Can't drag part off board

[infinite.machinery]

I'm working on my first board with Eagle, standard version. I started working on the board design/assembly step. After dragging a part to the board I am unable to drag it back to the collection of parts where it first started. I get the following error message. I running Eagle 9.2 Standard.

This seems so bizarre

[rachaelATWH4]

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@infinite.machinery wrote:

After dragging a part to the board I am unable to drag it back to the collection of parts where it first started. I get the following error message. I running Eagle 9.2 Standard.

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Hello,

This is an issue which has been raised a number of times and catches a lot of people out when they first use EAGLE. It's due to the license restrictions of the standard version. Once a component has been moved within the area defined by the license limits it is not possible to move it outside of those limits again. Unfortunately at this time there isn't anything you can do to change this behaviour, you need to work within the 160cm^2 area allowed by your license.

Best Regards,

Rachael

[infinite.machinery]

I appreciate the response. Still, from a usability perspective this is frustrating. I'm not trying to make a board that has dimensions beyond the limits of my license. In fact the board dimensions are already set in the area I defined on the right side of the board layout window. 

In my day job (I use Eagle for a new hobby), I'm a software engineer. I find it incredibly perplexing that Eagle cannot differentiate between a part that is laid on the board and a part off the board, once the part has been placed on the board.

[matt.berggren · Accepted solution]

Thanks for your post! Unfortunately, we needed to place some constraints around the free license and over the 27 years of EAGLE history, you can imagine the lengths people have gone to work around the limitations of the free version. Having a well-defined area where components can/cannot be placed is a simple, easy to define / easy to understand requirement. Overall it’s still imperfect perhaps, but something that doesn’t take a ton of effort and gives us more time to build capabilities that focus on productivity. We’ve got plans (at some stage) to address this in a somewhat cleaner way but they’re a ways out.

Best regards.

Matt – Autodesk

[infinite.machinery]

Thanks for the reply, Matt. I'm glad to hear that this matter will be looked at in the future.

[k7michal]

HI. I'm working with Eagle Standard and just now I somehow managed to put a heat sink into the board area and then move it back into the grey area.... For some reason I cannot do it again with other heatsinks. The particular heatsinks didn't seem to have defined pads. 3rd party library (SK104)..

[one-of-the-robs]

Two points on this:

1) It's not the black/grey area - defined by your board outline in the dimension layer - that matters. It's the 160cm^2 license limit, which is a rectangle in the upper right quadrant anchored at (0 0)

2) I'm a tiny bit surprised the heatsinks are getting caught but not very. I think the limit is imposed on pads and origins, so "mechanical" bits (heatsink extremities, working parts of R/A connectors, etc.) can sit outside the limit as long as they wouldn't cause any copper to be routed there, but that doesn't allow you to put a non-circuit element just anywhere.