I used Eagle for years, but can't say I really warmed to it. I recently changed to DipTrace. Their pricing model seems to work better for me (large but sparse boards in Eagle require $$$ license) as it's based on pin count, not board size.
It's really hard to quantify usability, but I no longer find myself dreading drafting a symbol from scratch and things work more like how I would expect them to work. I watched their video demo, found that it made a lot of sense to me, tried it, and was hooked. http://www.diptrace.com/ Scott On Feb 23, 2012, at 6:38 PM, John Miles wrote: >> I'll add another vote for Eagle. It is a German program written in >> Unix, and ported to Windows. Therefore, you select the action >> first then click on the object of the action. It takes some getting >> used to. There has been a pattern of PC layout companies getting >> cobbled up leaving you with an orphan program, or an upgrade >> to some very expensive program. Orcad and Protel go gobbled up. >> Eagle did too, but by a distributor, Newark. They just came out >> with a new improved version. You can finally draw arbitrary SMT >> footprints. I think that was the major limitation of the old >> version. You can of course draw your own symbols any way you like. >> I have been using Eagle for 5 years now and never looked back. >> One other drawback of Eagle is that it is difficult to move a design >> between computers, and there are issues with the way preferences >> are stored. If you use a part from a library in a design, you are >> forever locked into that library. Many other CAD systems have these >> issues. Mentor used to be terrible about having absolute path names, etc. > > It's worth noting as well that Eagle has just moved to a more "open" > XML-based format for their data files. Assuming they've done a good job (I > have no experience with the new version yet), I wouldn't be surprised to see > it become the lingua franca of EDA, with a lot of third-party support in the > future. Eagle is quirky but it's also inexpensive, reliable, and highly > functional, making it accessible to a lot of users at a lot of different > levels. Their new public file formats could be a major selling point. > > I use Sunstone for PCBs myself, but I don't use PCB 123 because I don't want > the board house to 'own' my data. In most serious projects you spend a lot > of time not only drawing schematics and routing traces, but also building > part definitions and writing various scripts. This all adds up to a > long-term commitment to whatever tool you select. In most cases you should > use Eagle or another program that can generate standard RS-274X Gerbers, and > you should always double-check those Gerbers in a third-party viewer before > hitting the big green button. The free GEDA Gerber viewer (gerbv) is pretty > good; there are plenty of others. > > All that being said, Eagle V6 is brand new, and historically it's been > painful to use brand new major versions of Eagle. Everything went smoothly > on a recent project with the last version of Eagle V5, but if you look back > at CadSoft's support forum posts dating from the initial V5 release era, > there were a lot of unhappy campers. The downside of the new XML file > formats is that migrating back to V5 will be difficult or impossible, so you > should take some time to be sure that V6 is really ready for your > application before going with it. I can't overemphasize how important it is > to read their support forums to learn what to expect with any new Eagle > version, and what to watch out for. > > -- john > > > > _______________________________________________ > time-nuts mailing list -- [email protected] > To unsubscribe, go to https://www.febo.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/time-nuts > and follow the instructions there. _______________________________________________ time-nuts mailing list -- [email protected] To unsubscribe, go to https://www.febo.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/time-nuts and follow the instructions there.
