g'day this Q is meant for macroman.. i guess that you are using eagle to draw your schematics (cathode throbber).. and your prolly using eagle as well to draw your PCB layout and stuff.. i'm having a lot of trouble with eagle.. and i'm getting pretty fustrated after trying other numerous programs.. 1) how do you get the program to layout the components automatically on the board and route it so that it comes out on the bottom only? 2) how do you use the cam job feature to get your bottom foil design?! pls help.. i'm in despair here! =(((
Forget autoroute it's pants I have used MUCH more powerful programs than Eagle and non have good auto route that I would trust and forget. The program does not layout your components automatically, it just pulls them out of the library for you. You have to position them yourself. Actually this is much better than having the program guess, (always wrongly), the optimum component positions. Putting N/A for the layer routing will disable routing for that layer. Not sure what you mean with Q2? Are you referring to generating a Gerber file?
I dont know about it being pants, macro... i've done 5 boards so far, one of them with around 140 connection. the completion rate, once everything was properly positioned, was around 96%. further position tweaking and DRC tweaks got it to 100%. its not perfect, but if you set it up right, I find it works extremely well. of course, i've only used protel otherwise so i have no basis on which to compare.
On small simple boards autorouting can save be tweaked to work very well. On anything approaching complex say upwards of 2000 connections it generally creates problems. Bear in mind we are talking about making PCBs at home and not commercial manufacturing were much finer tracks and tolerences are possible. Most, including Eagle, packages use default track widths which are close to the limits of reliable board fabrication for DIY PCBs. Manual autorouting, i.e. selected net routing is very useful though. I do occasionally use autorouting to see if a single sided board can be made without the use of links.
how do i come up with a bottom layer design for my PCB? for ie, i've drawn my .sch file.. done my .brd file and routed it so that the top layer is n/a. ( note: however after routing it.. the route still comes out red and blue.. and red is the top layer... looks weird too coz they cross each others path).... how do i come up with the bottom foil from the .sch and .brd files?
If you want the tracks on the bottom only then you should not be able to see any red tracks, your whole pcb should be blue. My guess is that you just continued a autoroute job which had top layer enabled or possibly you did not rip up all the tracks before autorouting the bottom only. It's kind of like windows, if it doesn't work reset everything (ie. ripup all tracks) and start again. It should come right after that. If the autorouter doesn't complete the whole board on the bottom then you'll have to make wre links and an easy way of finding where the links should be is to run the autorouter with top enabled after it's done all it can on the bottom. When you finally make your board either ignore the red tracks till you soldering your links or just uncheck the top layer in the view settings. Hope that helps. And macroman, I think eagle is 1337. What do you suggest one should use as better alternative (other than Graph paper
That question was answered above. Eagle is very good, I never said it wasn't. My point was there are more powerful, (and expensive), packages and even their autorouting is not perfect. Eagle is reasonably cheap and very easy to use which makes up for it's lack of features. The free version is good for the small simple circuits that I publish here on BiT-Tech.
()*@#$ doh.. still having problems.. it only comes out 14%... anyone here can offer to route it and come up with a bottom foil design for me pls?
