I often find it would be nice to tell EAGLE which layers I intend to route
on in the near future. Two cases:
First Case: 4-Layer Board
Most 4-layer boards have a similar stackup to:
Top
INNER1 - GND layer
INNER2 - POWER layer
Bottom
In this case, I am very rarely going to route to the inner two layers. But
with EAGLE I always get a popup menu on layer switch and there is an
additional step of choosing the destination layer. There is no ambiguity
here in this design--I will almost always go from routing on top to bottom
(or bottom to top). So the extra step of choosing layer is irrelevant and
inefficient.
If I could just mark Top and Bottom as active routing layers then there
would be no need for the secondary selection.
Second Case: Multi-Layer Board
In dense board layout, you want to minimize the number of vias as they take
up a lot of space. So with good planning, you can often find yourself in a
situation where you're routing a bus across a board and you are only going
to use 2 layers to do it. If I could set my active routing layers to the
two in question, then again I save the extra step of selecting destination
layer for each via.
When that bus is complete I could set the active routing layers to all the
signal layers again.
Cheers,
James.
--
James Morrison ~~~ Stratford Digital
http://www.stratforddigital.ca
--
EAGLE support forums at http://www.eaglecentral.ca :: Where the EAGLE community meets.
