EAGLE Product Manager Outlines Coming Changes

SFHW Industry News
Supplyframe
Published in
3 min readJan 16, 2017

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Matt Berggren (technolomaniac in the chats below), head of circuits at Autodesk and product manager for EAGLE stopped by the Hackaday.io hacker community on Friday, January 13th. He outline some of the coming changes to the popular ECAD software. CadSoft (creators of EAGLE) were acquired in mid-2016 by Autodesk.

Official ULPs

The scripting back end of EAGLE is how users create a range of custom functionality, including manufacturing organization and layout creation. These “ULPs” are non-sanctioned and have been shared over the years between users. Now EAGLE is planning to standardize more of the popular ones:

Routing improvements

This is the largest focus of the upcoming improvements and the one that is most heavily promoted on the software homepage. Matt goes in depth about the individual changes that are coming for layout and some of the challenges associated with implementing them in the the legacy software.

BOM and Manufacturing Improvements

The Bill of Material (BOM) is the lookup key for any manufacturing venture. The previous release of EAGLE brought some built-in manufacturing features. More broadly, Matt promotes a standardized GitHub repository and a library of proven components.

Matt also refers to the ability to easily interface to tools like FindChips Pro. This software has the ability to accept a range of CAD files, including native EAGLE files in a drag-and-drop manner. From there users can view their BOM in terms of availability and part risk. This was featured on the Supplyframe Hardware blog recently in “Purchasing Agent For A Day”.

Licensing

The licensing and data model for CAD software can cause user-strife, depending on how often a computer needs to revalidate the license. Matt describes that the licensing model will move towards the Autodesk model of “checking in” with the license server every few weeks. This also allows completely offline work and user-owned data.

Read more and join in future chats

You can check out the full chat transcript here. The chat lasted long enough to require a second page of transcript, as well.

There will be another chat session with Wayne Stambaugh, lead developer for the open source KiCad electronic CAD software, coming up Friday January 20th, 2017. Sign up for notifications about that here.

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SFHW Industry News
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