Philip Pemberton wrote:
> Now I just need to rebuild the horrendous component libraries that
> come with EAGLE and KiCAD...

Yeah, the part libraries supplied with Eagle suck.  The board footprints
don't seem to follow consistant conventions, the silkscreen is often sloppy,
and the schematic symbols appear optimized for the time it took to throw
them together instead of for readability in the schematic.

Long ago when I first started using Eagle I used parts from their library
because making all my own seemed so overwhelming.  That got me into trouble,
so I haven't used the Cadsoft libraries since.

It's really not that hard to make your own as it may seem when you are
starting out.  It also allows you to stick to conventions about parts that
help with automating things later.  For example, all my parts have their
designators in the tDocu or bDocu layers in small text.  These are used only
in the board drawing and helps the manufacturer find a part regardless of if
its designator made it to the silkscreen layer or not.  (There is also a ULP
for generating a parts index that gives board and schematic coordinates for
every part, but that's a independent issue.)

Another important part of my conventions help in automatic BOM generation.
If you set all the right attributes, then you can go fully automated from a
Eagle board to a Excel BOM with my ULPs and host programs.  Take a look at
the CSV_BOM and EAGLE_ATTR doc files after installing my Eagle tools release
from http://www.embedinc.com/pic/dload.htm.


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