How to change point of view on PCB layout?

Question

Hi all,
I m new at this forum. Generally i can find what i m looking for it by googling it. But this time i couldnt.

On the PCB layout i m staring at the top side of my circuit. I can see the bottom side but it s all mirrored ( if i type anything on my pcb letters re mirrored. Look at my screenshot for that) . I just want to change my point of view and see from the bottom, so i can see the straight blue copper and mirrored red copper. It s easy to change that thing in Proreus.
I hope someone could help me with my basic problem.

Have a good day.

rachaelp · Accepted Answer

Hello,

Unfortunately you cannot change the view to look from the bottom of the board in EAGLE's board editor. It's a feature that has been requested before but isn't available yet, probably because it doesn't really cause any big issues in completing the layout task, what difficulty is not being able to flip the view causing in your workflow? A lot of the very expensive tools don't allow this either so EAGLE isn't alone in lacking this feature.

Best Regards,

Rachael

rachaelp · Answer

Hello, Are you saying you want to flip the board so you can see the traces better on the bottom for routing because the top side traces obscure your view? If that's the case you can turn the top side layers off and see just the bottom side. You can also export from EAGLE into 3D tools if you have the right add on software. CADSoft seem to have partnered up with a 3D CAD company to provide this feature and I am sure there are probably other open source options available too but I haven't explored them. On the Mac there is an app called Copper which is really cheap and amongst many other things does excellent 3D renderings of EAGLE boards directly from the .brd file. Finally, if you want to highlight a net in the board easily then name them to something meaningful in the schematic, eg. UART_TX for the transmit from a UART, then in the layout you can type: show UART_TX <enter> This will highlight the entire UART_TX net. Unfortunately the highlight will disappear as soon as you select any other tool which is really quite annoying. There is an open feature request for a proper highlight feature which I am hoping will be in an upcoming release but who knows as we don't have any visibility of what the team at CADSoft are actively working on sadly. Best Regards, Rachael