Chasing 'trons

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.

Update on Monday, July 16, 2012 at 7:41 by

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.