Can't use layers

Try: set used_layers all, enter. See also the online help.

r

Ing. J.M. Rafetseder wrote:

Try: set used_layers all, enter. See also the online help.

 

No effect.

I solved this by create a new board and then using the group-cut-paste

trick to move everything over from the original board. I then closed

everything and renamed the original board hide.brd and gave the new

board the original name. The layers are all now available and

consistency seems ok.

Would be nice if the original problem was fixed for the future, however.

-Brad

Brad Schick wrote:

Ing. J.M. Rafetseder wrote:

Try: set used_layers all, enter. See also the online help.

 

 

No effect.

 

I solved this by create a new board and then using the group-cut-paste

trick to move everything over from the original board. I then closed

everything and renamed the original board hide.brd and gave the new

board the original name. The layers are all now available and

consistency seems ok.

 

Would be nice if the original problem was fixed for the future, however.

 

 

-Brad

The command to add and delete layers from the menu is

Layer 2      to add it

Layer -2        to remove it.

Note that they may not appear in order and could be at the bottom of the menu.

In this case the help in eagle does work.  If you had tried HELP LAYER in

the board editor you should have found the solution.

cheers

David

Brad Schick schrieb:

I have a schematic & board that was created using Eagle Light on linux.

I just upgraded to standard to be able to use 4 layers. I changed the

drc layers tab to ((12)+(1516)), but the layers are still not

available in the "display" or "select layers" areas.

 

If I create a new board using standard and set the layers to

((12)+(1516)) it works as expected. Is there a problem moving boards

create under Eagle Light to Eagle Standard? Or am I missing something?

 

 

-Brad

The board file was initially designed in the Light edition.

This means that the inner layers are not gernerated, yet.

Simply use the LAYER command now to generate them:

LAYER 2 Route2;

LAYER 15 Route15;

--

Mit freundlichen Gruessen / Best regards

Richard Hammerl

CadSoft Support -- hotline@cadsoft.de

FAQ: http://www.cadsoft.de/faq.htm

Richard Hammerl wrote:

>

The board file was initially designed in the Light edition.

This means that the inner layers are not gernerated, yet.

Simply use the LAYER command now to generate them:

 

LAYER 2 Route2;

LAYER 15 Route15;

 

 

Ok thanks.

Wouldn't it make sense for that to happen automatically when someone

adds layers to a board that is running under standard or pro (even if it

was create in Light and the layers don't exist yet)?

My only real frustrations with Eagle are usability issues like this that

are really all over the place. It would be nice if Cadsoft read posts

like this one and along with providing a solution (which is

appreciated), also thought "can we make this easier in the future

without too much development effort".

Don't get me wrong, I like Eagle and appreciate its value. But I wish I

could spend less time reading the help files to do simple tasks. I'm

happy to read help files for involved tasks.

-Brad

David Moodie wrote:

Brad Schick wrote:

 

In this case the help in eagle does work.  If you had tried HELP LAYER

in the board editor you should have found the solution.

 

Sure, but just because the answer exists doesn't mean its easy to find.

I searched the entire manual for "Layers" and the only reference to

that command was for changing layers, not creating them. Besides, I

thought they would already exist if I defined them in the DRC.

Its always easier to lookup the help for a command when you already know

it exists and what it does in the first place

-Brad

David Moodie wrote:

 

The command to add and delete layers from the menu is

 

Layer 2     to add it

Layer -2       to remove it.

 

Note that they may not appear in order and could be at the bottom of the

menu.

And thank you for the assitance!!

-Brad

Brad Schick wrote:

Ok thanks.

 

Wouldn't it make sense for that to happen automatically when someone

adds layers to a board that is running under standard or pro (even if it

was create in Light and the layers don't exist yet)?

 

My only real frustrations with Eagle are usability issues like this that

are really all over the place. It would be nice if Cadsoft read posts

like this one and along with providing a solution (which is

appreciated), also thought "can we make this easier in the future

without too much development effort".

 

Don't get me wrong, I like Eagle and appreciate its value. But I wish I

could spend less time reading the help files to do simple tasks. I'm

happy to read help files for involved tasks.

 

-Brad

I strongly second Brad's comments!  We recently upgraded from the

2-layer Light edition to the 4-layer Standard edition, and I thought

I'd try out the 4-layer auto-router available in the Standard version,

on the board I'm presently working on.

I found in the autorouter setup window that only layer 1 and 16 were

available, so instead I tried to manually route a track, but found the

extra layers other than 1 and 16 I was expecting in the layer

selection pull-down did not exist.  This satisfied me that it wasn't

an autorouter issue per se.

It didn't take long to figure out that I needed to specify the four

layers in the design rules.  Alas after changing the edit->design

rules->layers->setup field to (12+1516) I still didn't have access

to the new layers.  What then?  Well I looked at the online FAQ, but

found nothing.  Then I looked through the (printed) manual, but still

found nothing helpful.  The CADSoft website mentioned these newsgroups

as a good place to get support, but it turned out our company firewall

blocks newsgroup access (TCP port 119).

So while waiting to have the firewall rules changed I decided to try

creating a new PCB.  This new board did in fact have all four layers

available for routing (yay!).  I suspected it would, having thought

about ways in which such an error could occur, as well as being a

really switched on guy (and very modest too ).

So next day I have newsreader access, and here I am.  Someone else

with the same experience!  It feels so much better when you're not the

only one pulling your hair out.  I tried the command

Layer 2

but that didn't work ('unknown layer 2' message).  Then I tried

LAYER 2 Route2;

LAYER 15 Route15;

which worked a treat.  Now I have all the layers available that I

expect, and the autorouter also lists them all.  Problem solved.

Some things worth mentioning:

I'm not a long time user of Eagle, and while it's clear it has evolved

over the years from the bad old days when everything was entirely

command line driven, that's not how I (and I suspect many other recent

users) use it.  Really, when you can click and drag and find all the

options you need under a menu like any other windows based interface,

why would you bother to learn the extensive command line interface?

So I know it purely from the windows based interface, and I baulk on

those few occasions when I have to resort to the command line, such

as with this layer business.  I believe that if there is a graphical

interface, it should be possibly to do everything from the graphical

interface.  Of course Eagle isn't the only example of this, one just

needs to look at any graphical Linux distribution to find oodles of

such flaws.

I don't use Eagle every day, so I'd probably forget the commands

pretty quickly anyway.  I know the odd package building/library step

that's only possibly via command line and I have to look that up in

the manual almost each time I do it (every few months).

Suggesting 'help layer' as an obvious solution also isn't all that

helpful; for a start I (and I suspect others) don't know what the

'layer' command does, so there is no reason I would try typing 'help

layer'.  Even if I did, the help really wouldn't help, because typing

'layer 2' didn't work.  The help suggests that layer 2 and 15 should

be available, but they aren't.  The help also talks about defining new

layers, but tells you to use layers above 100.  I'm not even sure if I

did define a layer above 100, whether I could use it for routing (just

call it another one of those hunches).

So yes, we like Eagle (I chose it for our next project, which is

saying something), but it has some real quirks!

If the authors wish to improve Eagle, I'd suggest they start by

checking out some of Joel Spolsky's articles at www.joelonsoftware.com

as he (IMNSHO) has some great ideas for making software more usable.

Then again, maybe the authors are all German and don't hang out in the

English newsgroups and never even see this discussion - vielleicht

sollte ich eine Uebersetzung machen..?!

Greetings Martin van den Nieuwelaar,

  on Fri, 14 Mar 2008 you wrote saying :

Really, when you can click and drag and find all the options you need

under a menu like any other windows based interface, why would you

bother to learn the extensive command line interface?

Because, as I keep having to tell people whose computer experience has

been crippled by Windows, the command line is very much faster and more

powerful for a lot of jobs. This doesn't just apply to Eagle - it's true

of lots of stuff from the *nix shell to text editors.

Sure, Eagle's command line by itself is a more awkward way to draw a

schematic than the drag-and-drop approach. But when drawing new

component packages in the library editor the mouse is a painfully slow

way to place 64 pads on a regular and well-defined grid. Since I have

some programming skill, it's much quicker for me to knock up a Python

script to auto-generate the command line instructions into a .scr file.

If I want to create (as I have several times recently) a whole family of

connectors, then this approach does it in half an hour. It would take

days to draw them all by mouse.

I have observed people using CAD tools of all sorts, and computers of

all sorts. In my experience, your "The GUI is BEST" cry is common among

inexperienced to intermediate users. True experts prefer the greater

power of a command line. Good software therefore provides both.

--

Rob Pearce                       http://www.bdt-home.demon.co.uk

The contents of this | Windows NT crashed.

message are purely   | I am the Blue Screen of Death.

my opinion. Don't    | No one hears your screams.

believe a word.      |

Robert Pearce wrote:

Greetings Martin van den Nieuwelaar,

 

on Fri, 14 Mar 2008 you wrote saying :

Really, when you can click and drag and find all the options you need

under a menu like any other windows based interface, why would you

bother to learn the extensive command line interface?

 

Because, as I keep having to tell people whose computer experience has

been crippled by Windows, the command line is very much faster and more

powerful for a lot of jobs. This doesn't just apply to Eagle - it's true

of lots of stuff from the *nix shell to text editors.

I have observed people using CAD tools of all sorts, and computers of

all sorts. In my experience, your "The GUI is BEST" cry is common among

inexperienced to intermediate users. True experts prefer the greater

power of a command line. Good software therefore provides both.

Fair comment, and I think you're right too.  Perhaps what I should

have said was "why would I bother to learn the extensive command

line interface?".  The difference here is that I obviously don't use

Eagle as much as you do, and I suspect never will; I will never be an

expert Eagle user because I simply don't use it often enough.  If I

take the time to learn the Eagle command line, that will be great in

the short term, but I'm only working on a small/short project, so in

six months or a year when I go to design another board I'll have

forgotten a good chunk of it.

What I'm trying to say is that it would be nice if the easy windowing

interface didn't make the beginner and intermediate users move out of

their comfort zones into the command line realm of the expert user (as

was necessary in this case in order to get the two extra signal layers).

For what it's worth I play on *nix systems all day on the command line

and also use a text based editor for almost everything.  I still think

it sucks though when a "GUI only" user runs into a problem where the

solution cannot be found by way of the GUI and they have to use the

command line.  The 'trick' I believe is to make the human-computer

interface (whether Eagle, or any other software) usable by users of

all abilities and without assuming that beginner users will eventually

become (or even want to become) expert users.