Comparing ".brd" files

Eagle Professional on Windows isn't a limitation to doing what has been

suggested.

You could use Windiff which will show you the changes in the XML board file

but the down side is it's very low level and not in any graphical format

which works fine but people some may not like viewing changes like this.

You can install a Python interpreter for windows and then follow the

instructions in Eagle Automation and hopefully get that working (I haven't

tried but it should be possible). It'll be more work but if it does work

then you'll have something that will give a graphical representation of

where things have changed.

Do you put your .brd file into a version control system like Git? If so

then you could look at the differences in there too at a basic textual

level (as per diff as it will do this within the VCS) and the bonus with

git is that if you were to get eagle automation working you could then see

visible differences between different board versions stored in git.

Other than that I don't have any other suggestions I'm afraid. You might

want to think about putting it as a suggestion for a future version of

Eagle in the eagle.suggest forum.

Best Regards,

Rachael

--

Web access to CadSoft support forums at www.eaglecentral.ca.  Where the CadSoft EAGLE community meets.

Eagle Professional on Windows isn't a limitation to doing what has been

suggested.

You could use Windiff which will show you the changes in the XML board file

but the down side is it's very low level and not in any graphical format

which works fine but people some may not like viewing changes like this.

You can install a Python interpreter for windows and then follow the

instructions in Eagle Automation and hopefully get that working (I haven't

tried but it should be possible). It'll be more work but if it does work

then you'll have something that will give a graphical representation of

where things have changed.

Do you put your .brd file into a version control system like Git? If so

then you could look at the differences in there too at a basic textual

level (as per diff as it will do this within the VCS) and the bonus with

git is that if you were to get eagle automation working you could then see

visible differences between different board versions stored in git.

Other than that I don't have any other suggestions I'm afraid. You might

want to think about putting it as a suggestion for a future version of

Eagle in the eagle.suggest forum.

Best Regards,

Rachael

--

Web access to CadSoft support forums at www.eaglecentral.ca.  Where the CadSoft EAGLE community meets.

I did not realize that the ".brd" file format is XML.

Of course I can find many ways to compare text files. The problem with that is that undone edits still show up as differences: if I rip up a trace, then rout that trace again and save under a different name, I will still have the same exact board but two different files. It would be much better to be able to view the differences.

So I took it to the next level and decided to compare the actual Gerber files generated from two .brd files.

Gerbv (http://gerbv.gpleda.org/) uses different color for each imported layer, so I was able to immediately see the difference between two ".cmp" files (or ".sol", etc). I guess this is the simplest way to compare boards, although somewhat slow.