Eagle CAD
Eagle CAD Parts Search
11/02/09 06:07
News: ESawdust is now offering a free Eagle CAD electronic parts search available on ESawdust.com.
Synopsis: The impetus for this came from a general frustration with not being able to easily find components in the sea of Eagle parts libraries.
There are two problems. One, a part you need may already exist in the Eagle libraries, but you can’t find it, so it might as well not exist. Two, the component you’re looking for may exist in a 3rd party Eagle library, but you don’t want to have to download every contributed library and search it to find out.
There’s no way to search the contents of contributed libraries from the Eagle site. You might get lucky and find what you’re looking for on the web page of contributed libraries based solely on the overall description of the library, but for actual parts, you would need to download each library candidate and search it locally.
Bottom line: Out of the thousands of parts available in the Eagle CAD libraries, it can be very difficult to find the part you’re looking for with the Eagle CAD search mechanism. There has to be a better way, so we made one.
How the ESawdust Eagle Parts Search Engine Works
First, we downloaded all Eagle contributed libraries. Next we developed an SCR script file to export all libraries, including the standard, builtin libraries of Eagle, to SCR text files that can be indexed and searched using more powerful search methods.
With the ESawdust Eagle electronic parts search engine, you can use regular expressions or simple literal strings to find many more parts types than you can with Eagle’s search.
You can search for device names, descriptions, even package types and the search algorithm will product a summary of the library names where the component can be found along with detailed discoveries of Eagle parts in the libraries.
Give it a try and let us know what you think.
Synopsis: The impetus for this came from a general frustration with not being able to easily find components in the sea of Eagle parts libraries.
There are two problems. One, a part you need may already exist in the Eagle libraries, but you can’t find it, so it might as well not exist. Two, the component you’re looking for may exist in a 3rd party Eagle library, but you don’t want to have to download every contributed library and search it to find out.
There’s no way to search the contents of contributed libraries from the Eagle site. You might get lucky and find what you’re looking for on the web page of contributed libraries based solely on the overall description of the library, but for actual parts, you would need to download each library candidate and search it locally.
Bottom line: Out of the thousands of parts available in the Eagle CAD libraries, it can be very difficult to find the part you’re looking for with the Eagle CAD search mechanism. There has to be a better way, so we made one.
How the ESawdust Eagle Parts Search Engine Works
First, we downloaded all Eagle contributed libraries. Next we developed an SCR script file to export all libraries, including the standard, builtin libraries of Eagle, to SCR text files that can be indexed and searched using more powerful search methods.
With the ESawdust Eagle electronic parts search engine, you can use regular expressions or simple literal strings to find many more parts types than you can with Eagle’s search.
You can search for device names, descriptions, even package types and the search algorithm will product a summary of the library names where the component can be found along with detailed discoveries of Eagle parts in the libraries.
Give it a try and let us know what you think.
Eagle Tip #2 - Selection and Movement
03/12/09 22:55
Synopsis: This is the second screencast in the Eagle CAD Tips and Tutorials for New Users and it focuses primarily on how selection and movement work. When you first start with Eagle it seems ridiculously hard to move a component or group of components around on a schematic. Until you first understand the Eagle selection model, it’s very difficult to get very far with your first schematic.
Tip #1 - Separating Label from Part
[Update: 11/2/09 - check out our new ESawdust Eagle Parts Search Engine ]
Tip #1 - Separating Label from Part
[Update: 11/2/09 - check out our new ESawdust Eagle Parts Search Engine ]
Eagle Tip #1 - Separating Label from Part
03/12/09 21:09
Synopsis: This is the opening screencast of Eagle CAD Tips and Tutorials for New Users. I am (was?) a new user a few months ago and I found Eagle has an obtuse user interface if you’re used to fine digital graphic arts applications like Adobe Photoshop or Flash vector drawing applications. The objective of this series of screencasts is to help new users over the initial Eagle CAD bumps.
While Eagle is a very powerful schematic capture and PCB design package, there are many operations that are unintuitive in Eagle. I stumbled over most, if not all of them on my way to designing my first PCB. The problem with Eagle is you quickly hit walls and it’s difficult and time-consuming to guess your way around the Eagle user interface roadblocks.
As these sometimes painful lessons are still fresh in my mind, I am hoping to help others in the same boat learn the basics of Eagle more quickly. If I stumbled on it, I want to make a tutorial about the issue and how to get around it or make Eagle do what you want. If you have any requests for Eagle tutorials, send me an email perhaps I can figure out the issue you have or post something related to it.
Eagle Tip #1 - How to separate the label from the component and reposition the component’s label in an Eagle schematic
What’s the problem? If you rotate a part, the label rotates with it making it difficult to read or improperly positioned for a pleasing and easy to read schematc. This screencast demonstrates how to separate an Eagle component from its label and adjust its orientation and fine position.
Tip #2 - Selection and Movement
[Update: 11/2/09 - check out our new ESawdust Eagle Parts Search Engine ]
While Eagle is a very powerful schematic capture and PCB design package, there are many operations that are unintuitive in Eagle. I stumbled over most, if not all of them on my way to designing my first PCB. The problem with Eagle is you quickly hit walls and it’s difficult and time-consuming to guess your way around the Eagle user interface roadblocks.
As these sometimes painful lessons are still fresh in my mind, I am hoping to help others in the same boat learn the basics of Eagle more quickly. If I stumbled on it, I want to make a tutorial about the issue and how to get around it or make Eagle do what you want. If you have any requests for Eagle tutorials, send me an email perhaps I can figure out the issue you have or post something related to it.
Eagle Tip #1 - How to separate the label from the component and reposition the component’s label in an Eagle schematic
What’s the problem? If you rotate a part, the label rotates with it making it difficult to read or improperly positioned for a pleasing and easy to read schematc. This screencast demonstrates how to separate an Eagle component from its label and adjust its orientation and fine position.
Tip #2 - Selection and Movement
[Update: 11/2/09 - check out our new ESawdust Eagle Parts Search Engine ]
asdfasdf
