Eagle workflow/tips

GroupDIY Audio Forum

Help Support GroupDIY Audio Forum:

This site may earn a commission from merchant affiliate links, including eBay, Amazon, and others.

Gustav

Well-known member
Joined
Jun 4, 2004
Messages
2,271
Location
DK
Mind blown - Eagle PCB

"RUN select-sch-group-to-brd-group"

With this command, you can highlight a section in the schematic, switch to board, and they are selected there as well...

I just saved hours of working sorting components into sections by getting familiar with this command, and thought someone else may benefit.

If you have a tip too, share it here!

Gustav

 
Gustav said:
Mind blown - Eagle PCB

"RUN select-sch-group-to-brd-group"

With this command, you can highlight a section in the schematic, switch to board, and they are selected there as well...

I just saved hours of working sorting components into sections by getting familiar with this command, and thought someone else may benefit.

If you have a tip too, share it here!

Gustav
It's a .ulp, not a native command. Which version of Eagle do you have?
 
abbey road d enfer said:
It's a .ulp, not a native command. Which version of Eagle do you have?

RUN executes the ulp in the command line.

Ver 6.6.6.0!

..and mind still blown. Any other nice tips, post them up!

Gustav
 
Very nice, Thanks Gustav!

It's true,  'Show' (the eyeball icon) won't group.  Still use it all the time to track things down.

Oddly enough, copy, delete, mirror, etc does allow grouping without command line.

Edit: Since we're on the topic, do any of you use the Bus feature?  I find having to connect all the bus stuff a pain, instead preferring to enlarge width of occasional net trace to make 'pseudo-busses' stand out in schema.

Edit2:  Almost added a tip on using alt and ctrl keys for 'alt-grid offsets', but figure it is so basic everyone knows it.  If someone asks about it, happy to re-post.  8)
 
I recently switched computers, and found I was able to use the pro license I bought for the last "pre-subscription" version available on the site, which seems to be 6.6.6.0.

Rename attached file to *.ulp

Gustav
 

Attachments

  • select-sch-group-to-brd-group.txt
    1.8 KB · Views: 6
boji said:
Edit: Since we're on the topic, do any of you use the Bus feature?  I find having to connect all the bus stuff a pain, instead preferring to enlarge width of occasional net trace to make 'pseudo-busses' stand out in schema.

Edit2:  Almost added a tip on using alt and ctrl keys for 'alt-grid offsets', but figure it is so basic everyone knows it.  If someone asks about it, happy to re-post.  8)

Never use the buss feature.

Do tell about hte other tip - sounds like youre talking abotu alligning things to the same grid? If I swtich to mm by mistake, and go back to inches, I am sometimes left with a mess.

Gustav
 
JohnRoberts said:
I'm still using V 4.03...  getting marginal as new PCB fab technology has improved a lot, but I don't do many (any) PCBs these days.

JR
Using an older version may be an issue when trying to do intense hierarchical or variants, panelizing and optimizing yield, but so far I haven't felt any limitation.
I hate the new system put in place by Autodesk. How to get periodically ripped off...
 
Do tell about the other tip
Sure, happy to.

"Alt grid offsets"  Using Eagle 7
First, set your 'Alt' grid to something very fine, or leave default value if you don't need visual perfection.

I prefer Alt to be a fraction of coarse grid set /4 or /8 smaller than your standard size grid (for example, 2.54mm standard using an alt grid of 0.3175mm)

Hold down the alt button on your keyboard, then select a part to move. This lets the part to snap to the alt grid.  Once the part is placed and alt key released, you can move it again and it will snap to coarse grid, but keep the previous alt grid offset (relative to coarse grid). Copies of part will also keep to the offset.  Useful when you need multiple parts to fit perfectly or to center traces or part by 'eye'.

To restore part or trace back into alignment with coarse grid (no alt-grid offset):
With move command enabled, hold down Ctrl button while re-selecting part.
 
abbey road d enfer said:
Using an older version may be an issue when trying to do intense hierarchical or variants, panelizing and optimizing yield, but so far I haven't felt any limitation.
I hate the new system put in place by Autodesk. How to get periodically ripped off...
The modern business model is to generate recurring revenue (rent) rather than selling software outright... 

Everybody it trying to use this model even with exercise bikes.  ::)

JR
 
zamproject said:
Eagle tips? use Kicad  ;D

:-X

Cheers
Zam
I tried Kicad a long time ago. The difficulty of creating devices turned me off. They had worked around by supplying a huge library, unfortunately I use a lot of non-standard parts, so that didn't work for me.
Has it changed?
 
abbey road d enfer said:
I tried Kicad a long time ago. The difficulty of creating devices turned me off. They had worked around by supplying a huge library, unfortunately I use a lot of non-standard parts, so that didn't work for me.
Has it changed?

To me Kicad is very mature now,
About lib, I don't use that much non standard part, but most of the time you can just duplicate and mod an existing one, some times I even don't care if it's a pin compatible device , and I just change the ref name in schemo without creating/duplicating an existing part in the library.

My advice is to try it again... this is free and opensource, for perfect DIYer  :)

Best
Zam
 
abbey road d enfer said:
I tried Kicad a long time ago. The difficulty of creating devices turned me off. They had worked around by supplying a huge library, unfortunately I use a lot of non-standard parts, so that didn't work for me.
Has it changed?
Their footprint-to-symbol-to-instance schema is a bit difficult to understand, but no more or less easier than Eagle's.  I've found that once you have a few packages created, it's actually easiest to make new ones in a text editor since the file are XML and JSON based. :)

The biggest hurdle is not being able to span a schematic easily across sheets:  they heavily push you towards hierarchical schematics.  I railed against this for a few months and then gave in, and I've found it actually makes the schematics more readable and reusable.

You have to invest a man-month of effort and then it's just as usable as Eagle...in fact, with the OpenGL renderer, I've found the schematics and layouts actually much cleaner and easier to read than Eagle's vector format.
 
Despite the many flaws of Eagle, primarily licensing, IMHO, I still prefer it over the other CAD-E software I tried.
I really wanted to like Kicad, but did not, tried a few others, also did not like them.
Yes, the labels on the buttons are quirky, and more so with every new release, the fact that you can only do smaller PCB (I have a license for 100x160) and have to really shell out the cash if you want bigger, the hoops you need to jump through if you want to define your own components etc etc. Still, it is second nature by now, and you can find a ton of components in libraries, so yeah.

As for a tip, I like the "zoom-unrouted" ULP a lot, sometimes I have a tiny airwire I cannot find, this ULP helps with that. Tried the "dxfimport" ULP but did not have a whole lot of luck with it (maybe the thing I wanted to import was a bit too complex, I do not remember).

 
Back
Top