| ??? 04/17/06 19:01 Read: times |
#114412 - Eagle Responding to: ???'s previous message |
Richard Erlacher said:
[RANT]Eagle is the absolute worst schematic package I've encountered in my 40-plus years of Computer-Aided-Engineering work, first of all because its library organization is dreadful, separate, and largely limited to what the authors could get for free from their victims, and secondly because it has no means of importing or exporting essential information to/from other packages, not that one might often like to do so.[/RANT] While I have only half of your experience with CAD packages, I feel I should say "Preach On, Brother Richard." I downloaded the eval version of Eagle and installed it. It didn't take me very long to HATE it. The process of creating a library part is just wrong. The whole product is a toy. I used DOS PCAD at a previous job, and found it to be difficult to get around. I like Accel (now PCAD) for Windows. The library creation process is reasonable (it can import a text file and make a symbol). It handles 20 layers without issue. We use Protel DXP at the office. It has some serious interface "issues" that drive me bonkers, and I've managed to break its back-annotation feature (I changed the ref-deses on the PCB and tried to send them back to the schematic, and it just BROKE). I have a copy of Ultiboard 2001 and the companion Ulticap schematic capture (basically, Multisim's capture without the simulation). I actually like it; creating libraries and library parts are both easy and the capture works well enough, once you get past the weird things. I think the biggest issue with any Schematic/PCB package is: how do you want to organize your libraries, and will the tool let me do it the way I want? For example, my preference is to create a discrete symbol for every part. Each symbol includes a footprint as well a complete vendor part number, so I can generate a BOM directly from the schematic without needing to go through an external database lookup step. Yeah, this means I have a resistor library with a hundred resistors, and I place on the schematic the particular value I want, but it's not as big an issue as you might think. Creating a new symbol for a 4.99k 0805 1% resistor is as simple as copying the symbol from the 4.75k 0805 1% resistor and changing the value and the vendor part number. I suppose my process hiccoughs when you want to have part substitutions (same part from different vendors with different vendor part numbers) but in that case, a database is useful. Of course, G-d's Own CAD Tool is Mentor. But who can afford it? -a |
