[time-nuts] Schematic capture, anyone?

Rick Karlquist richard at karlquist.com
Fri Feb 24 01:21:39 UTC 2012


Jim Hickstein wrote:
> What do people use these days for schematic capture (and just possibly PCB
>
> worse, I prefer ANSI logic symbology over shovels-and-spades (or, really,
> over
> plain rectangles where you're expected to know what the part number
> means).
>

I'll add another vote for Eagle.  It is a German program written in
Unix, and ported to Windows.  Therefore, you select the action
first then click on the object of the action.  It takes some getting
used to.  There has been a pattern of PC layout companies getting
cobbled up leaving you with an orphan program, or an upgrade
to some very expensive program.  Orcad and Protel go gobbled up.
Eagle did too, but by a distributor, Newark.  They just came out
with a new improved version.  You can finally draw arbitrary SMT
footprints.  I think that was the major limitation of the old
version.  You can of course draw your own symbols any way you like.
I have been using Eagle for 5 years now and never looked back.
One other drawback of Eagle is that it is difficult to move a design
between computers, and there are issues with the way preferences
are stored.  If you use a part from a library in a design, you are
forever locked into that library.   Many other CAD systems have these
issues.  Mentor used to be terrible about having absolute path names, etc.

Rick N6RK




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