Have a question about CadSoft EAGLE?  Ask our Expert, Richard! (Archive)

Richard,

Recently we discussed how the keyboard shortcut to flick between schematic and board was disabled in the Mac OS X version of Eagle.

While I was working today it occurred to me that I can use Mac OS X's 'Spaces' feature - with the board in one space and the schematic in another and this worked great - AND it gives you a really cool sliding animation when you switch between schematic and board.

If you've never used spaces on Mac OS X before I strongly urge you to try it out - it's one of those 'how did we ever manager without this' features.

One minor point though. When I closed the project and openend it again, the windows remembered their size and position on screen, but not which 'space' they were in, so every time I opened the project I had to move the windows to their respective space again.

-Kenny

Hi Kenny,

just tried it and you are right, it's great. As you wrote, once known you don't want to miss it. Thanks for posting and sharing your experience.

Richard

Hi Kenny,

just tried it and you are right, it's great. As you wrote, once known you don't want to miss it. Thanks for posting and sharing your experience.

Richard

Hi Craig,

this is a known problem which is fixed in EAGLE 6.1.0. Please download it from our web site

http://www.cadsoft.de/downloads/

Regards,

Richard

I made a library part with a hole in it.

After I place this part into my schematic,

the auto-router is routing traces right through the hole?

I see the hole is in the DIMENSION LAYER?

Any idea why the autorouter is doing this?

Iain Galloway wrote:

 

Richard,

I have a couple of items that you could perhaps point me in the right direction.

 

We have a board design with a large array of the same components...say 1600 diodes.

 

1) Need to place these on a BRD grid of x by y spaced at nnn apart. I assume this could be done with a ULP or SCR, but I've never really looked into the programming language. Any good starting point for this specifically?

 

2) Unfortunately when the schematic was first made, a generic diode was just picked, and used a standard part, say 1n4442.

Now we'd like to replace them ALL with something more custom and have it in our own library where several different footprints can be tried.

Any ideas here?

I found a ULP that made a library for the board, but it doesn't actually make the parts on the sch/brd point to that new libraray.

Hi Iain,

There is an ULP that might help in placing matrix of components or at least giving an example for this. See the cadsoft.de download area, ULP folder. There is  matrizdeleds.ulp

About the diodes: You can use the REPLACE command for this. It could be executed via a script for all diodes in the project. Syntax is:   REPLACE new_device_name component_name;

Example:

REPLACE 1N4442   D12;

REPLACE 1N4442   D13;

REPLACE 1N4442   D15;

Regards,

Richard

Richard,

I have a couple of items that you could perhaps point me in the right direction.

We have a board design with a large array of the same components...say 1600 diodes.

1) Need to place these on a BRD grid of x by y spaced at nnn apart. I assume this could be done with a ULP or SCR, but I've never really looked into the programming language. Any good starting point for this specifically?

2) Unfortunately when the schematic was first made, a generic diode was just picked, and used a standard part, say 1n4442.

Now we'd like to replace them ALL with something more custom and have it in our own library where several different footprints can be tried.

Any ideas here?

I found a ULP that made a library for the board, but it doesn't actually make the parts on the sch/brd point to that new libraray.