Anyone used Eagle Professional PCB editor?

[[email protected]]

There are thousands of happy users who love Protel, who learn all the quirks
and never think twice about it.

I recognise that, but I am among the group who find Protel to be shoddy,
weird, offensive, stupid. I've gone to the help forums, read documentation
and I just don't see how Protel can charge $ for this amateurish job. Its
not so bad if you use Protel a lot, because you remember the tricks, but I
only do a board every 6 months.

By contrast, I can sit down to all sorts of programs and pick them up after
6 months.

Roger Lascelles

Fair enough. I do agree its price is incredibly inflated, and there's no
way we can justify the expense of upgrading to Protel DXP.

 

[Alex Gibson]

Hi,
I've just wasted about a fortnight at work, all thanks to the
Protel 99SE schematic/PCB program going berserk, corrupting its own
files, being impossibly non-intuitive and generally doing everything
it can to make me want to smash my monitor out of frustration.
I refuse to ever do another schematic and PCB layout using that
woeful bugware (in my opinion).
Has anyone here used Eagle Professional for doing multi-layer SMD
artworks? I'm thinking seriously of going to it from Protel, and would
like some feedback from actual users before I go any further.
Thanks.

Regards,
Bob

You can remap the keys to be the same as protel or whatever else you like.


There are newsgroups for eagle on their server
news.cadsoft.de

There is a book on eagle as well.
Have a copy here somewhere but I haven't read it yet
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/t...103-4467631-0310254?v=glance&s=books&n=507846>

Same guy who has writen a few basic stamp books.

Make sure to have a search around the cadsoft web site
for extra libraries , user projects etc
There is a script file that will allow eagle to import protel99se files.
Think its under ulps.

Alex

 

[The Real Andy]

There are thousands of happy users who love Protel, who learn all the quirks
and never think twice about it.

I recognise that, but I am among the group who find Protel to be shoddy,
weird, offensive, stupid. I've gone to the help forums, read documentation
and I just don't see how Protel can charge $ for this amateurish job. Its
not so bad if you use Protel a lot, because you remember the tricks, but I
only do a board every 6 months.

By contrast, I can sit down to all sorts of programs and pick them up after
6 months.

There is two choices for professionals when it comes to CAD packages
for electronics, Protel and Cadence, the rest are toys. When you use
protel to it maximum capabilities, there is only one better, Cadence.
It is extremly powerful. If you can handle using the toys, go for it,
you are probably a back yard operation anyway.

BTW, I have been using protel since dos to 99se. 99se is the best i
have used, the most powerful and the most stable. IF you blame Protel
for their ddb, then go and have a whinge to MS because Access
databases are shit and so are both there native drivers and the ODBC
drivers. When 99se was developed, there was JET (access) and sybase
anywhere. Sybase would have added another $300 to the cost.

 

[Bob Parker]

Hi Alex,
Thanks for all the really useful information! I just went to the
Eagle site and downloaded:

protel2eagle.zip 56,468 7,207 Thu Dec 12 09:58:28 2002
This ULP will convert a netlist in Protel .NET format to an Eagle
script and PCB layout.
Uploaded by Tom Connelly <tconnelly at blueyonder.co.uk> from
Cardonald College

I hope this is the one you meant. I'll check it out the moment I
get some time. This might be the answer to my prayers in many ways.

Regards
Bob

 

[Bob Parker]

My thoughts exactly.
Protel and some other companies seem to have the attitude that
anything which is intuitive and straightforward and doesn't have you
constantly jumping through all their hoops has something wrong with
it. They equate simplicity with "deficiency" and make it as complex
and obscure as possible to do almost everything.
In 99SE You have to dig down through about 3 levels of menus just
to turn layers on and off, for example.
Maybe I shouldn't put this in a public forum, but Altium sent us an
evaluation copy of their latest Protel/DXP(?) 2004 package on CD. On
three out of four PCs we tried it on, the installation froze up. All
were fast Celeron machines running XP Pro with lots of RAM. Only a
1GHz Pentium 3 running XP Pro would work with it. For some reason we
weren't the slightest bit surprised. Altium were. They said it was
fine on their Celeron laptop.


Bob

 

[Bob Parker]

Fair enough. I do agree its price is incredibly inflated, and there's no
way we can justify the expense of upgrading to Protel DXP.

That's exactly what management in the company I work for said, too.

 

[Bob Parker]

Some swear by 99SE, and others swear at it!
I was actually going to print out a strip of 99SE icons in colour
and glue them to my packets of headache pills. I usually have a
headache after 1 - 2 hours of fighting with that program.
We'll probably never know why people like me seem to have constant
problems with 99SE, and others have a pleasant experience.
For example, I've sometimes been plagued by phantom net lines on
the PCB, which terminate at little spurious dots which are only
visible sometimes.
From trial and error I found that doing a File Repair then deleting
the tracks near those phantom lines makes them go away.
But you gotta ask: what kind of a program has a file repair
function built in, to fix problems that it creates?!

Regards
Bob

 

[budgie]

My thoughts exactly.
Protel and some other companies seem to have the attitude that
anything which is intuitive and straightforward and doesn't have you
constantly jumping through all their hoops has something wrong with
it. They equate simplicity with "deficiency" and make it as complex
and obscure as possible to do almost everything.
In 99SE You have to dig down through about 3 levels of menus just
to turn layers on and off, for example.
Maybe I shouldn't put this in a public forum, but Altium sent us an
evaluation copy of their latest Protel/DXP(?) 2004 package on CD. On
three out of four PCs we tried it on, the installation froze up. All
were fast Celeron machines running XP Pro with lots of RAM. Only a
1GHz Pentium 3 running XP Pro would work with it. For some reason we
weren't the slightest bit surprised. Altium were. They said it was
fine on their Celeron laptop.

which was probably the full extent of their in-house testing ....

 

[budgie]

Some swear by 99SE, and others swear at it!
I was actually going to print out a strip of 99SE icons in colour
and glue them to my packets of headache pills. I usually have a
headache after 1 - 2 hours of fighting with that program.
We'll probably never know why people like me seem to have constant
problems with 99SE, and others have a pleasant experience.
For example, I've sometimes been plagued by phantom net lines on
the PCB, which terminate at little spurious dots which are only
visible sometimes.
From trial and error I found that doing a File Repair then deleting
the tracks near those phantom lines makes them go away.
But you gotta ask: what kind of a program has a file repair
function built in, to fix problems that it creates?!

FFS don't mention that to MicroSloth - their implementation would add even more
bugs.

And aren't we all glad that MS don't produce a PCB package (shudder at the
thought).

 

[Johnny]

That's exactly what management in the company I work for said, too.

My company recently bought a number of Protel DXP 2004 upgrades
because Altium were about to stop issuing upgrade licences from 99SE.
However so far there is no decision to start using it because:

1) Many of our workstations are slower than 2GHz, or with less 512Mb
RAM. They are too slow to run it properly, especially with large
project files or complex simulations.

2) It seems far too complex and no one wants to suffer the
productivity loss.

regards,
Johnny.

 

[Bob Parker]

Just looking at the complexity of the DXP startup screen is enough
to make me not want to use it.

Regards
Bob

 

[Bob Parker]

What a thought.... as scary as having the flight control systems on
an aircraft running Windoze, like in this picture:

http://members.ozemail.com.au/~bobpar/WindowsPanel.jpg

Regards
Bob

 

[Trevor]

On Sun, 12 Jun 2005 15:26:46 +1000, Clifford Heath
Yes, I tried those Video drivers, and they don't work either!

Work have moved to compacs with LCDs and since then I've been unable
to run the s/w on those machines with any drivers I've found.

Trev

 

[Alex Gibson]

Hi Alex,
Thanks for all the really useful information! I just went to the
Eagle site and downloaded:

protel2eagle.zip 56,468 7,207 Thu Dec 12 09:58:28 2002
This ULP will convert a netlist in Protel .NET format to an Eagle
script and PCB layout.
Uploaded by Tom Connelly <tconnelly at blueyonder.co.uk> from
Cardonald College

I hope this is the one you meant. I'll check it out the moment I
get some time. This might be the answer to my prayers in many ways.

Regards
Bob

Yes.Think thats the one.

Also to export a netlist to protel format

netlist_protel.ulp in the Download area, ULP directory.

Eagle power tools under misc
can import dxf files limited demo available also other ulps for this as
well.

This mini faq may be useful
http://users3.ev1.net/~rpauly/frequently asked questions.pdf

Alex

 

[Bob Parker]

Thanks again Alex,
Ironically I'm flat out busy making up for all that lost time now
that 99SE seems to be in one of its relatively good moods (isn't
crashing or bringing up "Floating Point Division By Zero" messages as
it throws components off the schematic page).
I'll follow up your latest suggestion very soon, because I really
want to use Eagle for all my future designs!

Regards,
Bob

 

[Bob Parker]

Just as a little followup, 99SE hasn't crashed on me even once in
about a fortnight of intensively using it on the 3GHz P4 motherboard
which replaced the 2.8GHz Celeron one. Yes, it's done its "phantom
netline" trick once, but that's about all so far.
BTW, the Celeron had 512MB of RAM and so does the new board. The
Celeron was running XP Home and the P4's running XP Pro. Apparently
99SE is very cranky about what kind of machine it's installed in.
However, 99SE continues to be highly irritating to use, all the
more so because I've played around with Eagle quite a lot and have
been spoiled by its intuitive-ness. My next project will definitely be
done with Eagle.

Cheers and thanks again to everyone for your helpful/interesting
comments!

Bob

 

[dmm]

Just as a little followup, 99SE hasn't crashed on me even once in
about a fortnight of intensively using it on the 3GHz P4 motherboard
which replaced the 2.8GHz Celeron one. Yes, it's done its "phantom
netline" trick once, but that's about all so far.
BTW, the Celeron had 512MB of RAM and so does the new board. The
Celeron was running XP Home and the P4's running XP Pro. Apparently
99SE is very cranky about what kind of machine it's installed in.
However, 99SE continues to be highly irritating to use, all the
more so because I've played around with Eagle quite a lot and have
been spoiled by its intuitive-ness. My next project will definitely be
done with Eagle.

Cheers and thanks again to everyone for your helpful/interesting
comments!

Bob

Bob, are you running Service Pack 6 ?

 

[Bob Parker]

Bob, are you running Service Pack 6 ?

Yes, I certainly am.