[time-nuts] Schematic capture, anyone?

[Scott Burris]

I used Eagle for years, but can't say I really warmed to it.  I recently
changed to DipTrace.  Their pricing model seems to work better for
me (large but sparse boards in Eagle require $$$ license) as it's based
on pin count, not board size.  

It's really hard to quantify usability, but I no longer find myself dreading
drafting a symbol from scratch and things work more like how I would
expect them to work.  I watched their video demo, found that it made a lot
of sense to me, tried it, and was hooked.

http://www.diptrace.com/

Scott

On Feb 23, 2012, at 6:38 PM, John Miles wrote:

>> I'll add another vote for Eagle.  It is a German program written in
>> Unix, and ported to Windows.  Therefore, you select the action
>> first then click on the object of the action.  It takes some getting
>> used to.  There has been a pattern of PC layout companies getting
>> cobbled up leaving you with an orphan program, or an upgrade
>> to some very expensive program.  Orcad and Protel go gobbled up.
>> Eagle did too, but by a distributor, Newark.  They just came out
>> with a new improved version.  You can finally draw arbitrary SMT
>> footprints.  I think that was the major limitation of the old
>> version.  You can of course draw your own symbols any way you like.
>> I have been using Eagle for 5 years now and never looked back.
>> One other drawback of Eagle is that it is difficult to move a design
>> between computers, and there are issues with the way preferences
>> are stored.  If you use a part from a library in a design, you are
>> forever locked into that library.   Many other CAD systems have these
>> issues.  Mentor used to be terrible about having absolute path names, etc.
> 
> It's worth noting as well that Eagle has just moved to a more "open"
> XML-based format for their data files.  Assuming they've done a good job (I
> have no experience with the new version yet), I wouldn't be surprised to see
> it become the lingua franca of EDA, with a lot of third-party support in the
> future.  Eagle is quirky but it's also inexpensive, reliable, and highly
> functional, making it accessible to a lot of users at a lot of different
> levels.  Their new public file formats could be a major selling point.
> 
> I use Sunstone for PCBs myself, but I don't use PCB 123 because I don't want
> the board house to 'own' my data.   In most serious projects you spend a lot
> of time not only drawing schematics and routing traces, but also building
> part definitions and writing various scripts.  This all adds up to a
> long-term commitment to whatever tool you select.  In most cases you should
> use Eagle or another program that can generate standard RS-274X Gerbers, and
> you should always double-check those Gerbers in a third-party viewer before
> hitting the big green button.  The free GEDA Gerber viewer (gerbv) is pretty
> good; there are plenty of others.
> 
> All that being said, Eagle V6 is brand new, and historically it's been
> painful to use brand new major versions of Eagle.  Everything went smoothly
> on a recent project with the last version of Eagle V5, but if you look back
> at CadSoft's support forum posts dating from the initial V5 release era,
> there were a lot of unhappy campers.  The downside of the new XML file
> formats is that migrating back to V5 will be difficult or impossible, so you
> should take some time to be sure that V6 is really ready for your
> application before going with it.  I can't overemphasize how important it is
> to read their support forums to learn what to expect with any new Eagle
> version, and what to watch out for. 
> 
> -- john
> 
> 
> 
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