Eagle CAD and FreeRouting.net
Eagle Cad is a necessary evil to me. It’s the only usable PCB design software I know of for OS X. Plus, there’s an abundance of parts libraries out there. Beside its sometimes horrible user interface, my biggest complaint is its autorouter. Luckily there’s a website, FreeRouting.net, that has an excellent online autorouter. It takes a little trial and error to learn how to use it, but it does a much better job than Eagle. Here’s a video I made showing you the basics to routing your Eagle design at FreeRouting.net.
Eagle CAD from Jay Kickliter on Vimeo.
Jay Kickliter
Update. I’ve since moved on to Altium Designer. It’s much more expensive, but I was able to get a student license for about $150 if I remember correctly. On the negative side, I have to run Windows in Parallels to use it. Although its autorouter is a little better than Eagle’s, I hardly ever use it. Altium has pretty good semi-auto routing with push and shove, allowing me to hand route almost anything. Mind you, I haven’t yet tried to route a board with a 320 pin BGA yet, but with fan-out and a multi layer board I suppose even that is hand routable.
The real test come when my student license runs out. I don’t know what I will use then. Someone who’s opinion I respect swears by CADInt. I downloaded it. It seems almost primitive in it’s simplicity, but maybe that’s good. I might give it its day in court again.
Sunday, December 19, 2010 at 9:51 electronics | tagged Eagle CAD, PCB, autorouter, freerouting, freerouting.net
Reader Comments (1)
Check out Osmond PCB. I too have been viewing Eagle as a necessary evil for those uninclined to leave OSX, but have recently become interested in Osmond for board layout. It's not as full featured as Eagle yet, but the scripting interface is in Lua (much nicer than Eagle) and the user interface is quite friendly. I was thinking of writing a script to interface it to freerouting.net (no autorouter is built in), but wasn't able to to access that site today and got nervous about its longevity. Too bad the freerouting.net creators won't create an offline version.