by ScanSoft of OCR software including Pagis Pro (Xerox), Paperport, and Omnipage.  We had used Pagis Pro for a complicated estate problem.  It's indexing seemed a bit unusual initially (sorta like learning cut and paste in early Eagle), but once  you got used to it, it was great.  After purchase, it disappeared.  I tried Paperport and Omnipage and liked neither one.  That history is from the 1998-2002 era and is just memory. There have been other acquisitions, mergers, and sales since.

[SpacedCowboy]

Have just moved to Altium because of Autodesk’s policy regarding Fusion 360 and Eagle. Bad timing on my part, I had just signed up for a 3-year subscription when they decided “no more Eagle for you”.

Altium is of course a lot more expensive, but having used Eagle for ~20 years, I expect to get a similar lifetime from Altium and I bought a permanent license. Altium is already so far beyond Eagle that I may not even need to upgrade it at all during that expected lifetime You do get a lot more capability for that extra cost.

I haven’t got the fluency with Altium that I had with Eagle, and (maybe as a result) sometimes it does seem like they make things more difficult (and “process”-y) than they need to be, but thus far the learning curve hasn’t been too steep. It helps that there’s a lot of online help around, and Google is my friend

[PlainName]

it does seem like they make things more difficult

Part of it is mindset that you will gradually absorb. A biggy (for me) is that for some operations you do the normal multi-select and then choose what you want to do with the selected items. But for some other operations, you choose what you want to do and then select what you're going to do it to. It's really annoying when you go through the motions for the wrong sort, but ultimately you just kind of realise it's nothing personal and go with the flow (on the second attempt). I think there is some subtle logic to it because now I find I usually pick the right way to go even for something I've not used before, but that might also be pure luck

[tszaboo]

They explicitly stated that they want to kill Eagle

Oh no! Anyway...

[langwadt]

Have just moved to Altium because of Autodesk’s policy regarding Fusion 360 and Eagle. Bad timing on my part, I had just signed up for a 3-year subscription when they decided “no more Eagle for you”.

"subscription" afaict the paid subscription for F360 still includes a full eagle

[SpacedCowboy]

Have just moved to Altium because of Autodesk’s policy regarding Fusion 360 and Eagle. Bad timing on my part, I had just signed up for a 3-year subscription when they decided “no more Eagle for you”.

"subscription" afaict the paid subscription for F360 still includes a full eagle

Right, currently you can get a 2.5-year old program that they've not even bothered to release bug fixes for, let alone new features.

Instead they want you to switch to Fusion360 where they've shoe-horned an electronics package into a 3D design application that runs in the cloud. Not just "no", but "hell, no".

As an example: on the Mac they basically broke drawing stuff on the screen in the last public release, reducing it to a crawl - dragging stuff around was painful. No fix was forthcoming in over a year of asking, not just by me. It took Apple releasing an entire new architectural platform and designing new processors to make the app work acceptably again.

Any company that treats paying customers with such brazen utter contempt doesn't deserve the aforementioned customers. I will never purchase/rent anything from Autodesk again.

[Karel]

Look at there forum:

https://forums.autodesk.com/t5/eagle-forum/bd-p/3500

I'm amazed that there are still people using autodesk eagle (>= V8) 

I know, switching to another EDA is painful, but still...

[Unixon]

They explicitly stated that they want to kill Eagle and re-implement the whole thing from scratch using fusion graphic engine. So, Eagle is not long for this world anyway. It will be dropped any time now.

Is there a way to buy out old Eagle sources (latest CadSoft version, something around v7-v8) from Autodesk?

[ataradov]

Is there a way to buy out old Eagle sources (latest CadSoft version, something around v7-v8) from Autodesk?

I would assume not in  a reasonable way. For the amount of money you would have to pay, it is much cheaper to just write it from scratch.

[jpanhalt]

Search on it!  First hit from Google: http://eagle.autodesk.com/eagle/software-versions/7

Of course, that is contaminated with Autodesk, but I am sure there are other sites.

Edit:  I have versions 7.2 to 7.7 on my desktop.  I still use 7.2 almost all of the time.  Labeling tracts (as in later versions) is redundant.  I set up hotkeys for the important ones, like VDD's and GND.

[ataradov]

I assumed by "sources" was mean the actual source code.

You can find downloads for all versions, but it is no longer possible to buy a Pro license. So, you are stuck with the lite eval version.

[Unixon]

I assumed by "sources" was mean the actual source code.

Yes, this is exactly what I meant -- actual source code. This would save a lot of research time.
Not that these sources are exactly necessary, but it would be nice to see how some of things were implemented like DRC or CAM.

[KE5FX]

I assumed by "sources" was mean the actual source code.

Yes, this is exactly what I meant -- actual source code. This would save a lot of research time.
Not that these sources are exactly necessary, but it would be nice to see how some of things were implemented like DRC or CAM.

One of the (few) valid points Matt Berggren makes on the Autodesk forum threads is that the computational geometry library is the key to the whole ball game, and Autodesk is uniquely experienced in that area.  For its part, EAGLE's geometry library is suited to its original purpose, which is implementing a 2D PCB CAD program that does what EAGLE does.  If you had access to that foundation, or an equivalent one, things like DRC and CAM would be fairly straightforward to implement. 

The potential was always there to build a better-EAGLE-than-EAGLE on top of Autodesk's superior 2D/3D geometry toolset, but nothing has emerged except a lot of hot air and promises.  There was a lot of talk about how subscription revenue was needed for continued improvement and development, but we've seen how that worked out.  All of the R&D effort was directed toward Autodesk's goals, and not their customers'. 

[Unixon]

If you had access to that foundation, or an equivalent one, things like DRC and CAM would be fairly straightforward to implement. 

Well, not that straightforward but... Computational geometry is science, a well defined set of methods for doing particular things, if you know that you need to solve a particular geometry problem you will. Methods could be complex, but they are strictly formal, so at the end of the day this is just a huge pile of math and algorithms that has to be worked out. However, application of these methods and efficient application is more of an art because one problem could be solved multiple ways and it is not immediately evident that one is better than another and what's even worse -- the very process of coming up with a list of things to formalize and solve is not formal on itself, one can always skip and forget something important.

[james_s]

The potential was always there to build a better-EAGLE-than-EAGLE on top of Autodesk's superior 2D/3D geometry toolset, but nothing has emerged except a lot of hot air and promises.  There was a lot of talk about how subscription revenue was needed for continued improvement and development, but we've seen how that worked out.  All of the R&D effort was directed toward Autodesk's goals, and not their customers'.

I would be curious to know how many subscribers there actually are/were. I suspect the numbers were dramatically lower than predicted since virtually the entire hobbyist market evaporated after Autodesk lied and then took it subscription anyway.

[jpanhalt]

@james_s

I agree.

Been with Eagle since 3.x.  Just a hobbyist, but I liked it so much I bought a low level license and updated as needed.  Still use it.  But any subscription while affordable is not in my future.  Some years, I may design half a dozen PCB's; others none.  FWIW, I still use bought versions of all my CAD software, Photoshop, and office software.  Had to switch from WordPerfect and Quattro Pro (which were perfect for my needs) to Word Office several years years.  I grimace every time I have to use them.  Jorge at Eagle was/is a real prince.  Always helpful.  I hope he is able to stay on at Autodesk.

[langwadt]

The potential was always there to build a better-EAGLE-than-EAGLE on top of Autodesk's superior 2D/3D geometry toolset, but nothing has emerged except a lot of hot air and promises.  There was a lot of talk about how subscription revenue was needed for continued improvement and development, but we've seen how that worked out.  All of the R&D effort was directed toward Autodesk's goals, and not their customers'.

I would be curious to know how many subscribers there actually are/were. I suspect the numbers were dramatically lower than predicted since virtually the entire hobbyist market evaporated after Autodesk lied and then took it subscription anyway.

I'd think the Kicad maturing and becoming a more common format for opensource projects also did it's bit

[Keith Ward]

This sort of thing happens all the time with big corporations.  If they can't be bothered to compete with competitors, buy them and resume their profits, or absorb them and make the product go away.  It's rarely a good thing but that's how they roll in the big money league.

[james_s]

I'd think the Kicad maturing and becoming a more common format for opensource projects also did it's bit

I think KiCad did a fair mount of maturing in response to Eagle becoming non-viable for a lot of people.

[TomS_]

I thought it might be worth giving a little update. Ive been playing with KiCad (6.0.5) on and off over the past month or so, and long story short, it hasnt been a painless experience, but not as painful as I might have thought it would be to switch to another PCB CAD package. There have been some frustrating times, and a bug that Ive had to work with in the symbol editor (hopefully that is fixed in 6.0.6), but generally I would say the experience is positive.

I think Ive pretty much mastered making my own footprints and symbols, and have managed to put together one simple board and sent it off for manufacturing - it came back exactly as I would have expected, so thats a good sign that I might have figured things out.

I have a more complex project in the works, but theres still a lot of work to do on that one before I go ordering PCBs including building a prototype first. And I have a second project that I am currently prototyping/breadboarding that I'll get to some time in the next couple of months.

In summary, while I think EAGLE does some things better (or in a way that I prefer), there are also aspects of KiCad that I like, and I think it would be fair to say that I wont be looking back. If youre stuck on what to do post EAGLE, my advice is jump into KiCad sooner rather than later.

[jpanhalt]

@TomS_

Since you have experience with Eagle, you may have found that plated through slots are not easily supported in the Gerbers  made by the Eagle CAM.  Maybe that was fixed in versions 8.0 and higher.

Have you tried plated through slots in KiCad?  Are they a regular function?

[TomS_]

@TomS_

Since you have experience with Eagle, you may have found that plated through slots are not easily supported in the Gerbers  made by the Eagle CAM.  Maybe that was fixed in versions 8.0 and higher.

Have you tried plated through slots in KiCad?  Are they a regular function?

This is not something Ive had to work with to date so I dont think I can be much help with it.

But I just had a quick look in KiCad and it seems you can make oval shaped pads, so this should make it quite trivial to do plated slots I would imagine.

[ebastler]

you may have found that plated through slots are not easily supported in the Gerbers  made by the Eagle CAM.  Maybe that was fixed in versions 8.0 and higher.

I have certainy used plated slots with Eagle (version 7.x and earlier). The PCB houses I have used will interpret slots which are surrounded by copper, e.g. are located within pads, as plated slots. How else would slots be designated as "plated" in the Gerbers?

[jpanhalt]

Admittedly, I don't quite understand the issue with early Eagle.  Making oval pads is easy and has been available for a long time (even teardrop pads are possible). It's the plated slot per se.  I had communications with JLCPCB about it, and its requirement for a particular Gerber layer wasn't met.  Oshpark developed its own/modified CAM processor to create them, and as usual, the boards from Oshpark were perfect.  It's just an additional hoop to go through. 

Thanks for the prompt reply.

EDIT: @ebastler
Yes, I have been told that here.  So, I submitted Gerbers made that way to JLCPCB and never heard back from it.  Rather than take a chance, I went the sure route to Oshpark.

[ebastler]

Strange; I have definitely had JLCPCB manufacture several of these Eagle-generated boards. The slots, whether plated or not, were all defined in the milling/outline layer, I believe. I can check my archived files if that's of interest!

[jpanhalt]

Yes, I would be interested in those details. 

I tried a lot of things to view the Eagle gerbers and nothing (except the ones made by Oshpark) convinced me the slots would be plated.  The most important ones were signal tabs from an Omega TC socket, but mounting tabs were also wanted.

[ebastler]

I have attached two screenshots from a Gerber viewer. The GML milling layer includes all slots and large circular holes -- some plated, some non-plated. The second screenshot shows it overlaid with the top copper layer (GTL).

The slots which are surrounded by copper (the longish ones near the right board edge, as well as the near-circular ones to the left) were produced as plated slots. The large round holes were produced non-plated, since they are surrounded by a copper-free area.

No idea why the slots to the right are shown as fully milled-out, while the others are defined by contours only. There was no particular reason for that, as I recall, and it does not make a difference in what JLCPCB manufafctured.

[jpanhalt]

That is interesting.  Thank you for finding and posting those screenshots.  I was using EasyLogix.de as my Gerber viewer. 

I will save your post and use it as a guide with my next version of that board.

John

Edit:  Just FYI.  Here's a link to the Oshpark comments about slots.  It has been considerably updated since is did that board that needed slots.
https://docs.oshpark.com/design-tools/eagle/cutouts-and-slots/

[Northy]

They explicitly stated that they want to kill Eagle and re-implement the whole thing from scratch using fusion graphic engine. So, Eagle is not long for this world anyway. It will be dropped any time now.

Hi Alex,

When and where did they state this please?

Thanks,

G

[ataradov]

There was some blog post that described a graphical engine rewrite, which would only happen in Fusion and will not be backported to Eagle.

It was linked here, but I can't find the thread or a link right now. The only thing I could find is this forum post that talks about the engine rewrite https://forums.autodesk.com/t5/eagle-forum/future-of-eagle-and-fusion/td-p/10124680 . The blog post must be from around the same time.

[jpanhalt]

Here you go (11.27.21):

https://forums.autodesk.com/t5/eagle-forum/is-eagle-retired/m-p/10785448#M36081

Our decision to focus on the Fusion capabilities right now are not based on the move to cloud-storage nor is “cloud” the reason feature development has been slowed or stopped on EAGLE in recent months while our efforts focused on Fusion Electronics.

[Northy]

There was some blog post that described a graphical engine rewrite, which would only happen in Fusion and will not be backported to Eagle.

It was linked here, but I can't find the thread or a link right now. The only thing I could find is this forum post that talks about the engine rewrite https://forums.autodesk.com/t5/eagle-forum/future-of-eagle-and-fusion/td-p/10124680 . The blog post must be from around the same time.

Here you go (11.27.21):

https://forums.autodesk.com/t5/eagle-forum/is-eagle-retired/m-p/10785448#M36081

Our decision to focus on the Fusion capabilities right now are not based on the move to cloud-storage nor is “cloud” the reason feature development has been slowed or stopped on EAGLE in recent months while our efforts focused on Fusion Electronics.

Thank you both