I'm using Eagle, and I'm pretty fond of it at this
point. It may have been my post that you were talking
about wrt non-standard Gerbers. I didn't mean that,
I only meant that the first boardhouse I contacted
seemed to not want to deal with it, but I think that
it was because they were highly automated for a slightly
different format (-D instead of -X). Other houses
I contacted seemed to have no trouble with it whatsoever;
in fact the one I'm using seemed impressed that the
stuff that was spit out of the default 2-layer CAM job
was ready to go with no tweaking. I've also loaded the
Gerber output into Gerber viewers with no trouble.
I note that the CAM scripts are pretty straightforward,
and can be hand edited. One thing I did was to go through
and print (on a color ink jet) the same combinations of
layers as are used in the CAM scripts both in 1x and
3x scale; this was tremendously helpful in verifying
that the Gerbers were going to be OK.

The thing I appreciate the most is that I've never had
it crash on me or exhibit unrepeatable behavior. I have
run into the occasional quirk in the autorouter (like it
might refuse to route one net segment even though I can
see an obvious route, but if I rotate a connected part
it will do the routing OK), but the fact that it does as good
a job as it does is remarkable.  I have also found that,
when I need to select a part in a crowded area with a lot
of nets, I occasionally need to shut off the net layer
(temporarilly) or it won't find the part. I found it
virtually impossible to move a board-mounted D-sub once
placed, and I had to start the board over (there may have
been a way around it, but Eagle wouldn't move the pads
that came with the D-sub; I figure that the part design
was more to fault than Eagle itself).

Eagle also has both programming and scripting languages;
you can define a part, for example, without ever touching
a mouse. Unfortunately, these are not well documented,
and I feel I could be a lot more productive with Eagle
if I knew more about them.

The part selection is spotty, and the search capabilities
suck. (These problems are at the top of the list for
improvement in the 4.0 version of Eagle, which is due late
this year.) But you can get along with it pretty well once
you get used to it, and making parts isn't that hard. I
would *highly* recommend at least paying the $50 to get
the registered version with the manual; it's a bitch to
get started without it. I have the $600 standard version,
which can only do 4-layer boards with (I think) about 4"x6" a
limit.  The $1200 version can do much more complex boards,
but I've never tried it at that level.

The user support through their NNTP-based forums is quite
good.

--Bob

On Sat, Aug 07, 1999 at 01:50:13PM -0400, Jeff King wrote:
> Hi All:
>
> I'm looking at upgrading my old, but usable Orcad 386PCB V1.1 to
> something a bit more windows friendly. I liked Orcad originally because it
> was an affordable, abet quirky, product. It no longer is affordable to
> either maintain or upgrade the product (maintenance was going over $1000
> a year, upgrade cost is $3000+). I do about 5-6 boards a year and
> about 12 schematics a year (I also have Orcad SDT, another candidate
> for upgrade).
>
> Anyways, anyone have any feedback on the product Eagle from CadSoft?
> I've seen postings that it might generate non-standard Gerber files and others
> praising the product.
>
> My background in electronic CAD is P-CAD (ver 4.5), Mentor Graphics
> Board Station (~8.3), Douglas Cad and of course Orcad.
>
> Thanks!
>
> Jeff King
> Aero Data

--
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Bob Drzyzgula                             It's not a problem
bob@drzyzgula.org                until something bad happens
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