ATTRIBUTES - LIBRARY EDITING

Jonathan Roberts wrote on Tue, 05 July 2011 23:48

I have been using Eagle for a number of years now and the one, most

frustrating and time-consuming issue I have come up against, is the

the fact that ATTRIBUTES do not belong to the DEVICE but instead

belong to the PACKAGE?

 

As a consequence, it seems to be impossible to copy the attributes

from one package to another.

 

The net result, is that if you decide to add a new package to a device

in the library, it becomes necessary to type in all of the attributes,

blow-by-blow, consuming hours and hours.

 

It would be really great if CADSOFT could do something about this

deficiency, so that it would be easy copy and paste attributes

from one DEVICE to another and also to be able to open the library

in a spreadsheet so that it is possible to ensure consistency with

the library in a time-efficient manner.

 

I am most appreciative for the significant amount of hard work which

people have put into developing ULP's for BOM and ATTRIBUTE editing,

however, I have not yet found any which can operate directly on a

library.

 

The way I see it, is that an ATTRIBUTE should belong to a DEVICE,

and should remain attached to it, regardless of whether SYMBOLS and

PACKAGES are added or removed.

I disagree here to some extent.  You also have to take "Technologies" into

account.  An attribute belongs to a device/technology/package combination.

And that is very powerful and shouldn't be undone.

That said, I do agree that the handling of attributes could be handled

better.  A method to copy them from one package to another would be good.

To accomplish this I have a ULP that creates the default attributes that I

require every one of my parts to have for every technology and package in

the device being edited.  It's crude but it works in at least setting up

all the attributes--I still have to go in and fill in the information.

The biggest issue I have with attributes is that you can't rename a

technology.  So if you've put in all the work and added all your attributes

then realise you need to change the name of the technology then you have to

copy each field over by hand.  The ability to rename a technology would

completely bypass that issues.  Alternatively, a method to copy the values

of all attributes from one technology to another would do the same thing.

I'd prefer both options

Quote:

I also think that it would be extremely advantageous if it were to be

possible to have more than one SYMBOL per DEVICE, because components

are

often available in different PACKAGE configurations, which sometimes

have differing numbers of pins.

That has already been suggested many times.  Hopefully EAGLE 6 can address

that.

Cheers,

James.

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