PCB Layout without Schematic?

Am 20.09.2013 14:58, schrieb Mathew Jenkinson:

Is it a case of all boards start with a schmatic? or is there a way to

skip the schmatic and draw the pins stright to a pcb board?

IN PRINCIPLE, you can just create a board WITHOUT schematic (menu File -

New - Board) and add your elements there, no problem.

BUT if your designs get more complex, and debugging a board without a

schematic is REALLY awful, you should consider creating a decent

schematic for ALL your projects. Plus nobody will understand your

circuit without schematics documentation, anyway, and documentation is

more or less an absolute MUST everywhere. Even for very small circuits

with only ten components or so, we create a schematic: It makes the

function clear for everybody, and finding problems is SO much easier...

Andreas Weidner

On 20/09/13 16:29, Andreas Weidner wrote:

Even for very small circuits with only ten components or so, we create a

schematic:

Ten? TEN? I create a schematic if I have THREE components!

Yes you can just draw what you think, off the top of your head at

random, the board ought to look like. But if you do then you are doing

art, not PCB design.

The PCB is an implementation of a circuit, not the essence of the

circuit. If you don't have a schematic you don't know what the essence

of the circuit is. Besides, the extra time needed to draw a schematic of

five screw terminal blocks connected together, compared to placing the

same blocks on a PCB unaided, is less than a minute.

Its very usefull, when you have a bunch of portel, orcad and altium files. for some reason, .PCB files are imported perfectly, while schematics are messed up.  it would be nice if we could be able to recreate those schematics.

Second this!

Is there any way to generate a schematic from a board in Eagle?

It is a pretty manual process - the tool tells you what is different between schematic and PCB and you have to make appropriate changes to the schematic to make them match up. It sort of tells you what to do, but you have to manually do it....Once the tool is happy that the schematic matches the PCB, forward and backward annotation start to work seamlessly.

Thanks!

Went through that manual process... All the ERC checks O_O but now it works.

Well done