Eagle PCB software is very popular among electronics hobbyists and professional. It is really easy to use and very intuitive. Once you put hands on it you are starting to feel sympathies to it. Seems that Eagle CAD got some serious improvements and is becoming better in control and functionality.

With new 5^th version of eagle came many new improvements that can make life easier for many PCB producers. Main features would be:

• The Mac OS X version of EAGLE no longer requires an X11 server, and comes as a “Universal Binary” that runs on PPC and Intel Macs.
• The Linux version now comes as a a self extracting shell script with a setup dialog.
• When clicking with the right mouse button on an object in an editor window, a context specific popup menu is now displayed from which commands that apply to this object can be selected.
• Drawing on screen no longer uses “raster OPs”. The individual layers are now drawn using “alpha blending”.
• The new command LOCK can be used to lock the position of a part in the board.
• Various buttons in the editor window now have a popup menu that contains a list of recently used items or user defined aliases (depending on the button type).
• The names of inverted (”active low”) signals can now be displayed with a bar over the text (”overline”). To do so, the name needs to be preceded with an exclamation mark (’!'), as in

    !RESET

    which would result in

    _____

    RESET

• The new command FRAME can be used to draw a frame with numbered columns and rows.
• New Cross-reference labels support;
• Lots of new commands;

Check out the whole list of changes here and if you want you can give a try with a a limited freeware version which works as full version if board area is less than 100×80mm, only two layers are used and schematic is placed in only one sheet.

From my perspective greatest improvement in Eagle CAD version 5.0 is a… contextual menu feature - I missed that.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, June 5th, 2008 at 12:26 am and is filed under Electronics Software. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.