It looks as though I am looking at the Professional version of Eagle due
to the size of some of the boards I have in mind (mostly filled with
copious amounts of large items such as relays -- no I am not going to
become the next x86 motherboard designer )...

So, the price is fairly high for my uses if I get all three modules... I
mean, high for a hobbyist... The list price of all three modules at the
full retail is about $1,200.00. I did send an email to their sales staff
and they were able to bring the price down a bit for me, so now I am
seriously considering their product. Not only does it seem to do what I
need, but they seem to care about making a sale -- they were able to
drop the price a bit...

It may not be 'the best', but for a hobbyist who doesnt produce tons of
complicated circuits, it will probably suit me just fine... I cannot
seem to come up with the $8,000.00 that Protel costs, so when I do get
some traces at weird angles with the auto-routing, I will just put up
with them. lol.

To be honest, I wouldnt know a lower quality router from a higher
quality one if it hit me in the head... This is my first delve into this
type of software... (Err, I guess I did use CircuitMaker when I was in
college, but never did any PCB layout stuff with it.)

I have been playing around with Eagle over the past few days... Drawing
some basic schematics, trying out the autorouter (since I dont have a
clue as to where to begin with manually routing traces), etc... Just
getting used to the software to make sure it does what I expect... So
far so good...

Do any of the other low cost packages have any better routing
capability, or are they all sort of in the same class?

Thanks!

In article , gihackett@
1michaels.freeserve.co.uk says...

I have used Eagle for a few years now. It's not the best but the price is
good for what it can do, (it's always able to cope with our designs) There
is a great user group for it to, loads of people use it and are always
helpful. Every PCB house I have used can always read the files or you can
make boards yourself.

eagle.suggest.eng
eagle.userchat.eng
eagle.support.de

The auto router is not that great, it does not ripup and retry and leaves
tracks at odd angles as do many low cost routers. (I never the AR in
production designs).

You can spend a lot of money on this type of software but I think Eagle is a
good starting point.

It depends a lot on the work you want to do? I think you can use a limited
copy free. No gerber generation.

Geoff.....


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