Out of the Box Gripes

I just thought of another one, this may be fixed in V5 but in V4 the

save date/time of the drawing info box does not  update from the text

"Not saved !!!" when you save the drawing, it must be refreshed

manually. quite misleading.

good summary Travis, between you and James you got most of my gripes.

That nonstandard labeling of tools is a biggie. the manual isn't really

en-US usage either, but i think it can be understood by most.

btw, I do use COPY! which should be called DUPLICATE or CLONE, all the

time! Because it takes so long to add components, I make a palette of

common ones and use COPY (sic) to add them into the schematic.

the EAGLE "backwards" point and click interface wouldn't be backwards if

it were clear that the tool palettes are not buttons that execute

commands but rather tools that ( in normal windows ui ) attach to the

cursor and are applied to objects. of course, some of them really are

command buttons... oh well, if you pick up a brush tool in paint, the

cursor becomes a paintbrush.

James Morrison Inscribed thus:

The whole point of this is that the more intuitive and documented

EAGLE is to use, the easier it will be for new users to choose EAGLE

as their CAD tool of choice.  That means more people will (eventually)

upgrade to a paid license and inject money into the company.  In turn,

in a perfect world, that means more development is done and more

features are added to EAGLE, it continues to get better, and we all

benefit.

 

And the more things that work ouf of the box the less questions we get

here about the very basic stuff.  New users are less frustrated and

the SNR of the group goes up even higher.

 

Cheers,

 

James.

This should be obvious !

But it needs restating every now and then !

As we get more familiar and comfortable with Eagle we tend to forget the

teething pains we endured to get where we are now.

Everybody is different and needs some hand holding at some point along

the path.

--

Best Regards:

                     Baron.

johannes kotz wrote on Sun, 03 January 2010 11:31

to James Morrison: Since years, I'm using my own eagle.scr. So, why

don't you make your personal Eagle GUI like me. I really like this way to

personalize Eagle.

Sure, that's fine.  And I do the same.

But the whole point of this thread is that when you first install EAGLE you

don't know how to do that.  And there are some functions that I would think

(as a new user) are so integral to design that the tool should support them

out of the box in a very obvious, documented, and supported way.

Consider this scenario:  You are a small startup company.  You have a

limited budget and a real product you need to get to market as soon as

possible in order to start realising income and make the business viable.

For a CAD tool a team leader does his research and comes to two options:

EAGLE and Tool A.  He installs EAGLE freeware to evaluate and try to design

a small board.  This person is looking at how easy it is for his team to

get up and running with a new tool.  For every function that he has to (if

he even could) write or research his own ULP that is adding to the learning

curve and initial cost.

Now he loads Tool A and gets an eval license.  Sure it only runs on Windows

and sure it's more money out of the box.  But it does include all the

things he was looking for in a very integrated way that is documented,

integrated, and supported.  If he has an issue he can call the company

support line up and get answers.  And sure there is a maintenance cost but

he doesn't care about that now.  If they get to market they'll have cash to

spend, if not then they won't pay.

Now you tell me which way he is going to go.  If it takes a week to go

through EAGLE and set it up so that the rest of his team can use it then at

$100/hour (not unreasonable) that's $4000.  The difference in cost between

EAGLE and Tool A is less than $4000.  And he's not confident he can even

make EAGLE do what he wants (because he's new remember!).

To me that's a no-brainer.  You choose Tool A.

The whole point of this is that the more intuitive and documented EAGLE is

to use, the easier it will be for new users to choose EAGLE as their CAD

tool of choice.  That means more people will (eventually) upgrade to a paid

license and inject money into the company.  In turn, in a perfect world,

that means more development is done and more features are added to EAGLE,

it continues to get better, and we all benefit.

And the more things that work ouf of the box the less questions we get here

about the very basic stuff.  New users are less frustrated and the SNR of

the group goes up even higher.

And my apologies to the females in the group.  The above person in the

example just happened to be male.  Could have been female too, it's just

how it came out of my brain as I wrote it.

Cheers,

James.

--

James Morrison  ~~~  Stratford Digital

email:  james@eaglecentral.ca

web: http://www.eaglecentral.ca

Specialising in CadSoft EAGLE

• Online Sales to North America

• Electronic Design Services

• EAGLE Enterprise Toolkit

--

Browser access to CadSoft Support Forums at http://www.eaglecentral.ca

Travis G wrote on Sun, 03 January 2010 14:09

1)The Cut command not doing a cut.

...

5)I didn't understand why I should use a net vs a wire and learned it

wrong... I still use wire for everything...

Yeah, don't you just love it!?  CUT does a copy, and copy never does

anything you actually want.  Lines are drawn with WIRE unless they

represent wires, then they are drawn with NET.  Duh.  Eagle gets a lot of

things right, but simple stuff like bad naming detracts from the whole

thing.

By the way, using WIRE for schematic wires is very bad.  You really want to

use NET, else Eagle may not understand the connectivity.

--

Browser access to CadSoft Support Forums at http://www.eaglecentral.ca

When I first tried Eagle, I didn't understand certain things, but for

the most part, it was much easier to learn that OrCAD. I was a PCB

layout newbie at that point, but now I have enough experience that I

have no problems doing dense 2-layer boards or boards with high currents

or dealing with PCB thermals for SMT power parts (linear v-regs, FETs,

etc). I haven't learned matched impedance traces yet...

The biggest problems I had when I started were:

1)The Cut command not doing a cut.

2)I didn't know that I should create my own library and copy parts from

eagle's lib to mine so that upgrades of eagle wouldn't affect my

modifications.

3)I didn't understand how to search parts / packages in the library. I

still don't like how the lib has to be "used" before you can search it

and that you can't search the lib from the control panel.

4)I had trouble finding standard components in the lib, like supply and

gnd points, and didn't know about the pageframes at all for a long time.

5)I didn't understand why I should use a net vs a wire and learned it

wrong... I still use wire for everything...

6)I didn't learn what Smash did for a while. It was a case of Didn't

know didn't care, till I learned what it did! LOL

7)Knowing that I shoul use Vector fonts for the PCB wasn't something I

learned for a long time, not until I started doing small PCBs and the

text kept running off the board.

8)Using Polygons for GND and Vcc planes. That would have been nice to

know a lot sooner than I learned about it.

Other than those few minor things, I found it to be an easy program to

learn and began doing working PCB layouts very soon after starting to

use it.

Now I usually fine the getting started things useless... But a tips and

tricks page, those can be useful even for experienced users.

Olin wrote on Sun, 03 January 2010 10:23

James Morrison wrote on Sat, 02 January 2010 21:41

But more than a ULP, it needs to be more integrated into the GUI,

IMHO.

 

Argh, no!  Not anymore at least.  Whatever they do is going to be

incompatible with what I do now.

to Olin: I totally agree, everyone should be able to make 'his own eagle'

to James Morrison: Since years, I'm using my own eagle.scr. So, why don't

you make your personal Eagle GUI like me. I really like this way to

personalize Eagle.

Regards, Johannes Kotz

--

Browser access to CadSoft Support Forums at http://www.eaglecentral.ca

James Morrison wrote on Sat, 02 January 2010 21:41

But more than a ULP, it needs to be more integrated into the GUI, IMHO.

Argh, no!  Not anymore at least.  Whatever they do is going to be

incompatible with what I do now.  I'll be stuck either not using the new

interface and having to explain that to new people, or wasting a lot of

time converting libraries and some existing projects that will be

incrementally modified.

However, they can make attribute management a little easier, keeping in

mind that many people are using the new attributes for BOM information.

Propagating the same attribute for all technologies and packages for a

device is tedious.  I finally wrote a ULP for that, but it could be better

if built in.  Setting attributes on parts in a schematic is currently

broken.  You can't type the attribute name and value, then click on a part

or series of parts to apply them.  On several occasions I've ended up

creating a script with a external editor to do this.

Quote:

Quote:

There should be template CAM files for a few common board

configurations, like 2 and 4 layer.

 

Why not for all configurations?

Because that would make it more confusing and these examples would apply

less well to more common boards.  Once someone understands the 4 layer

example, they can easily modify to their particular needs for more

complicated boards.

In general you don't want go too far creating the impression that things

are easier than they really are.  Circuit design, layout, routing, BOM

generation, and getting boards fabbed takes specialized knowledge and

skill.  So does using whatever tools aid in this process.

You want to make Eagle seem accessible, but going too far takes resources

from the real issue of making it better.  It seems the quality of the real

documentation of large software tools is inversely proportional to the size

of the getting started guide, which is of little use once you've gotten

started.  Remember when you could read the documentation with MS Word like

a manual to see what it can do and get some intuition on how it works?  Now

all you can do is ask specific question without learning what else is

possible or how the system thinks inside, all the while with that stupid

paper clip in your face that says "we think you're so dumb that we can give

you a silly animated icon instead of real documentation".

Eagle isn't really that hard to learn if you just RTFM, like most packages.

Anyone that can't handle that and wants instant gratification instead has

no business desinging circuits, or doing any other engineering for that

matter.

--

Browser access to CadSoft Support Forums at http://www.eaglecentral.ca

This page elevated me from a rank newbie to a mere beginner:

http://claymore.engineer.gvsu.edu/~steriana/Videos/

I got more here in 30 minutes than hours spent in trying to follow the

documentation. Googling for tuts got me there.

Martin

"James Morrison" <james@eaglecentral.ca> wrote in message

news:hhp0e9$tjc$1@cheetah.cadsoft.de...

James Morrison wrote on Thu, 31 December 2009 16:59

Hello everyone,

 

So what is on your list of things that EAGLE could configure better out

of the box.  I'm not talking about any new functionality.  I'm thinking

about things that EAGLE will do, but is just not configured out of the

box.  Or things that everyone does the first time they install EAGLE.

 

Just to follow up and encourage new users to comment, as this is really

addressed to them.  For us who've been using the tool for ages it's

difficult to look at things from a different perspective.  What did you

think of EAGLE the first time you tried it?  What would have made it

easier?  What would have made a better impression?

 

Cheers,

 

James.

--

James Morrison  ~~~  Stratford Digital

 

email:  james@eaglecentral.ca

web: http://www.eaglecentral.ca

 

Specialising in CadSoft EAGLE

• Online Sales to North America

• Electronic Design Services

• EAGLE Enterprise Toolkit

--

Browser access to CadSoft Support Forums at http://www.eaglecentral.ca

James Morrison wrote on Thu, 31 December 2009 16:59

Hello everyone,

 

So what is on your list of things that EAGLE could configure better out

of the box.  I'm not talking about any new functionality.  I'm thinking

about things that EAGLE will do, but is just not configured out of the

box.  Or things that everyone does the first time they install EAGLE.

Just to follow up and encourage new users to comment, as this is really

addressed to them.  For us who've been using the tool for ages it's

difficult to look at things from a different perspective.  What did you

think of EAGLE the first time you tried it?  What would have made it

easier?  What would have made a better impression?

Cheers,

James.

--

James Morrison  ~~~  Stratford Digital

email:  james@eaglecentral.ca

web: http://www.eaglecentral.ca

Specialising in CadSoft EAGLE

• Online Sales to North America

• Electronic Design Services

• EAGLE Enterprise Toolkit

--

Browser access to CadSoft Support Forums at http://www.eaglecentral.ca