A few suggestions for the development team

[pmoulder78]

Hi

I hope that this is a good place to post this but I have a few suggestions that I think might make Eagle a little more user friendly.  I'm not mega experienced with it so maybe I'm missing something (in which case someone help me out 🙂 )

1. Grouping. It would be useful if components could be grouped so that the might be moved together, perhaps with an "explode" command to ungroup them.

2.  Moving groups.  If a set of components are grouped it would be really useful to be able to move / rotate them together relative to a selectable reference point of that group (i.e, the centre or corners)  in a similar way that you can move / rotate single components

2.Cut, copy, paste CRTL+X/C/V.  almost universal commands???  and really useful, the copy and paste is really clunky; and does cut even exist??

Hope someone out the is listening

Cheers

[jorge_garcia2]

Hello pmoulder78,

I hope you're doing well. To address your points see my comments below.

1) This is already possible in Autodesk EAGLE. The GROUP command is active by default so you can define the GROUP by doing a rectangle selection. Then left-click and hold an item in the group and you'll see that you can free hand move the group around as you please, when you release the left-click the group is placed.

2) This is also already possible, here is the procedure:

1. Define the group

2. Left- click on the MOVE icon, you'll see that it indents to indicate it is the active command.

3. Go to the command line and type (> x-ref y-ref), where the x-ref and y-ref are the reference coordinates of the group and then hit enter. You'll notice that now GROUP is floating on your mouse cursor grabbed at that point. Now you can place the group manually or you can specify the exact location you want to place the group at by typing (x-loc y-loc) where x-loc and y-loc are where you want the groups reference point to go to now.

3) Also possible, just not enabled by default. All of these types of shortcuts are defined in the default-assign.scr file that comes with EAGLE. To have it run by default go to the EAGLE Control Panel and expand the scripts tree. There you will find the above mentioned file as well as the eagle.scr. Go ahead and double click the eagle.scr file to open it. Near the top of the file you'll find a line that says:

#SCRIPT default-assign.scr;

Remove the # from the front and save the file. Now every time you start a new editor the default shortcuts defined in default-assign.scr will be available.

Cut isn't really applicable to EAGLE's workflow so you only have to worry about copy and paste.

Please accept this as solution if it solves your issue, otherwise please let me know if there's anything else I can do for you.

Best Regards,

[rachaelATWH4]

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@jorge.garcia wrote:

1) This is already possible in Autodesk EAGLE. The GROUP command is active by default so you can define the GROUP by doing a rectangle selection. Then left-click and hold an item in the group and you'll see that you can free hand move the group around as you please, when you release the left-click the group is placed.

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Hi Jorge,

My impression was the the OP's suggestion was so you could create permanent groups of components and easily move the individual groups as one. E.g. if you had a design that had say 4 stepper driver circuits, you could group each stepper circuit and from then on they would be selectable and movable as one until such time a group was smashed. This is how vector drawing programs like MS Visio or other mechanical CAD tool type for example work.

The way EAGLE groups work currently is easier in v8 but still doesn't allow you to move groups of already laid out and routed blocks around easily, you have to keep regrouping every time you need to move an individual block around which can be a bit slow sometimes.

Best Regards,

Rachael

[pmoulder78]

Thanks for  the replies.

Yes Rachael is right. 

I'd like the ability to select groups as single objects without having to continually draw boxes around them.  It is particularly frustrating when placing components on a board when you want to select a group of parts but the group box also selects objects in the immediate vicinity.  It doesn't appear that you can use the CTRL or shift keys to add or deselect from a group selection  which kinda make the "draw a box around a group" selection awkward.

[jorge_garcia2]

Hi pmoulder78

I hope you're doing well. In the new Autodesk EAGLE like the old one you can toggle and objects group membership by holding ctrl and left clicking on an a item if you already have the group defined.

So for example:
1. You've defined a rectangle selection and you have a highlighted group. Now there are a few components you don't want to be part of the group.
2. Hold ctrl and left click on each part you don't want in the group and you'll notice that it stops being highlighted it's no longer in the group.

You can do this with single objects as well. Hold down control and left click each item you want in the group.

Please accept as solution is this solves your problem.

Let me know if there's anything else I can do for you.

Best Regards,

[pmoulder78]

Hi Jorge

I was hoping that the group selection could be made semi permanent.

let me give you an example. 

I have a schematic which contains 4 identical sets of components which form a larger module.

I create a board and arrange the 4 sets of components onto the board into four identical groups, which I then want to arrange on the board.

it would be really useful at this point to be able to create semi permanent groups so that each time that I want to select one of the sets of components I do not have to draw a box around them.  I could just pick up the sub-group and move it as required without having to go through the selection process multiple times.

I don't know if you have ever used Google sketchup?  it's a 3d modelling program.  within the program you can draw 3d objects.  You can group these objects into components which can the be moved around within the environment as a whole.  If you need to break the object into its' component parts there is an "explode" command which returns the object to it's component parts.

That's the kinda thing I think would be useful.

Make sense??

Cheers

Phil

[C.Nicks]

Hey everybody, I just wanted to chime in and offer what I've found to be useful over the years.

I agree having a persistent group option would be valuable to workflow, but care must be taken in it's implementation.

Damhave has created a ULP that implements a decent grouping tool where you can save and recall groups by defining a custom name. His latest ULP is called Select7.ulp.

I have made some modifications for myself that restrict grouping to components only (in brd) so recalling and moving a group doesn't move every trace connected to them as well.

Another thing I really like about this ULP is that it saves group definitions in the project directory, so they are easy to modify and manage outside of Eagle. I think a direct implementation could easily save them in the files.

I think Autodesk could easily build upon this. Maybe have a list in the properties window which could show what groups a component belongs to.

As a long time Eagle user (and advocate) I'd be more than happy to offer my input and testing regarding a grouping feature.

Regards,

Cameron Nicks

Phase IV Engineering, Boulder CO

Experience: 130+ RF/mixed boards designed in Eagle (4-7)

[jorge_garcia2]

Hello Cameron,

It's nice to hear from you on our new forums. The developers are looking into what would be a good way to do persistent groups, I've forwarded the ULP so they can have a look at it.

Thanks for your feedback and don't be a stranger.

Best Regards,

[dgbates2]

Jorge,

Just adding my voice to this, permanent grouping would be very useful.

Regards,

Daniel

[rajat.goel]

Hi @pmoulder78 and others,

We have added the feature of persistent groups in EAGLE 9.5.0 that will enable users to create permanent groups out of design components, save those groups and easily retrieve them later. The design manager has a new 'Groups' view to navigate and manipulate those saved groups.

Users can also perform actions like move, rotate etc. directly on groups. So check it out and let us know what you think of it.

Thank you for your valuable suggestions and feedback!

[pmoulder78]

Hi

Yes, I saw the new persistent group feature, I haven't had a chance to try it yet but hopefully it will make life considerably easier.

Now if you could only allow users to move components around freely on the standard version my life would be complete. 

(and what I mean by that is once a component is placed within the board area it would be very useful if components could be returned to the left of the original, otherwise you either have to get your layout correct first time, spend ages shuffling components within the board boundary, or rip up the entire design and start again)

Thanks for listening, it's great that user feedback is making it into the updates.

Phil