On 4/13/10, Alexandre Souza - Listas <pu1bzz.listas at gmail.com> wrote:
Lessons learned
were:
Increase PAD size :) these are solderable, but are just a touch too small
by the software default.
I'd ask you which software, but it is probably eagle with its
too-small-to-solder pads ;)
I've not had a problem with *most* of the footprints in Eagle (OTOH, I
do solder 805-sized parts without magnification), but occasionally,
there's a part that is less than ideal - in particular, there's a
40-pin DIP footprint with big, huge pads (right out of the 1970s, like
the size you get from rub-off transfers) but the associated drill
holes are barely big enough to admit a machined pin. I've seen that
footprint in more than one hobbyist-made board, so it must be in a
default library somewhere. Also, the footprint for the provided 2.1mm
DC power jack assumes you have really, really tiny pins on your jack.
I even went to the trouble to purchase the jack named in the parts
library and it *still* didn't fit - had to ream out all the holes on
the final board.
For through-hole resistors and caps, for 14 and 16-pin DIPs, momentary
switches, etc., I've not had a hole or pad problem with Eagle. It's
just a few parts, but when it happens, it is maddening.
As for the "blue wire" problem - I happened to have made a mistake on
my last board that I would have liked the ERC or DRC catch - I
accidentally named two elements of the same bus the same (D7 twice, no
D5). Because only one or two pins of that bus happened to go
somewhere, it wasn't an obvious problem visually. Yes, I should have
caught it while inspecting the design, but I didn't. Fortunately, I
could change the firmware to work around the bug (or I could do a
cut-and-jump). More fortunately, once the problem was identified, it
took less than 5 min to fix it on both the schematic and the layout.
I remember such problems back in the day with OrCAD and PADS and how
much one had to rip-up to fix layout mistakes. I'm happy things are
much easier to correct with modern tools.
Next time, use kicad, diptrace or something
useful. Eagle sux.
I'm not going to defend Eagle, but I'm unfamiliar with diptrace - what
makes it better?
I use Eagle because it works on any computer I'm likely to be sitting
and and because there are lots of examples and user-contributed parts.
I'm not opposed to switching tools, but I'd rather not switch tools
just to spend all my time creating libraries for classic computer
components. If another tool has better libraries and is easier to
use, then I'm all for it.
-ethan