EAGLE v8.3.0 Issue: Missing Grid Outside Board Outline

[rachaelATWH4]

I've been testing out EAGLE v8.3.0 today and I have found that a new "feature" exists where the area inside of the board outline shows the grid and the area outside the board is a mid grey colour with no grid.

This completely does not work for me at all and I am sure I won't be the only person....

I do large and complex layouts and I often do placement of key groups of parts and some of their routing off board. I can have many such sub circuits placed and partially routed dotted around the canvas. Unfortunately with the grid now no longer visible my ability to do this effectively is severely curtailed. I think whoever decided to do this thought this would look nicer but perhaps isn't experienced with doing large PCB layouts because it just doesn't work for me.

In addition, I do a lot of work at night and have dark themes set up. Previously I had a nice large black area. Now it's a lot more mid grey and not as good for a dark theme.

Best Regards,

Rachael

[kvuong_multimatic]

i agree with rachael's point. although it is nice to differentiate the board from non-board, it should have an option to disable this, as building circuit outside of the dimensions is a lot easier/convenient then within the dimensions we set.

on closer inspection, the grid is still there, underneath the 'grey' layer, almost like it is a grey polygon fill for anything 'outside' the dimensions. i seem to remember the dev's mentioning there was going to be a way to turn it off during their webinar, but quickly scrolling through the youtube replay didn't seem to mention it (was possibly mentioned during the QnA afterwards.

Hopefully a dev can inform us of how to turn it off.

[jorge_garcia2 · Accepted solution]

Hi @rachaelATWH4,

Thanks for participating, we knew someone was going to jump on that. The outside color is actually user controlled so you can changed it to whatever you want even black. The GRID actually covers the entire area, but I understand grey on grey isn't easy to distinguish.

To change it go Options > Set > Colors tab. Click on the palette you are working with (in your case the black palette). The outside color is controlled by the color in the 1 square on the second row going from left to right, top to bottom. See the attached picture for a contrived example.

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

Please accept as solution if my post fully resolves your issue, or reply with additional details if the problem persists.

Best Regards,

[pmoulder78]

This feature is just awful, please make it go away.

[pmoulder78]

Why cant i get rid of the grey????  i want it to be black outside of the board dimension??

[rachaelATWH4]

Hi Jorge,

Right, on my machine (and I am using the standard black colours) I also need to further go and edit the colour that the grid lines uses to be something else or if I don't it will also change the grid to black and lose the grid altogether. I need to do some more fiddling with this to see if I can get it right but it looks like I should be able to fix this. However, I suspect this is going to be annoying and end up something I have to faff with regularly. I would like to request you give an option to check in the settings which will just put this back so it's not tied to that colour value setting and then this will not be a problem, it'll be a preference.

Best Regards,

Rachael

[jorge_garcia2]

Hi pmoulder78,

Did you follow the above procedure to change the background to whatever color you want? Just change it to black.

This feature has more to with Fusion than EAGLE. The board outline is now treated as its own object which is more amenable to how Fusion360 handles the board objects.

One thing to note, if you have an old eaglerc file and you have the default color schemes you should delete it. The default colors schemes have been adjusted slightly for better visibility of the grid lines on grey. Again you have full control over all of this but this is a nice way to reset the default colors.

Hope this helps.

Best Regards,

[pmoulder78]

So which of these is supposed to change the grey, because nothing seems to work.y????

[pmoulder78]

Nope, nothing works.  where can i find this eagle rc file??

[rachaelATWH4]

But now I can't see my board outline properly because it's a funny pale orange colour and the lines are very fine.... Except the right hand edge, that's fatter.

So I can set the palette so it has a white instead of that orange colour and the board outline is slightly more visible. But it's still very fine lines and the right hand edge is fatter.... Looking at the line widths, they are all set to 0 so WHY is the right hand one wider?

Jorge, I can't get this to look how it used to look. The board outline is now really not well defined and I don't want to have to put this much effort into fixing this for every board I do, it'll soon become tiresome. Please can we just have an option to put EAGLE's board view back. The Fusion360 integration will still be awesome and doesn't rely on this change in the way things look in EAGLE.

Many thanks,

Rachael

[rachaelATWH4]

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@pmoulder78 wrote:

So which of these is supposed to change the grey, because nothing seems to work.y????

---

You need to click on the black square under Palette for the black theme, then click on the 1st colour in the second row, change it with the controls on the right then click 'Set colour" and then click ok, then click ok again and it'll be black.

Then go down the same rabbit hole I did looking for how to get your grid back, then your board outline to not look funky, then back to asking for things to be changed.

I think having this as a feature to toggle between "Normal" view and "Board" view as a button on the toolbar like the loop remove, obstacle avoid, single layer features would actually make this useful. It gives a quick way of visualizing the board and making sure all the shapes and cutouts are correct. But it should be something that is toggleable, then this feature would be great. As it is, it gets in the way.

Best Regards,

Rachael

[kvuong_multimatic]

so it took me a while to figure out (i'm a little slow sometimes) but jorge's instructions are correct, you have to click on the palette 'colour button' for the background range you want to edit (for me it was black), and then, you adjust the colour of the first square in the second row (choose that box, change the colour on the right side, click set colour, i set mine back to black) then after that's all done, when you are back at the colour setting window, click on the box under lines (or dots) and then choose a different colour box in the palette window that opens (i chose one of the other dark grey that were there). now you will have different line colours then from the outside background colour. basically when you change the colour in the palette, but dont change the colour selection for the lines, it will always follow the same colour as the outside background.

i have to say, all this was not very intuitive...

*edit - rachael beat me to it, haha

[pmoulder78]

Thanks Rachael, it's sorted now, why the second square????  and no indication of what that square does. 

That is possibly the least intuative thing i've come across in a while.  So instead of getting on with my project this evening i've just spent an hour swearing. ffs!

[jorge_garcia2]

I'm going to put a screencast here, that explains how all of this is supposed to work and give an example of the setting.

I agree this is not intuitive, but it's a way for now. We will be circling back to work on the colors shortly.

Best Regards,

[rachaelATWH4]

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pmoulder78 wrote:

That is possibly the least intuative thing i've come across in a while.  So instead of getting on with my project this evening i've just spent an hour swearing. ffs!

---

Yes I know what you mean. It certainly took a chunk of my time going through this.

On reflection, I can see the benefit of the view being like this as it does make the board outline and and cutouts immediately obvious. It'll show if there are any strange errors causing pieces not to be correctly cut or cutting things out where they shouldn't be. But... I really do think it should default to the old view and this view be an option on the toolbar to switch between views much like the new single layer view in the route mode. That would make it really useful.

Best Regards,

Rachael

[rachaelATWH4]

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@jorge.garcia wrote:

We will be circling back to work on the colors shortly.

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That's good to hear. As you can see from my other posts, this view is sort of growing on me, I can see the benefits but it needs to change in the way its implemented (so it's not the default view and be a toggle function) and then it'll become a really useful feature. Currently the drawbacks of the view take away from any potential benefits.

Best Regards,

Rachael

[jorge_garcia2 · Accepted solution]

Hi @rachaelATWH4,

Here is the screencast explaining how this is supposed to work. You can get most of the colors back to normal by running an old defaultcolors.scr in version 8.3. This will turn dimension back into the old grey color. The kicker here is to set your Grid lines to a different color palette entry so that changing the back ground doesn't change the grid line color.

The new board shape feature is intended to be a permanent part of EAGLE because of its neccesity to integrate with Fusion. Most of the issues seem to be related to the color choices though. I know it's a pain to change them but, most people will probably leave them on default for now. You can always save your custom color settings using exp-pallette.ulp that way you only ever have to go through this process once.

[pmoulder78]

Jorge

Why not have the square for the background colour clearly labelled as such on the tab next to the grid and dot colour selection within the first colour menu.  No one will ever know to change the second square down in the sub pallette menu unless they are specifically directed to it.

Thanks

Phil

[jorge_garcia2]

Hi Phil,

You are correct on that, part of color system improvements is making all of this clearer. Thank you for your comments, for now I hope this plus the comments in the manual will give some time until the color system is updated.

Best Regards,

[pmoulder78]

Jorge

One last thing on this.  I there a quick way of resetting the colours to default??  I seem to have changed the component origin and net names to a colour i can barely see.  and i don't know which boxes in the pallet to change.

Thanks

Phil