We don’t have a planned date on any “end of life“ of eagle because we know Fusion adds a lot of value but is missing elements of desktop eagle we need to deliver before we can even have that discussion. Nevertheless, I wouldn’t imagine we hold out forever maintaining two code bases that become ever-more divergent. Yet, I will say this to be as reassuring as I can: we aren’t stopping development in the eagle code base this year and we won’t be complete with the complement of features in Fusion that would signal eagle’s waning capability until well-into next year. Neither if those two statements also don’t mean the eagle license you have will stop working because doing a design revision that requires you use a different piece of software is dangerous.
Again being direct and transparent, we have some serious constraints on what we can add to eagle where those things are dependent on a better underlying engine and I can assure you, we are going to hit that wall. That said, a (highly speculative) roadmap is in order I suppose to help explain the “why?”:
1). complex constraints like object to object snapping, better selection mechanisms (hit testing / a new ray casting system)
2). overlays and better layering / layer drawing, layer management, overlays / highlighting etc, sim overlays, thermal results, etc
3). efforts around support for multiple PCBs beginning with basic alignment, 3D snapping, and moving into other areas (I’ll let you imagine & influence where we go with it)
4). fonts, images, etc and better support for graphics in general in PCB and schematic
5). python bindings to eliminate or reduce the current ULP “pseudo-CPP” stuff
...And a host of other stuff are placing strain on eagle in ways it wasn’t designed to handle. Not to mention things like access to tools for panelization, desktop printed circuits, 3D circuit printing and host of other things.
What’s more, we (as a team) also have to hit feature for feature, the equivalent things in eagle to make Fusion more attractive to use than eagle for those of you with the few challenges that the Electronics Workspace in Fusion can’t yet address. We know them. We are working on them right now.
Still, maintaining the interop would ensure you can use them when you need them and return to eagle when you don’t.
We have an eagle release scheduled in fact, planning to ship soon, and including some really vital new things like Splines for more complex board shapes and an overhaul of polygons to make them much more user friendly and support these spline geometries. This will also include support for the new 3D PCB document type that Fusion has today. This will include an update to Fusion Sync and we will have a better overall experience for managing board shape and component positions between ecad and mcad.
In the interest to trying to pin down a time horizon, let me stress that until we have an answer for the things “missing” in Fusion, we wouldn’t make any hasty moves to try and move customers across. It isn’t to our benefit but it does create (healthy) pressure on the development team / product team to really nail this. If I had to guess, we wouldn’t be ready with that for a year and we would take another year to really encourage the migration. The license works for both so for those that don’t see the value, I’ll reassure you that there’s no urgency around shutting the lights off.
Best regards.
Matt Berggren
Autodesk
