Share your experience with us on CadSoft Eagle

I think many many user need this tool too...

and we also need a tool to mark the board length, and the other thing... in the measure layer.

another question: how can I measure total length of the wire which I routed on a net ?

Hi,

there is an ULP that lists the lengh of all signals in the layout. See length.ulp for it.

To get more information about your board, just try statistic-brd.ulp. Currently there is no dimensioning tool in EAGLE.

-Richard

Hi,

there is an ULP that lists the lengh of all signals in the layout. See length.ulp for it.

To get more information about your board, just try statistic-brd.ulp. Currently there is no dimensioning tool in EAGLE.

-Richard

I think if when we use "SHOW" command to display a wire's length, it will be very easily for user.

There are plans to show the length of a track directly, but at the moment I can't tell you how it will look like. Maybe we will pack this information into the properties dialog (INFO command).

-Richard

On a similar note, are there plans to show the area of copper used? (I try to maximise the amount of copper being used, so I don't have to etch as much off . Sometimes, moving a component around does appear to make a difference, but it's difficult to say how much).

Also, is there an group for suggestions (this appears to be the only Eagle-based group, and the name doesn't seem well-suited to this).

Hi Jason,

take a look at www.cadsoft.de/download.htm, ULP directory. ==> statistic-copper-plane.zip

This might help.

Suggestions should be posted in the CadSoft newsgroups directly. They can be accessed via news://news.cadsoft.de.

As far as I am informed these groups will become accessible via element-14 soon.

Richard

Thanks for that, I'll take a look at it later (when I'm back home. I'm not sure if it's only the statistics for the polygon, or if it includes the traces, pads and via as well - will experiment).

I've been putting off installing an NNTP client on my machine That might be the impetus I need to do so.

Just another ULP comes into my mind. Try statistic-brd.ulp that comes with the EAGLE installation.

Richard

Message was edited by: Richard Hammerl

Now I've been able to have a go at them, the first one worked more as I would've liked it than the second (which only seemed to produce a rough statistic as to how many there are - the one that looked the most promising was the area consumed by the devices on the board).

The first one does appear to give me a surface area of how much would've been etched away *, and it does have some oddities when a trace goes over a via/pad - most of the time it appears to draw the trace to the centre of the via, but occasionally it'll draw the via with a hole in it. I haven't worked out what it does when though. This is by looking at the bitmaps it generates.

It's also a little slow - but I can understand that (interpreting binary files in the ULP language is going to be slow).

* Looking at the bitmaps, the "plane (Cu)" column appears to be related to the black area, rather than the white area - certainly bitmap ~~~0 has a lot of black, and gives 2092.07mm^2, and bitmap ~~~1 has not much black and gives 22.63mm^2 (there's a big grounding polygon over the area).

I'm guessing the algorithm is effectively converting it to a bitmap at 0.1mm per pixel and then counting the number of black pixels.

So, many thanks for that - although it's a bit too slow for interactive use, so I'll use it as a bit of experimentation so I can get a better idea based on visuals.