SUPER-Newbie: Eagle

Question

Hello Ben and Element14 community,

I'm a freshmen studying to get a bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering. I have a lot of projects that I want to start working on. And know that I've started with the first one on my list, I realized that it's mainly a microcontroller. Fortunately, I discovered The Ben Heck show which introduced me to eagle and a brief insight on how to build your custom microcontroller or AVR development board- correct me if they're two different things. Reading in the CADSoft website, I felt that Eagle is the perfect software to use for my project.

The problem is that many questions occurred to me when attempting to buy the software, of which:

When trying to buy the Eagle Light, this eventually showed up '1 schematic sheet, 2 signal layers, 100x80 mm routing area (3.2 in x 4 in)'. Is the program limited to a certain number of designs?
As a SUPER-Newbie in the world of microcontrollers, I'm curtain that I'm going to face problems with my design at first. Will any of the services provided for CADSoft help answer questions as why/ how/ when do we use certain component? Or even help me fix issues with my design?
When ordering PCBs from a board house, is there a minimum number of board you could order? or a minimum payment?
Can the manufacturers make custom casings for the PCBs?

P.S. I'm really new to this stuff, I'm bad with the abbreviations

Thank you in advance to any body helped or passed by.

AnalogNotes · Accepted Answer

faris algahtani wrote: 
 I'm a freshmen studying to get a bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering.

Nice. Engineering rocks! So, speaking as an EAGLE user, Element 14 sucks. The real place that EAGLE support and communication is done is via NNTP (Network News). Check the CadSoft web site for information about it. If you don't have a news reader, the best way to communicate with other EAGLE users is at http://eaglecentral.ca/forums where you can be sure that your message gets propagated to the newsgroup. Your post here on Element14 did not reach the Eagle Central site or the newsgroup, so you will probably not get many responses from EAGLE users. There is also a Yahoo Group at https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/eaglecad Edit: Element14 munged the link to the Yahoo Group. Here it is again, I hope with the correct link: https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/Eaglecad/info 
 Reading in the CADSoft website, I felt that Eagle is the perfect software to use for my project.

Not to discourage you from EAGLE, but have you looked at any other EDA programs? Many of us are not happy with the changes that have been made with recent versions of EAGLE, but since you are so new, it may not matter to you. Wikipedia can help: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_EDA_software 
 When trying to buy the Eagle Light, this eventually showed up ' 1 schematic sheet, 2 signal layers, 100x80 mm routing area (3.2 in x 4 in)'. Is the program limited to a certain number of designs?

No, once you buy EAGLE, you can use it as many times as you want. Make sure that you read the license agreement. You may want to think about whether you will need a larger size board in the future. If you do, you will have to buy the more expensive version of EAGLE, or switch to a different program. Switching is a pain, as you have to learn a new way of working... I think there are a lot of helpful people in the EAGLE community, but you will probably have to do all of the work to figure out what components to use and which pcb manufacturer you order from. There are a lot of web sites that can help, search for SparkFun, Adafruit, Makezine, Curious Inventor and Dangerous Prototypes for example. You may also like the build-electronic-circuits.com web site too...

element14Dave · Answer

I have moved this over to our EAGLE forums.

Former Member · Answer

experimenting with Linux especially ubuntu I know you can get the eagle CAD software for free i believe that it is the same as on windows however you would have to look into this more i hope this helped kallum

SUPER-Newbie: Eagle

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