Why are poorly supported pcb layout packages so popular?

Eagle PCB layout software is relatively cheap and undoubtedly has the best support structure of all of the PCB layout packages.

If you get stuck doing something in Eagle, then if you google the problem , or write to one of hundreds of online electronics forums, then you will likely receive help for your problem…This applies more to Eagle than any other PCB layout software package and is undisputable.

I’ve just completed a four layer Emergency lighting PCB in eagle which comprised two SMPS’s, one 64 pin microcontroller and some opamps, comparators and logic IC’s etc.
It was a joy doing it in Eagle, because free support was so easy to get from the web, as discussed. I didn’t get stuck trying to find where the various features were buried etc.

With Eagle, I was a little disappointed that there wasn’t enough warning about avoiding “proportional” text and always using “vector” text on the actual PCB silk lettering. –But I’m over that now. Also, it would be nice to be able to actually highlight more than one net at a time. Also, being able to have the tracks automatically stop when they get closer than the set clearance distance from different-net copper would be nice. And and ODB++ output format would also be nice…(though I’m told for $25 I can by a ULP which can do this for me)

However, the massive availability of free online support for actually using Eagle made it a sheer joy to use.
Most of the expensive pcb layout packages (i.e. not Eagle) don’t appear to have things like “getting started guides”. Its almost as if they want people to struggle, perhaps so that they have to keep contacting the company’s applications engineers, who can then check if they’ve payed their license fee.

The professional PCB Layout consultancies are scathing about Eagle, -no doubt because they realise that its ease of use makes it a genuine competitor to themselves……after all, any of their customers could just do the job themselves if they used Eagle. They always seem to use an expensive package, so that customers are less likely to make changes to it (the schematic and layout) themselves, and are more likely to keep having to go back and pay the consultancy to make the changes.

One place where I worked, we had one consultancy lay a board out for us and they did it in Altium….then when they found out that Altium was actually our company’s in-house package, they put it all into Cadstar instead…..needless to say, we weren’t able to make adjustments to it unless we contacted them and payed them.

Given that Eagle is so superior to use (especially for a design engineer who simply doesnt have time to delve deeply into a complex labyrinth of pcb layout features), how is it that so few companies actually use Eagle?

It just doesn’t make sense. Is the reason that more complex, expensive packages are used because companies are scared of having their designs copied by poor start-up companies?

I solemnly believe that managing directors of electronics companies are being hoodwinked here, -they are being fooled into coughing up way too much money for unnecessarily complex pcb layout packages.

I think that its time to contact our local Government and get something done, as industry is being strangled by not having enough PCB layout engineers, because they simply can’t manage the complexity of these complex pcb layout packages……………if Eagle is used, anybody with some electronics knowledge (and a knowledge of pcb structure) could quickly lay out PCBs.

Altogether, I have used four PCB layout packages other than Eagle……….and they were far inferior in that they were not really “tools” as they should be, but rather , were a science all to themselves. I think “Keep It Simple” really is a wise phrase where PCB layout packages are concerned. (unless of course you are hoodwinking people into paying you lots to use an overly complex pcb layout package.)

So why is Eagle so uncommon?

I didn't have the chance to buy Eagle, so I use the free KICAD instead.
If you heard of KICAD, do you think Eagle is clearly better than it in some aspects?

I've never used KICAD, but searching google and youtube and various forums, it has nowhere near the quantity of great tutorials and advice that eagle has.
Eagle has a free version called eagle lite, which is restricted in board size. This was one of the first ever significant free pcb packages, and was adopted throughout the electronics hobbyist community....that may sound corny, but it means there's vast amounts of help and support available, and things just grew from there for eagle............if KICAD was superior to eagle in support, then I would be using kicad, but its not so I wont be.
I use Eagle Pro, which cost me around £900....money well spent....of course, i'd have liked it to have been cheaper, that goes without saying.

treez said:

Eagle PCB layout software is relatively cheap and undoubtedly has the best support structure of all of the PCB layout packages.

Click to expand...

Eh, well, you lost me at the first sentence.

Other than that, while I don't use all of the so-called "difficult" features of Altium, I use a lot of them. In my humble opinion, Eagle fares well for hobby-folk or entry-level proffesional projects, but that's about it.

I’ve just completed a four layer Emergency lighting PCB in eagle which comprised two SMPS’s, one 64 pin microcontroller and some opamps, comparators and logic IC’s etc.
It was a joy doing it in Eagle, because free support was so easy to get from the web, as discussed. This was not a hobbyist PCB. I didn’t get stuck trying to find where the various features were buried etc.

Can you post me a link to any decent Getting started type Altium tutorial.?....I used to use altium in my job and used to struggle....it was too much to have to design the circuits, and then fathom out altium aswell.
I only ever found one single useful web tutorial for altium...and that was a youtube video made by some guy whose baby was crying in the background as he gave his explanation...I just checked youtube and see that this video does not appear to be there any more....is this Altium apps engineers getting it removed because its too good and means less of there customers will come to them? (of course , its good for them to have customers coming to them because they can then check they've payed up licenses...not only that, many Apps engineers do pcblayout as a bit of moonlighting, so its not good if the package is made too easy for people to get into)
The tutorials from altium, with the Aussy guy called Marty was talking were unfathomable....at least in my short time frame.

I needed to get going and Eagle allowed me to do that.

Im not saying altium is bad...how can I say that when I never really understood it?.......it definitely lacks the kind of support that's needed for a design engineer to get on and lay out a pcb quickly.
I worked with a pro PCB layout engineer once, and he told me that if he came back to altium after 6 months away from it, he struggled with it.

Ice-Tea said:

... Eagle fares well for hobby-folk or entry-level proffesional projects, but that's about it.

Click to expand...

Would you like to give specific reasons for that statement?

Keith

I think when somebody uses altium very regular, and its their main selling point on their cv, then they obviously want to talk altium up, and put down and slag off things like eagle, which is a competitor package to their own....eagle is a package on which any junior engineer can immediately compete for pcb layout work with an altium user....at the end of the day, the electrons in the current don't care whether altium or eagle was used.

Powerfull DRC possibilities, database and library managment, supply chain links, build in version control capabilities, easy to keep board/schematics in sycn, 3D capabilities and, well, my gut feeling

Maybe the only difference with Treez is that I got the "click", but it works for me. That is not to say I like everything about Altium. I find the whole FPGA environment to be pointless (except for the very easy pin-swapping) and when I tried a few years ago the SI part is useless. Maybe I just wanted to offset the phrase (and quote) "Given that Eagle is so superior to use...". For me, it is not "given" at least.

And as for tutorials: **broken link removed**. Again, at least for me it "clicks".

I saw that tutorial before and it didn't help me then....I used to keep getting layer stack problems......id import a colleagues pcb and he'd used different layers or something and his silkscreen or mech 1 layer would come out as copper.
Also, look at the blocks of text in your link...in eagle, you have a multitude of simple , well layed out tutorials, youtube videos and more...there nothing like a good youtube vid to teach the odd concept.

Not sure what your layerstack problem is but I'd bet a wad of cash on the fact that your problem comes from the fact that if you have more options to configure something you can also screw more things up.

As for videos: here's 171 of them

I found those vids unhelpful when I started out with altium.....then the company hired a pcb layout pro to come and sit with me for the day to get me started..........the thing I remember about the altium vids was the Aussy guy...."hi Marty here"....and then he'd babble on and confuse the lights out of me.

Interesting comments above, but it's comes down to who you are, what you need and how much it costs.

I used Eagle as a hobbiest up to V5, but then I needed a PCB CAD system for my one man business.
Eagle is free to hobbyist (it's called Eagle Hobbyist for non commercial use!) so the entry level for business 140Euro plus tax for 2 layers!
Anything useful starts at 690Euros and is still limited to 160x100mm board area.....
I needed 120x110 mm for my first business design, so I looked elsewhere.

In 'big company' employment I had used various packages of which the lowest cost one I could now justify was Proteous, but the release then had 'features' that I did not like, although I did like their simulator.

Exploring the market I came across DesignSpark PCB (then at V3) which has a huge board area and lots of layers, far more than I would ever need AND was free for commercial purposes, it wasn't even linked to a PCB manufacturer, so I gave it a try.
Yes, like all packages you have to learn the 'new way' of doing something, but I quickly designed my first board.

I even found a PCB house who took the DSPCB files directly, removing the need for me to create the Gerber files, yes there's a risk of errors, but it worked perfectly for me.

Now on Version 5 it is growing in features all the time and on their forum have been some pretty advanced PCB designs posted.

The paid for products do have 'more' and features like team development, good integration with upmarket mechanical CAD systems such as SolidWorks and AutoCAD etc., but I do not require these.

So in summary, for commercial purposes I couldn't see a more cost effective route to CAD that didn't have restrictive board sizes or layers than DesignSpark PCB.
I'd even recommend newbies jumping in with DSPCB so they have a progression route without restrictive limits as their designs grow.

Ice-Tea said:

Powerfull DRC possibilities, database and library managment, supply chain links, build in version control capabilities, easy to keep board/schematics in sycn, 3D capabilities and, well, my gut feeling

Click to expand...

I think the DRC on Eagle is pretty good.

It doesn't have a system like Orcad CIS for part management but then small companies don't need that.

Eagle is probably one of the easiest packages to keep the schematic & PCB in sync.

It doesn't have 3D capabilities (although add-ons can give you that) but it is not something I need often and there are ways round it.

I have used a number of packages over the years, including Orcad, Protel, Ultiboard (some of which don't exist any more). I think the more complex packages are harder to learn - they have more features. This can also mean more work to do simple tasks. For example, if it has 3D capability then you need to create a 3D model for any new component if there isn't one you can pull out of a library. Or you don't include the 3D model and then cannot create a valid 3D model of the PCB. When I have been working on products that have a tight space I am usually working with a mechanical engineer who is designing the rest of the system and will take some basic dimensions from the PCB and draw a rough space model to check fit. With a more expensive package that could be integrated from the PCB package into the mechanical CAD package automatically. Whether these things matter to you is an individual choice and probably depends on the size of the company and the number of people working on a project.

Differences between packages are only important to me if they prevent me from creating a PCB that is how I need it to be. For example, I dropped Boardmaker (yes, a long time ago) when it wasn't keeping up with component sizes and couldn't handle the resolution for doing some of the fine surface mount and RF work I was doing. Eagle didn't support different pad dimensions on different layers at one time and even now only supports it globally, not per device. This may be a problem for some people but it isn't an issue for the PCBs I need to produce which are mixed signal, some RF, usually 6 layers or less. If I found problems creating PCBs for the work I do with Eagle I would switch to something else.

I am not sure about the support/learning issue. Learning is a one-off experience. A package that is harder to learn doesn't necessarily make it worse - maybe just more complex. Complex can be "powerful" or it can also be clumsy. If I pay for software I expect support and I assume you get it from Orcad/Altium as well as Eagle. When I used Orcad I used their support service when necessary. I don't remember it be a problem. I think the difference with Eagle is possibly that it has a large community based support. Whether that is a good thing or not, I don't know. However, on the odd occasion I have needed support for Eagle I simply contact them direct. As a licensed user you don't have to use the community based support. That said, the Cadsoft forums are supported by Cadsoft themselves so it is a valid, useful support forum.

I think there is some PCB package "snobbery" around but also it is very difficult to know other packages inside out in order to truly assess them. It takes quite a while to become proficient with the software and you need to be doing "real" work to really get a feel for it. In other words, work on a real design not a tutorial. That makes quite a commitment in the evaluation process. Someone who has worked at a few companies and been forced to use different packages would probably have a better inside view. I have used a few packages but not that many.

Keith

do people agree with the statement that there is more online support available for eagle than any other package?
I feel they do.
I think the problem with the high end package opinions, is that once people know them they realise they can sell that knowledge, so they are more likely to slate the cheaper packages, which are competitors to them and their high and package knowledge.

treez said:

do people agree with the statement that there is more online support available for eagle than any other package?
I feel they do.
I think the problem with the high end package opinions, is that once people know them they realise they can sell that knowledge, so they are more likely to slate the cheaper packages, which are competitors to them and their high and package knowledge.

Click to expand...

I don't agree that "support" for packages other than Eagle is poor. I guess it depends on how you define "support". To me it is - the company I bought the software from solving technical issues with the software or usage queries. My experience of other companies is that they do that. There might be a lot more information on the internet about Eagle which may be useful information. However Cadence have a support forum for Orcad and I believe Altium have one. "More" information is not necessarily "better".

Keith

I have givin Eagle a good look and honestly, it does seem best suited for hobbyists or students, and there is nothing wrong with that. A power user could very well do a fairly sophisticated design, but the more powerful programs definitely help do a more efficient design. Would an Eagle user be comfortable doing a 20+ layer design, with multiple split power planes, and hundreds of differential pairs that need to be matched in length using tuning sections with smooth continuous traces AND account for the z-axis delay due to traversing vias? It would take a Herculean effort, and lots of dxf imports to do such a design in Eagle.

Now for Tech Support, that is a very good point made. It has been my experience that Altium tech support is basically useless. If you get stuck, and you have a deadline approaching, don't depend on Altium tech support because if your lucky it will take 2 days or longer to get a meaningful reply. Altium Tech Support is really the "Altium User Forums" on their Altoum Live website.

The annual maintenance fees for Altium do very little to improve the PCB features of the program. Sure, they make the program look nice, and have some interesting "vault" things, but as far as the program is concerned, functionally version 13 doesn't really do a whole lot of useful things compared to version 9 or even version 6. And if you have a 10,000 net motherboard, don't count on using Altium's autorouter for routing thousands of non-critical nets because it will draw a series of bizarre traces then hang or crash. Reading the official Altium forums, you can see users complaining about the autorouter since its release and nothing has ever been done to improve it. Disclaimer: I still use Altium because my company has it, but have switched over to something more powerful for more demanding designs because Altium just isn't improving fast enough to keep up with demanding designs.

While I agree that an Eagle user wouldn't be doing a 20+ layer design (it can only handle 16 layers!) it is a rather patronising view that it is "best suited for hobbyists or students". Is someone not doing 20 layer PCBs not a professional? "... with multiple split power planes" - I do those on just about every PCB I design.

Keith

I often hear this...

"best suited for hobbyists or students"

Click to expand...

or remarks like "eagle is crude"
or "eagle is just a toy"
or "you cant lay out a pcb properly in eagle"

I have never ever , ever heard one single reason given by the makers of such statements...never. These statements are never qualified with good old engineering reason.

I therefore suspect that these statements are made in order to deter companies from employing use of eagle, because it means there will be less chance of their high end package getting used instead.
You see , the thing about eagle is, that ANYBODY who understands the structure of a pcb can lay out a pcb in eagle...so this potentially floods the market with loads of pcb layout engineers, and would thus make it much harder for "professional" pcb workers to get work.....it also would reduce the pay for such work, since there'd be more potential layout people going in for jobs.

I reckon most "Professional" layout contractors and consultancies, would like to see eagle dead and buried, hence the totally unqualified , way-over-the-top , nonsensical criticism eagle receives.

I think people forget that software is just a tool - it is the results that are professional or not. How you arrive at the result is largely irrelevant. Is designing a filter by hand calculations rather than using filter design software unprofessional?

Keith

As an owner/licensee/user of several PCB packages I would say Eagle is one of the less "user friendly" packages. It's down to personal preferences of course but having spent 40+ years in the industry and still producing lots of designs as a freelance 'retired' engineer, I find Kicad works best for me and it only has one fully functional and free version to worry about. As second preference, I would say the program "DEX" not yet mentioned is also very good and although not free, is very inexpensive. Both are complete schematic capture to 3D PCB view programs with industry standard PCB file outputs. The only problem I have with DEX is it's Windows only while Kicad works on several OS, including Linux and the design files are compatible across systems. DEX is at www.kov.com if anyone want to have a look. I should point out that I have no commercial interest in these programs but I can confirm that both have very active developer and user groups and Kicad even gives you access to the program source files.

Brian.