Community
tl; dr? library.io, IPC-compliant 2D & 3D model generation, copy and paste pins from a datasheet to a symbol, WAY better highlight / color controls, SPICE supports saving and comparing waveforms + better plot controls, router now contours with 90 degree bends, & a bunch of little (but important workflow/UI/UX improvements).
Greetings EAGLE Community!
Today we’re proud to announce the release of EAGLE 8.7 and what is quite possibly one of the biggest releases we’ve had to-date, this time focused (largely) on libraries and library development (and what that means for 3D modeling of your finished PCB)! But before we get into it, let me share a thought --
As some of you know, most of us on the EAGLE team use the SW (imagine that!). In fact, it’s the overwhelming majority in development, mktg, leadership, support, etc. who not only use it, but we’ve run workshops, taught university courses with it, etc. And it’s from the experience of talking with you and having to explain many of the more idiosyncratic things either in EAGLE or in ECAD in general, that we’d decided we needed to take a shot at addressing the component creation process. Our goal being to reduce or eliminate one of the slowest, most non-value added processes in your workflow. (This is the stuff that really slows you down and only gets harder as the parts get more sophisticated.)
That being said, this is only part of our ongoing efforts to make library development and the problems with quick, quality component creation faced by so many users (whether professionals or hobbyists or students) a thing of the past. It’s also the first step in treating ECAD parts and their MCAD equivalents as a single component creation process which shouldn’t be decoupled (after all, it’s the same datasheet whether you’re making parts in EAGLE or in Fusion360).
Now on to the show!
library.io - 2D & 3D Parametric Package Generation
Today we launch library.io...A completely free site that integrates seamlessly with EAGLE and Fusion 360 and which includes, amongst other things, parametric PCB package AND 3D model generation, with a new IPC-compliant footprint calculator. This site replaces the previous https://hub.circuits.io managed library site however all of your managed libraries will work without issue and all of the content has already been ‘migrated’ into the new site.
Your existing EAGLE login already gets you access to the site (free & paid users both) and the content that you create can not only be used in EAGLE, but every piece of content you create can be downloaded, by you, to use anywhere you like. We are not building a walled garden, we are building something useful to everyone (we hope!).
Accessing from the desktop EAGLE
Before we move on, it’s important to stress that this same package generator is accessible from within EAGLE’s desktop client, so you dont need to go to the site to manage your content unless you want to. You can create content online or in EAGLE and you can add packages to your EAGLE library, with powerful search filters to search for any content you might create in either environment.
Creating a package from EAGLE
Adding a package from within EAGLE
You will need to be logged in to use the new package generator when using EAGLE (we use a number of web services that make the 3D model generation and linking to Fusion possible) but from within any library, you can now search for and create new 2D & 3D packages. And again, any piece of content you produce can be downloaded.
Paste 2.0: Entering Pin Information Sucks, Let’s Fix It
With this release we’ve also taken a shot at reducing the millions of man-hours a year the engineering community spends entering pin information into a symbol editor, with the introduction of enhanced paste functionality in EAGLE. With this new capability, simply select a list of pin names from a text document or PDF then paste them (as pins) in the symbol editor.
Copy pin names from a list and paste as pins
Pro-tip: if you use Acrobat as a system-viewer for PDFs, you an use Alt+Select to select a column of text.
What’s happening behind the scenes is some pretty sophisticated processing of the contents of the clipboard and if we see something that looks like a list of pins, well, we paste them as pins! (and yes, we looked out for things like adding the @1, @2, @3, etc for multiple GNDs, naming collisions, CAPS, spaces, etc).
Well ordered table -> Paste++
The new Paste functionality also includes the ability to paste well-ordered data from a table (like an excel spreadsheet or any other delimited list). The well-ordering in this case implies that you have column headings that tell EAGLE more about the pin (things like pin length, direction, etc) and from this data we will construct the pins. The more data you give EAGLE, the more you dont have to modify later.
Pro-tip: there’s also a top secret ‘Im feeling lucky’-like mode. If you have a table or a column and have issues with Paste, hold Shift while pasting, it will attempt to analyze less-ordered data, apply some heuristics and see if it can make sense of the stuff you copied...if so, it’ll produce pins...mostly...we hope. 🙂
Paste pins from a well-ordered list
Some UI / UX love
Beyond libraries, this release of EAGLE was also chance to make more critical UI / UX improvements. Below are a few and I would look to the release notes for more info!
NAME then LABEL? ...why not NAME -> LABEL?
Today, when EAGLE users explicitly NAME a net in schematic, they almost invariably then go ahead and use the LABEL command to apply a label. That got us thinking: if you always do process A followed by process B, then why not pipe process A into process B and voila, life is easy!
Point is, there are almost zero times where one would want to use the NAME command to explicitly name a signal and NOT use LABEL to label it. SO...Now under the Name popup, you have a checkbox that will pipe you thru to placing a label right afterwards. A little change but a much tidier user experience.
NAME & LABEL now tightly coupled
Layers & Colors Improvements
First on the layers front is the improvement to highlight colors. Previously a highlight color for any layer was specified in the color picker row, directly beneath the actual layer color, so long as it was an even numbered row.
Previously highlight was defined with #1 being the layer color and #2 being that layer’s highlight color
To say this was confusing to new users (and many if not most legacy users) is an understatement. So we’ve since reduced all of this complexity to a single slider located under Options->Set. This slider controls the highlight color by manipulating the Saturation and Value of the HSV color space to make the highlighting clear, but also recognizable as some derivative of the layer color.
Highlight slider now controls the highlight color automatically as a function of the base color
With regard to layers we’ve also modified the layers dialog a bit so that simply selecting a layer in the dialog doesnt enable it, but rather, you can enable them using the eyeball icon. This makes this far more explicit & solves the issue where users accidentally clicked on a layer not realizing they did and having to add layers until they get the right layers back.
Webinar, more posts, more videos all coming…
With regard to the library.io site, EAGLE 8.7, etc... this is not the first you’ll be hearing about any of this. Look for more info on UI/UX improvements, SPICE improvements, component creation in EAGLE, etc in the coming weeks. We will be hosting a webinar tomorrow and will continue to host webinars, post videos, and more. So stay tuned!
Best regards,
Matt Berggren
Director - Autodesk EAGLE
Can't find what you're looking for? Ask the community or share your knowledge.
Post to forums
![Autodesk Design & Make Report](https://forums.autodesk.com/t5/image/serverpage/image-id/1350519iCB55845EBFC43016/image-size/large?v=v2&px=999" "Autodesk Design & Make Report")